Back when I was a welder, I was trying to cut something with an angle grinder in an awkward position.

I guess my brain was turned off that day because I decided to grind with the sparks going directly away from me.

So of course, the disc binded, and sent the angle grinder directly at my face.

Thank god I was wearing a face shield, at least. In about 0.1 seconds, my face shield was cut entirely in half.

The fun didn’t stop there, though, because I had the trigger lock on (again, genius). So it was still spinning at full force after it jumped out of my hands.

Also, I was on a ladder, so here I am, trying to throw the grinder away from my with my arms, on top of a ladder, all the while the cutting disc is going absolutely out of control essentially in full contact with my face, neck, chest, and arms.

Finally I manage to push it off of me, it falls to the floor and the disc breaks. I finally get off the ladder and unplug the grinder.

At this point, I can see that my face shield is cut clean down the middle. I’m thinking 1000% I’m gonna be needing an urgent hospital visit. I take off the face shield, and carefully touch my face… No blood… I take out my phone and use it as a mirror, not a scratch… I meticulously check the rest of my body… nothing.

Turns out, after all that, the only damage was to the disc and the face shield.

I can’t even explain how I felt after that. I spent the rest of the day in an almost out-of-body experience, and was shaken for a few weeks at least. I beat myself up a lot for being so stupid, and I literally couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I still can’t believe it.

My parents sent me to Jesus camp when I was in high school. This particular camp was one where kids would go on week long excursions. I didn’t jive with the jesus stuff, but a week of camping and swimming in lakes was great.

This particular year I did a week of biking and climbing. We practiced at the rock wall and got our bearings and we were signed off by some climbing instructor. We then went on the road. Six days later, we arrived at the rock face we were to climb. We started at the top, dropped our gear, then half of us hiked down and our belays hung out on top to help us back up.

I did my climb. It was uneventful but fun. Then it was my turn to belay.

We did everything with just climbing ropes and carabiners. No additional equipment. We were to tie off onto a tree or boulder on the summit and make a particular kind of loop around ourselves that wouldn’t allow it to constrict and hurt us if we were hauling the person below up the face. Nbd I get it all set up and we move on.

Well, my climbing buddy was picked randomly and it was the fat girl with homesickness. She finally stopped moaning and decided to give it a shot. I was happy for her and got ready. She hiked down and got herself ready.

“On belay!” I check my stuff, see it’s good “Belay on!”

She starts climbing. But she couldn’t get past the first major rock and she decided to quit. Oh well.

Then I turned around and found my support rope wasn’t tied around the tree and I would’ve been yanked off of a 60 foot rock face the first time she slipped.

When I was a kid, my family took a tour bus of many sights. I think this was near Stonehenge though it’s all kind of blurred together into so many various monuments and settlements.

The bus stopped for people to get out and stretch their legs but gave us just 5 min. I desperately, desperately needed to piss. I was like seconds away from wetting myself so I gladly took the opportunity to go pee.

It was open ground everywhere, the tourists from the bus were all around and I didn’t want to pee in front of everyone. There was a field nearby of tallish grass just about up to my waist. I thought that might offer some privacy but as I walked in I realised it was still pretty public so I began running further in since my bladder was about to explode. I ran and ran and ran until I decided it was enough and came to a sudden halt.

I looked down as I prepared to unzip and saw that the spot I’d randomly chosen to stop running was one footstep away from a deep, open concrete shaft full of some kind of agricultural slurry at the bottom. Completely impossible to see through the grass, no signage and no protective grating, no obvious way to have climbed out. At the distance I was from the tour group no one would have heard me yelling for help.

After recognising how close this stupid shaft had come to claiming my life, I duly pissed in it. The tour group were already getting in the bus after barely 3 min had passed and I had to run back. I couldn’t quite accurately describe what had happened or how close things had come so no one seemed that perturbed by my dice with death in a pit of slurry.

Hiking in remote Tasmania, 4 hours from anyone else, let alone help and almost stepped on a tiger snake. Thankful that they left me be to enjoy the rest of my walking tour.

Australia tried to kill me a few times.

15 year old me tried to drink a bottle of gin (because I tought it would make me even more cool). Woke up in the hospital the next day, was asked if it was an attempted suicide. I didn’t even know you could die from alcohol poisoning. One year later I crashed my friends car upside down into a canal (back then the minimum age where you learnt to drive was 18 years old in my country). I did some pretty dumb things as a kid.

Had the opportunity to fly in a small vintage airplane (not sure what kind). It was awesome but the following day we got information that the next flight crashed and all passengers died.

Some kid got angry and sat on my head underwater. He was several years older and much bigger (I was 7 he was maybe 11 or 12). He was mad because I confronted him about stealing my toys (little miniature transformers not expensive but theft is theft. He had been accusedof theft by others but my Mom thought he was just being bullied, he had a cleft lip, and I should try to be his friend). Both our families went to the lake for the weekend and he was playing with one in the water and for some reason either didn’t think I’d see him playing with it or wanted me to be mad. I said I was going to tell on him and he grabbed me and shoved my face into the sand in two foot deep water and sat on my head.

Luckily there was a bystander who stopped it, but that fucker was totally prepared to murder me over some plastic. I later found out he had done similarly violent stuff to other kids after I stopped being around him.

When I was 9, I think, I felt off a pool slider, hit by head agaisnt the floor and then felt into the pool.

I was at a birthday party so I they pulled me out and called an ambulance. There’s one entire year of my life that I cant remember.

I can so tell the time I was at a protest and the police was shooting at us.

Closest would probably when I hung myself from a noose over a stairwell and fully blacked out but the rope I used had so much stretch that I actually fell out of it, fell down the stairs and hit my head on a glass doorknob giving me amnesia. Probably would be dead if I wasn’t an idiot about rope choice.

Other than that I mean I have had about 16 concussions and the one I got for accidentally skiing of a cliff and plummeting down below would be second, I’m lucky I didn’t seriously injure myself other than the concussion and that people found me because I landed off to the side of another ski trail.

About 25 years ago, my car was struck by another, in the rain, with very poor visibility, on a two-lane highway, going around a curve. I came to and discovered that my car was on its roof, and I had gotten out of it while dazed. I was about 3 feet away from traffic that was passing by, facing the highway, and had almost walked out into traffic.

Tried to crash my car into a bridge stanchion, chickened out, tore the mirror off.

In 2018, I had an infection and I basically couldn’t eat or drink almost anything without throwing up, even a sip od water would make me sick for hours. The antibiotics made it even worse.

I lost over 15kg in 2 weeks, I legit thought I was going to die. It took almost 2 years before I could eat normally again.

Probably five or six years ago when I was around 20 I went with my Uncle and his family to the beach. After we were finished and the sun began to go down, we washed off in our swimsuits in the outdoor showers.

Nearby they had some benches to sit on that were made out of the same concrete as the ground, smoothly sloping up out of it to form each bench. I was walking across one of these waiting for the rest of the family to finish rinsing off, and extremely stupidly walked down the end, down the slope, which, of course, was completely slick wet from being near the showers.

As soon as my first foot touches the slope, I slip backwards, with just enough time before impact to think “I really fucked up, this might not be good at all…”

The back of my head impacted the concrete slope of the bench, and it hurt like a mother fucker, but I didn’t lose consciousness or awareness. After gripping my head and cursing for a few seconds my Uncle arrived at me and found my head to be bleeding, but the cut was not so wide as to need stitches.

We returned to his house nearby and after my head clotted up, i realized I needed to drive myself home, 40 minutes away on the freeway, and I felt… a bit dazed after the impact. I didn’t feel sleepy at all, and after waiting for about half an hour, I decided I had to go home. I felt a little foggy until the next day, or maybe I’m just that foggy now and Im used to it.

There’s a scar where hair doesn’t grow, and sometimes I wonder if my universe forked to keep me alive somehow and I was supposed to just die instead, because it was entirely created by my idiocy and if seems silly I got that lucky. Sometimes I have dreams still where I’ll slip on something and relive the sequence of slipping, accepting the imminent possibility of death, and everything sort of slows down increasingly until I fade to white and wake up.

I hit a deer while riding my motorcycle. I saw it crossing the road from my left, tried to evade it, heard the bang of my fairing hit it, and next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at the sky. I ended up with a shattered collarbone, broken ribs, and some road rash on my left side. I have absolutely no memory of falling or sliding at all (and I’m okay with that).

The most likely explanation for why I survived was that I was only going 30 mph (50 kph). That same day another rider wasn’t so lucky. There was a husband and wife in one of the cars behind me that were both EMTs and I got experienced care right away. Plus, I was wearing boots, gloves, a leather jacket, and a full-face helmet. The road rash was from my jeans wearing through during the slide.

I was shot with an rocket propelled grenade once.