Around 25 years ago I was visiting my then girlfriend and on the way home I stopped at a red light a couple blocks from her place. It was late at night. When the light turned green my instinct told me not to go yet. Sure enough a few seconds later a black car with no lights on came barreling through the red light at ridiculous speed. I don't know if I would have been dead but if I had gone when the light turned green he would have t-boned me at high speed but my intuition saved me.

I thought my number was up a few years ago. I was in extraordinary pain one night. Turned out to be acute pancreatitis.

Two three times have been in situations in a car where it was probably around second before it would be very likely death (almost frontal crashes, almost driving into moose in a nighttime).

Well, I did die or had the option to. I wrote a whole book on meditation that came from the experience.

How's this? NSFW

Forced entry, stabbed 4 times, punctured lung and liver.

AMA

Turned my alarm off. Had an evening shift. Happy I was able to sleep in.

Got a text late at night from manager. “Hey can you take the morning shift?”

Always one to get on my managers good side, def said yes, but was annoyed that I had to wake up at 7am now.

Got to work around 8ish, staring my day, till I get a call from my roommate.

“Are you ok?!?, I thought you were dead!!!”

Turns out, after I left, my roof ceiling caved in. This wasn’t some dust and dry wall. This was a heavy concrete looking ceiling with heavy wire mesh on the inside. From the front door to the windows, a giant thick metal mesh and concrete just slammed down. Looked like giant metal/concrete blanket was covering everything.

My roommate was awaken by the noise. Thought a bomb went off.

Had my manager not changed my schedule late at night, last min, I would have been dead or heavily disabled today.

Manager whom I figured was religious conveyed the good fortune to me, said “god saves the good people”. I was never religious myself, but he has always struck me as a good person.

For years I really didn’t think about it much. Showed pictures to people when I told the story to entertain people.

But these last few years, I started thinking about it again while lying in bed. I get a little scared.

Here's a war in my country. Everyday shelling can take your life

i almost got hit by a truck a few times being stupid. but never like on my death bed close.

Ruptured appendix when I was 6 or 7. Stuff spilling from the gut into the abdominal cavity can lead to death. It's called peritonitis. Glad my body won.

at a routine checkup, a doctor, somewhat bemused, called out, "that's a very visible prostate", only to correct himself much more sullely a second later, "no wait, that's the prostate. so what is...?"

Turned out I had a benign tumor, but this, I only konw now. I went to get it removed before knowing what it was; it was too soft to be pierced before. When I woke up from the narcosis, I overheard nurses talking about me, using a description for my tumor that I then googled: hyper aggressive, death within weeks.

It was four days until the lab results came back; it turned out that whatever I overheard, I didnt actually have. (I still don't know whether they just gossiped without yet knowing, or were talking about someone else.) What I actually had was benign, not aggressive, not likely to ever reappear. (and it hasn't, as far as I know.)

In those four days, however, I didn't have any of the typical near-death grapplings and regrets. I thought, no, I'm doing what I want to do, I live how I want to live, there's nothing much I would change, except doing more of what I like and try to cut out the tedious stuff (more; I already had done that.)

Spontaneous pneumothorax, sudden collapse of my left lung from...nothing... I sat up from the bed to throw something away and felt like I got stabbed in the back.

Felt very strange, I laid down for an hour or so and felt okay, tried to go to the bathroom and couldn't get out a full sentence without needing a breath.

Girlfriend (now wife) brought me to the ER, had surgery to fix it. In my case they had to cut the lung such that it healed and stuck to the ribcage, preventing it from collapsing again.

The feeling of your lung being inflated is wild.

That was a horrific experience to go through for both you and your wife, it's great you recovered from it . My near death experience was getting robbed at gun point till one of my assailant ordered his colleague to shot for maybe seeing that face (of which I didn't as I was scared to death). Adrenaline saved me that day as I pushed him off and I started running.

I died a year ago in the ICU. My wife said they heard her anguished scream throughout the entire hospital when the code went out with my room number. Thankfully I did not hear that, though I did hear my dad's voice asking the nurse's station about a patient's condition, which I thought was weird, because he passed in 2022. Anyways...

I was on the beach in South Africa's "Wild Coast". Some friends and I saw dolphins swimming in the waves so we rushed in to try swim with them.

I should have been suspicious at how quickly I managed to swim out. We really did swim with these dolphins though which was incredible. But my friends were both frequent swimmers and surfers and water polo players, while I prefer running. I got tired and told them I was swimming back.

But as I was swimming it felt like the shore kept getting further away, and the waves were quite big so I kept losing sight of the beach altogether. I got really scared since I was exhausted and wasn't getting anyway and only then realized I was in a riptide.

I only vaguely remembered what to do (you're supposed to swim horizontal to the shore) so I started swimming backstroke diagonally towards it. I really thought I wouldn't make but I gave everything I had and was encouraged when I started getting closer.

I tried to explain to my friends that I thought I was going to die (they swam back in a few minutes later without much effort since they had experience with riptides). I got a tiny bit of sympathy 😅 Thought about it constantly for weeks, but I'm good now and still swim in the sea. Have read shitloads about riptides!

First step is to learn how to die since it's not if It's going to happen but when.

Today is the closest I've been to death. Tomorrow I'll be even closer. And so on...

More seriously, a few times, I think things could have turned out differently. It's often just the small details that make a difference. E.g. in car accident, a person in the other car died, I didn't.

This is funny, you can believe it or not, but the fact is that years ago my grandma suffered a stroke from which she recovered, although she died years later of natural causes due to her age.

The day after she suffered the stroke, both she and I saw death standing by the dining room table while we were eating. Why do I say we both saw the grim reaper? When I told my mother what I saw, she told me that my grandmother told her the same thing minutes before, that she was seeing death (parka).

The truth is that as much as I tried to discover his face it was not possible, his big black hood covered his face and I just saw a huge black hole instead of his face. From that precise moment, I knew he existed although I still wonder why he let himself show himself to me, but I have the feeling that he wanted to give a few more years of life to my dear grandmother, and certainly I will be eternally grateful, whether it was real, a simple hallucination or a series of lurid coincidences, and yes, I certainly do not believe in coincidences... What do you think?