Scruffy Six Eighteen: death : thescruffypirate.org

Scruffy Six Eighteen: death

So, the last scruffy six was on November 12th. That's a long time ago.

Last night I was scootering to work and went around a corner and nearly died. I was almost run over by a security guard in a golf cart. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. So I ask you dear reader, what were the top six times you were closest to death in your life? And we don't want to hear about the time you had cancer and were on your death bed, but we do want to hear about the time your dress fell down in front of the whole school and they all saw your boobs, and you were so mortified that you almost died. Do you see the difference?

Oh and Happy Valentines Day!

15 February 2006 10:54am UTC • 361 views • 14 comments

Tagged with scruffysix

14 comments

Dread Pirate Benjamin

15 February 2006 01:56pm UTC
1. While driving in Utah singing "That's the Truth about Men" at the top of our lungs scott and I almost hit a cow in the middle of the road. All I could muster was "Oh shit! Cow!".
2. My first kiss with Kathleen we bonked noses and it was terrible! I really almost died.
3.

boy this question sucks. just try and come up with 1 good one. I dare you.
Dread Pirate Benjamin

15 February 2006 01:57pm UTC
(response to the question that is)
Peon Peetie

15 February 2006 04:16pm UTC
i was skiing in flagstaff, az, for the first time. i was doing the whole swooping from left to right to slow myself down, and there was one moment where i was supposed to be on the left but was instead on the right so i couldn't swoop and i had to go through a small clearing. because i couldn't swoop, i was going 90mph (at least) and had to go over a little hump and i got air and i honestly said to myself, well, this is it. hmm.
Seamonster Kristin

15 February 2006 05:18pm UTC
1. When I was in 9th grade I was playing in our backyard on our trampoline with my best friend from 3rd grade who was visiting from Virginia. I tried to do a back flip with a straight body (back layout, for those gymnastics types) and land on my stomach in a stomach drop. I got distracted as I was taking off, and underrotated. I landed on my upper chest, and my legs collapsed on top of me... with my feet landing in front of my face and my butt landing on my head. I just stayed on my hands and knees and breathed for a while, asking my friend to tell me if my toes were wiggling when I tried to wiggle them. 3 weeks later my mom finally took me for x-rays... I managed to freak out my ligaments and tendons enough to give me temporary scholeosis, and I ripped off one of my spinal growth plates. Lots of physical therapy fun.
2 (god, that was long). We had a metal cord hung between two trees that had a slide-y thing on it that you could swing from between the trees (awful description). I liked to swing while hanging upside down. The cord ripped out of the tree, and I landed flat on my back... Again, checked fingers and toes. Was OK. (I think I was younger... 5th grade?)
3. 19 years old, on vacation by myself at a Club Med. Doing a trick on flying trapeze - trying to catch a new trick for the first time. I got a little too psyched up by they Lenny Kravitz muslc, released at the wrong time, and flipped quite speedily into the 7 lb. steel bar, back of the head first. Lucky me, the skin didn't split, or I woulda been dead meat (I don't trust random BVI docs)... Instead I got a giant lump (bigger than a grapefruit), some serious ice, and felt like a fool.
4. Early 2004, CC swimming pool. I was trying a new trick for the first time on the 3m. board. A one and a half flip with a full twist. I managed a 1.25 flip with a full twist... coming out just in time to land spread eagle on the water, with some forward rotation so I whipped my head into the water with some good force. Managed to mess up my elbow, the place where my rib meets my sternum, partially dislovate my shoulder, and get a concussion bad enough that my eye would jump around when I tried to follow the trainer's finger. Just in time for a final too. The good news - one of my fellow divers jumped in and helped me get to the edge of the pool so i didn't drown or anything equally fun.
5. ( skip. Benji won't like it. )
6. Can't think of a 6th.
I sure sound klutzy.
The Anonymous Poppy

15 February 2006 08:15pm UTC
1. "Darla? You're in the emergency room. I'm Dr. Fedorak and I'm going to be your doctor here."
"Hello, Dr. Fedorak. My name's Poppy."
"Um, hi."
"It's a pleasure to meet you."
I swear to you, this is exactly what happened. It seems that not even getting hit by a car will knock some ideas I have about good manners out of my head.
2. I've been in three separate car accidents with my sister. None of them serious, all of them amusing in some small way that isn't very funny later.
3. My car spun out of control on the freeway during the first snowfall of the season this winter. Luckily, there was a lull in traffic where I was and I twirled around right into the median where the snowdrift stopped my momentum before I hit the railing. No damage at all.
4. Um... one time I took a walk through the woods in the mountains instead of going back by the road, because I knew that the road curved around and I figured I could walk straight through and cut off the corner. And all I could think about was how years before, when I was first old enough to understand, my Dad told me that if a bear attacks you on Mt. Graham, climbing a tree is no good because they're relatively little and they'll climb up right after you and so don't believe that myth about climbing a tree being a good idea if a bear attacks you. Also, I'm terrible at climbing trees anyway. And he didn't really have any advice for things I _should_ do. I kinda wished I had a gun, and I wondered where was the road already, shouldn't I be there by now?
5. In terms of death from mortification: senior year, first semester drama production. Hoop shirts. Off-the-shoulder dresses, with hoop shirts. I simply leaned over to pick something up off the floor backstage and yes, I flashed both my ass and boobs to nearly my entire graduating class.
6. And another one, because everyone loves embarassing stories. End of senior year, I figured I might as well tell Nate that I'm crazy about him, since we'd pretty much been doing nothing but low-key flirting ever since the second-semester senior drama production. (In which we were Cyrano and Roxanne. Hence all the flirting.) And yeah. AWKWARD. Awkward as hell. He was all, "Oh." And then there was an awkward silence that lasted until I figured he wasn't going to say anything next, and just mumbled something along the lines of "Thought you might like to know," and walked away.
Don't you just love high school?
Boatswain The Fool

15 February 2006 09:05pm UTC
1. Apparently, when I was a tott, in the sense that I couldn't do much more than toddle, and walk a little ways when I found something extremely exciting (which was, I admit, probably just about anything). I can't remember why - perhaps the deep affinity for the color blue that would later make it my favorite color - but, while at the beach with my family, I was playing in the sand next to the water, when I decided to go for a swim. A little known fact about toddlers is that they, by and large, can't actually swim, a fact that I (apparently) was unaware of. I walked in, and continued to walk, until my head was below water. My mom remembers looking over at me (she and my dad were about fifty feet away), and seeing me walking and just drop below the surface of the water. At around this point, my dad started sprinting over to me. I don't remember how much water I swallowed - if any - but it's likely that if my dad were a slower runner, I would have had to learn how to swim much more quickly than I was doing.
2. My best friend from high school - Bopish - and I once went on a ski trip to Steamboat Springs with his dad. We were ecstatic because it meant spending more time together, and Bopish was also excited about skiing on a good hill. We skiied together, the three of us, the entirety of the first day, and were having fun on the second day, when Bopish's dad decided that he wanted to go on ahead somewhere. I wasn't exactly sure where - a lodge of some sort - but Bopish seemed to understand, so I let it go, and his dad went on ahead. After a little while of skiing, Bopish started to get ahead of me. Now, I'm not a great skiier, so I couldn't really catch up and keep control, so I let him get a bit ahead, thinking that he'd wait not far ahead. After he disappeared ahead of me, the trail run forked. I was going relatively quickly (at least more quickly than my brain), so I didn't have much time to think. I looked at both, decided that the right path looked easier and took it. I kept skiing and skiing, wondering if I'd taken the wrong path. After a while, I decided: "This is no good; I would have hit that lodge-thing by now... It must have been on the other path." My path had been going relatively straight, so I thought that I would just cross straight to the other path and then go up until I hit the lodge, rather than going up all the way and then back down. So, I started walking through the trees. As a panicky person, I instantly started regretting my decision, thinking "I should go back" and then "I don't have enough room to turn around!" and then "I'm lost!" and then "Where is the other path?" and then "I'm going to fall" and then "I'm lost!"... and so on. After about five minutes of crossing, it became apparent that I wasn't finding this other path, so I started really worrying. Thinking that it was my only chance at finding... anything... I started yelling for help. I yelled a few times, and when there was no response, I edged forward a bit more. About ten feet ahead of me, hidden by some fog, was the other path, which was about fifteen feet wide, directly after which was the lodge. I walked to it and found my friend and his dad, laughing hysterically. Apparently, they had heard me yelling for help, like twenty feet from the lodge, realized it was me and that I was lost, and found the whole situation to their satisfaction (and thus decided not to actually offer me the help I was asking for).
Okay, this is getting a tad... *ehem* ... long... I might post more stories later, when I am feeling particularly malicious towards you all.
Slade

16 February 2006 01:58am UTC
These aren't in any particular order.
1. Bruce and I almost fell off a cliff once. I was really much closer to falling off than he was, though.
2. Drunk cab driver in Las Vegas. That was a fun one.
3. When I was a kid, I piled up all my toys in the middle of the room, put a rocking horse on top, and tried to climb up on it. I still have a pretty righteous scar on the back of my head from that fall.
4. I almost had a bunch of tiles fall on my head this summer, when we redid our bathroom and whole ceiling came down at once.
That last one really wasn't near-death though. I guess I'm out of ideas.
Slade

16 February 2006 01:59am UTC
Oh, and it wasn't that much of a cliff, either. But we were little kids, so it seemed bigger.
Dread Pirate Benjamin

17 February 2006 01:33pm UTC
3. So, this one time, I was climbing this mountain, and it started storming and lightning-ing and my dad and I didn't turn around. We were this close to be struck by lighting. It was a lot of fun.
Carpenter Courtney

18 February 2006 11:41am UTC
Once upon a time, I was applying for this job that someone else was applying for too. God, that was like dying. :P
Beca

19 February 2006 08:48am UTC
okay, so it took me a while but I finally thought of one. Freshman year, I was sick with some sort of cold/flu nastyness. My friend Meghan is a walking pharmacy and she gave me what she told me was Tylenol. But I ended up in the emergency room anyways because I started having heart palpatations and shortness of breath while vomiting profusely. Very scary, thought I would suffocate or have a heart attack or something.
Swabie Scabbie

19 February 2006 09:22am UTC
1) When I was born my lungs were so full of poop I almost suffocated. The doctors had to de-poopify me with a turkey baster.
2) When I was about six months old my mom forgot to put sunblock on me and my shoulders got so badly sunburned that they blistered. I know it wasn't an immediate danger, but anyone who's seen my white, freckly skin knows that skin cancer will get me in the end, and I'm sure baby sunburns turn the cancer clock forward a few years.
3) At age two I had a massive asthma attack that nearly killed me. It appeared that my lungs were not entirely over the whole poop thing.
4) I nearly drowned in a pool in Kansas when I fell in at the age of three.
5) I nearly drowned in the wave pool at waterworld when I was five, but my superhero dad scaled the wall with me in one arm and saved me from the sea of evil teenagers in intertubes.
6) Jumping on my friend's trampoline when I was six, I did a front flip and a half and landed face-first on the bar. I think my friend was more worried than I was at the time, but I thought I was going to die when I first saw the hooked needle the doctor was going to use to put twenty-two stitches in my mouth.
So there are the six near-death experiences I had in the first six years of my life. The theme of the story? If we were still cavemen my genes would have been removed from the population long ago.
Pendleton Farnsworth, Ship\\\\\\'s Barrel Inspector

20 February 2006 11:51pm UTC
1) Last year, in London, I missed one of the trains that was bombed by five minutes. Thank goodness for women taking forever to get ready in the morning.
2) Two years ago I stood under a tree that was hit by lightning.
3) When I was a wee babe being pushed into the world to become a prosperous and successful barrel inspector by heart suddenly stop. All odds suggested I would perish there before my keen eye ever laid itself on its first round, wooden container. Thank goodness odds are never correct.
Surgeon , Brittney the

21 February 2006 10:09am UTC
1. when i was little, my parents weren't paying attention to me and i walked into the swimming pool and just stood under water, all the while holding onto the rail.
2. when i was in woodland park when i was about 13, i was standing across the street from a mountain lion--eek.
3. i was 6 in the parking lot and not buckled up. my grandma slammed on the brakes and i hit my head on the windshield. the windshield cracked almost all the way across. we think i had a concussion, but i didn't go to the hospital.
4. in my first knee surgery, the doctors gave me my anesthesia (spelling??) and i thought i was suffocating. it turns out that they had to intubate me during the surgery.
that's all i can think of right now.