Have you ever cheated death?

I was nursing in Belfast in 1969 when the troubles started then started married life in a rural area in N.ireland. I did hear bomb blasts during my time there but, as far as I know ,was never in immediate danger. In 1975 we moved to Kent for my husband's new teaching post and two days after our move got a new gas fire installed. Next morning I came downstairs to hear a hissing noise and discovered the pipe to the gas fire had snapped and gas was blowing out into the sitting room. Thank God it must only just have happened as we had a pilot light in the kitchen water boiler so could have been blown sky high. Needless to say we turned off mains straight away and got an engineer out. Turned out wrong type of connection had been used. Ironic to think we'd survived terrorist bombs but the gas board in Kent nearly blew us up. It was very scary as we had two small children in the house. We didn't even make a fuss about it at the time - think they'd be sued for trauma if it happened nowadays !

Several occasions when, as driver or pedestrian, my mistake fortunately didn’t coincide with someone else’s. I wasn’t paying attention, he was! And a few the other way round of course, where my alertness stopped the other person’s error being tragic.

I was months old when my Mother parked my pram outside a shop - which you could do then - and went inside. She said that something made her come out and pull the hood up. She went back inside, and as she did a scaffolding pole from the shop next door crashed onto the pram hood. A Silver Cross, so well made and sturdy, probably saved my life. Also several years ago on Christmas Day we were driving to our DS's house for lunch, when a police car came screaming along behind us; DH decided to move into the inside lane and luckily looked first - he stayed where he was and a stolen BMW overtook on the inside, travelling at about 150 mph at least. It made the 'WUMP' noise similar to when you stand on a platform and a high speed train goes through. Had we got in the way we would have been spun around like a top and no doubt taken several other cars with us - resulting in a very different Christmas for many people I suspect. The lunatic was caught twenty miles further on, and had reached speeds of 200 mph.

grannygranby

Dear Chestnut. I so understand. ran in front of a bus when I was four chasing my dad who covered his eyes as the bus stopped inches from me...I thought he was beckoning me but I think he was just waving.
Again ran in front of bus when about ten as I threw my GLB hat which was like a frisbee into the broadway (these are all in Wimbledon) and I was scared it would get crushed by the bus so ran to get it. I hid in shop window afterwards and police told me off for being so careless. (I loved that hat)
Ran away from men on Wimbledon common when I was collecting fungi and they were trying to stuff hay into my knickers (about 8). Hitchiked home to from Cafe des Artistes many times at 3 in the morning. Got hit by a car outside Cafe des Artiste and hid afterwards as it brought back memories and I was sure it was my fault. that's enough for now.

Oh grannygranbee what memories you brought back. I worked in the Café des Artistes when I lived in Earls Court. I did the 3 o’clock walk home on my own which now seems terribly dangerous. I was often invited to ‘parties’ but had to be up for work (a proper job in central London) just a few hours later and ran most of the way home.
I had so many near misses in my life, mostly due to recklessness on my part though I couldn’t be blamed for a flying emergency when a suspected fire in the hold forced our fully laden 747 to land in the middle of the night on a short, barely lit military runway in an eastern bloc country.

Chestnut

Oh my goodness welbeck, it wasn't Brady and Hindley was it? Was it the right time and place for them? That really was a close shave, it would not have ended well. Someone was looking after you.

not as far as i know. was in middlesex.
i did not sense danger at the time, but oddness, and a disinclination to comply. the lure of other children was not attractive to me. i did not meet any til i went to school, over age 5, and didn't like them, messy, unreliable, causing trouble.
i was a loner. actually often talked with adults esp at their work.
it's only as an adult i've wondered about that incident.

We had a young woman with learning disabilities and mental health problems living with us several years ago. Her step father died and she got to the anger part of grieving and attacked me. She picked up our big, heavy telly (no neat little flat screen jobs in those days) and threw it across the room at me, followed by the heavy oak unit that it sat on. Then she grabbed me by the hair and started to batter my head against the walls. I managed to grab the phone when she dragged me past it and dialled 999. I remember screaming for help down the phone and the operator on the other end telling me not to retaliate and that help was on the way. My then 15 year old DD was watching, horrified, in the living room doorway so I yelled at her to go outside and wait for the police and show them in. When two big, burly policemen arrived this young woman let go of me and started on them! They subdued her and took her away in handcuffs, leaving me shocked and exhausted in an armchair that was still, by some miracle, upright. My DH had been out but came home shortly afterwards and carted me off to hospital to be checked over. We later learned that, once locked in a cell at the police station, it was nearly an hour before she was calm enough for anyone to get anywhere near her. We also learned that I wasn’t the first person that this young woman had attacked, but social services didn’t tell me that when they placed her with us because that information was confidential.

I nearly drowned as a child, my friend and I were out of our depth and she panicked and climbed up me leaving me standing on the bottom completely submerged.

I was nearly kidnapped as a teen, I remember flying along on my bike and one of the men getting a handful of my hair.

As an adult I nearly bled to death after the birth of my son. I was in the hospital bathroom and couldn't leave the mess after having a bath. Trying to clean it nearly killed me.

It has taught me how quickly life can be taken away and made me quite over protective of my own children

3, Was taking son 1 to University in Durham, was in the middle lane when the car in front of me just stopped dead...luckily no one was in the slow lane at that point, and I just managed to swerve inwards and round it, I just carried on and never knew what happened behind me!
Very lucky again!

in my 20s, dithering about where i was going next, having come out of the post office. was inclining towards the nearer shop being lazy, when my stern inner voice said, do the farthest first, so i moved off. to the left.
then i saw a large volvo car describe an arc across the pavement outside the post office, where i had just been standing and come to a halt as it impacted a street lamp, from the inside.
if i had turned right or stayed where i was, i would have been mown down. vehicle was at speed. all very sudden.
an elderly man at the wheel.
i have disliked automatics since. and noted the number of incidents where elderly people have pressed the wrong pedal.

Definitely. The IRA planted a bomb in the shop I managed one night. I got call out with the police, my dad came with me and we all checked the premises and money thinking it was a robbery, boarded up the windows and then I got a couple of hours sleep before opening up.
I was hoovering the shop floor and pulled out a large box of sale shoes only to find a taped up biscuit tin, a bomb. I phoned the police and my staff and I cleared the other shops before the bomb disposal arrived.
The bomb was due to go off when the police and I entered the shop through the night and only a faulty wire stopped it detonating. The IRA phoned a local radio station to say they had planted it.
Hallelujah for a faulty wire as my mum would of lost my dad and I that night, never mind the police and families living in flats above the shops.

I'm sure that my nine lives are up .

The list is endless :

As a child -
Seriously ill from whooping cough rendered me with pneumonia and pleurisy and left me asthmatic .
Went into a comatose state for a week from sunstroke .
Nearly fell out of an upstairs window onto the concrete below .
Rammed a whole orange into my mouth and lost my airway .
Nearly drowned in huge pond at my Aunt's house .It was covered in moss and I thought it was grass .
Chased into traffic by a dog .
Neighbour's disturbed child tried to hit me round the head with a shovel .

Later as a teenager my horse bolted and we both went into a tree .
As a teenager - nearly raped and at risk from the would be rapist being recognised .

As a adult and abroad :
Dengue fever x 2 - not the most deadly serotypes .
Paratyphoid
Nearly killed in a car crash x 2
In a near miss plane crash .
Also escaped from a man with an axe by locking myself in a bedroom .He was after someone in the house .

Massive haemorrhage from a placenta praevia detaching .

A misfired rocket flew between my house and the next .

Am I living on borrowed time ?

Nothing dramatic has happened to me recently !

1/ 17 years old on my bike and a lorry suddenly stopped in front of me and started reversing rapidly. It started to run over me. Fortunately passers by noticed and stopped the lorry. I was taken to hospital. I was to OK apart from scratches and bruises. Another few seconds and the outcome would have been very different.

2/ My late father was violent so I married a man the same though alot worse. Stayed 16 years.

I finally left when he turned on my eldest (they are his however my boys disowned him hence I say my, or ours when I talk of my 2nd husband as he was the dad he didn't have to be)

How the hell i/we survived all those years of violence I will never know. It could have quite easily been me as a statistic

3/ Got beat up some years ago by this woman where we were living when we fled.

4/ I had a short period of time, after leaving the ex, when I was drinking too much which could have had dire consequences

5/ Fortunately that's about it and more than enough

6/ One I've just remembered: caught up in a serious terrorist alert at Manchester Airport in 2005.

It wasn't a near death, as such, as nothing happened but scary still with worry

So far, thrice. Once in a motorbike accident and once with viral meningitis abroad (poor medical help - they gave me out of date anti-virals) and once being hit on the head with a wooden golf club: it was a glancing blow but any closer and it would be have been deadly aged 6.

1: Violent ex-husband told me to keep our two small sons ( 7 & 4) out of the way whilst he backed the car out of the garage at my mother-in-laws home. I put them in the back garden and shut and locked the gate, and told them to stay out of the way and why...went back into the kitchen and watched them through the adjacent window, they went to the gate and watched as he backed the car out. He got out of the car and saw the boys watching, flew into a rage, came into the kitchen, I had by then got back on the floor to clean the floor ( m-in-law was ill, and I and boys had been sent up to stay to look after her - from S, Wales to North) - he then proceeded to kick me on the floor until luckily the boys banged on the windows!
2, I live alone ( i’m 75) and have kidney disease and kidney stones, went to bed in April last in pain, assumed a bout of stones again which usually passed in a couple of days. Awoke 3 days later in hospital - luckily my neighbour and a friend missed me and realised the house was locked up and he couldn’t use his key. He called the Police, they got an armed response until and broke in. I had at some point lapsed into unconsciousness and they took an hour to resuscitate me!
I spent 4 weeks in hospital with Sepsis, etc, and I am very lucky to be alive today.
Thank goodness for friends and a great neighbour!

Apparently, when I was a few weeks old, my Mum was having a rest, and my Dad offered to take me out in the pram (first time he'd done this alone). It was a lovely sunny day, so he went to the beach. Being a mindful parent, he parked the pram in the shade and moved along the beach a bit for a wee sunbathe. Of course, he nodded off to sleep, woke up all dopey and just walked home. Forgot all about the pram and the baby! The tide was coming in! Fortunately two old dears saw the pram being lapped by the waves and rushed in to rescue me. Needless to say, the minute Dad opened the front door, he realised what he'd done and rushed back to claim me. My mother never let him forget it!

The midwife said I was stillborn, until I started yelling. Then age 7 I nearly died of rheumatic fever.

Many years later I had a migræne that scared me badly, as I was alone and felt too ill to try to get to the phone to call for help.

Looking back, I don't think the last incident qualifies as cheating death.

Thankfully none of my experiences have been frightening like most of yours. I don't remember the first obviously, but have been told about it. Nor do I really remember the second, only feeling so dreadfully ill and wondering why Mummy was sitting crying by my bed.

2. Was in Woolworths in Manchester 10 minutes before fire went up!
3. Was in Lewis's in Manchester when IRA bomb blew in homewares dept in basement, ears popped really badly but unhurt, poor security guy lost his eye.

In 1994 I was separated and living alone in flat near work in st.annes.one evening after tea I poured a pint of cider and started eating a ginger nut, somehow it lodged in my throat and I started choking! I was shocked and could do nothing the thing that struck me was how silent choking is. I tried banging my back against door frame , started to feel as if my eyes would pop and getting dizzy , I suddenly remembered the pint of cider!!! I managed to grab and pour into my mouth tipping up entirely and it dissolved the lump of biscuit! I wondered how long it would be before I were discovered? It was a Friday and I had holidays booked until the Tuesday so nobody would miss me until then! I imagined my friend from work coming over Tuesday lunch to see why I'm wasn't at work!! All this whizzed through my mind along with dreadful feelings of the loss of my darling boys. Horrible.

My wife and I are keen geocachers -a hobby which involves finding “things” hidden by other players using map co-ordinates.

In June 2016 we were on holiday in Normandy. We had parked the car and we’re walking down a rural track where a geocache was supposed to be hidden in the hedgerow. When we reached the point where our map said the geocache should be, I put on my thick leather gardening gauntlets (lots of hawthorn in French hedgerows) and began searching the hedges on both sides of the track. I was poking one particularly thick piece of hedge when my walking stick struck something hard. Parting the branches carefully I peered into the hedge and saw a metal cylinder about 15 inches long with metal fins on one end and a point on the other end! Oh <<EXPLETIVE>> It’s a bomb!

Run to a safe distance. Ring the police. Explain in broken French where we are and what we have found.

Police arrived in about 5 minutes. Army bomb disposal arrived in about 20 minutes, and after about another 30 minutes there was a VERY LOUD BANG!

Apparently, it was a British Aerial Mine (according to the local newspaper).

Was due to fly to San Francisco years ago the day the planes were grounded because of planned terrorist attacks, found out afterwards our plane was one of the targets. Went two days later & spent the whole flight terrified, never really like flying anyway .

Several ti es, but I choose not to dwell on it. It’s too depressing.

When I was new born my parents rented a house and my bedroom cot was in the basement. Mum had a nightmare that the ceiling had fallen into my cot, so she came and got me, took me into their bed. Next morning they discovered ceiling had fallen into my cot! When I was 5 the paraffin heater in my bedroom caught fire, my sister had only just been born and was in the same room as me. I shouted for parents but they didn't hear me, the wallpaper was on fire, and the grey smoke cloud on the ceiling was getting lower and finally touched my baby sisters cot rail. I realised they were not coming, so I tried to undo her cot side, but child lock, so had to climb up into the smoke cloud into her cot, threw her over my shoulder, climb back out into the smoke cloud and remember crawling into the hall carrying her before I passed out. I saved her life and was allowed to chose new wallpaper for my room - Rupert the Bear! Age 10 I nearly drowned saving my 5 yr old sisters life again, when on holiday in Devon on a caravan park in an unsupervised swimming pool. She jumped into deep end but could not swim. I stood on bottom of pool and pushed her out and then remember being very calm , floating underwater and thinking 'oh I am drowning and going to die' passed out next thing, coughing guts up on side of pool someone doing mouth to mouth and the sound of my sister crying. So I have had earth, fire and water aged baby, 5 yrs and 10 yrs, needless to say I dreaded my 15th birthday!

Reading all of yours, I’m glad I don’t drive.

A stroke in 2008 definitely cheated death. Not in the UK and luckily my husband realised something was wrong as I wandered confused around a campsite in the USA. He got me to hospital and was admitted after several scans and rushed by ambulance to a care facility as my brain bled and I lost speech and became paralysed down one side. Super scary as I recall a discussion by doctors as to whether to drill into my skull as I was unable to respond and let them know I could hear. Still here today as mobility returned but not all the memories came back. The teenage near misses and driving near misses are minor compared to a life changing event. If we were here in the UK I wonder if I would have survived

I used to walk around Aldgate in London to work everyday. The day the bombings took place I had taken off to take my daughter out to celebrate her birthday. Her birthday was the day before so by rights I should have been at Aldgate at the wrong time.

I had a childminder/nanny for my daughter, who drove over a narrow bridge every day. One day a juggernaut hit the car and flattened the part of the car where my daughter sits. Luckily she was off sick with me at home that day.