Have you ever cheated death?

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.

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!

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!

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/ 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

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 !

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 !

Aged 40, first baby, 35 weeks pregnant, swollen legs with pitting odeama. GP unsympathetic but took my blood pressure and started asking if I was stressed at home. Didn't believe my normal BP was very low or that I was normally very skinny and I was actually very relaxed about things until my legs had swelled up. Finally agreed to test my urine, then changed her tune and wanted to call 999. Good job I knew the signs of preeclampsia and was persistant or both me and my lovely baby wouldn't have survived.

Just watched 'This is Going to Hurt' and it reminded me...

I had an ectopic pregnancy, but the hospital didn't realise, they told me I had had an early miscarriage and discharged me home, five days later I was absolutely doubled up in agony and feeling like I was going to pass out. Rang hospital who said to go in and I'd probably need a D&C. One of the junior doctors was a bit troubled by my condition and decided they would do a laparoscopy first just to see what was going on. When they looked inside my fallopian tube was now starting to rupture and I had to be additionally sedated for emergency surgery. I was in hospital for 10 days and off work for a month. If they hadn't found and dealt with it when they did, I might not have made it.

It was 1987, the night of the Kings Cross fire. I was Systems Operations Manager for a bank and responsible for their communications system. I usually left the office around 7 pm but that evening the computer went down just before I was about to leave. Unable to restore it myself, I called an engineer and stayed with him until the issue was resolved and eventually left for home at 9.15 pm. The fire in the underground station started around 7.30 pm which would have been right about when I would have arrived there on the tube from Covent Garden. It was a terrible tragedy, so many lost their lives. The memory has always stayed with me.

Bikes coming off cars etc - me too. I was on the M25 following campervan-type vehicle when 2 bikes came off and headed for my windscreen and I thought my end had come. Some sort of air current suddenly lifted the bikes up, probably 10 ft, and to one side and I scraped past. In my mirror I could see chaos behind as cars tried to avoid the bikes on the ground. The camper van carried on regardless, and no amount of flashing and tooting would stop it. Still can’t drive anywhere bikes on cars.

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202203/medium-927974-cafedesartistes.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202203/medium-382933-20190704-202447.jpg

Grannygranby and Minerva

The Café des Artistes!!! I used to hang out there a lot around 1868-69. On the tables they had candles dripping from Mateus wine bottles (the height of sophistication) and arty people sitting around them. My mother disapproved, she called them 'the twilight set' ha ha. By the way, the Café features in a 1965 Oliver Reed movie called The Party's Over which might come up on Talking Pictures. In the movie it was called 'The Crypt'.

See Capture 10 on this website:
The Party's Over
(Sorry, folks, just couldn't resist talking about the Café!)

Only time I've ever felt I cheated death was a few years ago. We were driving home on one of the local roads, DH zooming as always, and we came over the brow of a hill to see about 150 yards ahead a line of cars stopped to allow the cows to cross the road for milking. DH braked hard and we must have skidded as we went up the verge, rolled at least twice and ended up in the field upside down!

These are hair raising stories; I have always felt that when it is your time to go, you will - regardless of what happens. Some have amazing escapes from death, some will trip over the kerb, break their neck and die. Your sell by date is woven into your DNA in my opinion.

Age 11, attacked by what a thought was a nasty man. He was greasy and filthy in a dark grey long coat. It was six am and I was delivering papers down a quiet street. Suddenly he was on top of me, saying bad bad things, one hand around my throat, I kicked him in the balls and bit him. He let me go and I ran and ran.

Ran into the road, a bus screeched to a halt. I wet myself and cried. Two old ladies came seeing my distress and told me to go straight home to my mummy. I was 11.

Age 18 I stood for half an hour by an IRA bomb in a waste bin on Aldershot train station. It was Christmas Eve.
Two plain clothes policemen came early next day to my home. I had no idea.

Aged 25 getting a lift home from my work in a pub a Geest container lorry hit the car at 50 mph this was on a crossroads. Driver sadly killed on impact. I was thrown through the windscreen. I could remember going down the dark tunnel and a light getting brighter and brighter. It felt lovely just going towards the light.
Next thing I hear police say ‘she’s a gonner’ . Whoosh, I’m back in my body though many broken bones, five vertebrae in my neck damaged, kidney damage, 70 stitches in my face.