Near death
And by near death, I do mean nearly dying, versus a neurological stress induced white light/tunnel hallucination.

Even at my very birth, I nearly died, as did my mother, it was a very close miss, for both of us. This seemed to start a trend of almost dying.

When I was around eight, I fell off a roof backwards onto a garden bamboo cane, and should of been impaled, instead I managed to scrape against it, bizarrely unharmed.

At ten I made a complete arse of getting over a fence, doing a 180 dangle and drop manouvre. Despite royally screwing up my ankle in the dangle, when I did drop, I avoided another impaling courtesy of a closely located piece of pointy garden equipment.

At twelve or so, I was believed to have a possible life ending medical condition. The same condition that had killed a number of my family then, and even more by now. After tests, the diagnosis was, thankfully, inaccurate and based on similar, albeit false positive symptoms.

Shortly after I learned to drive, I was out in the parent's car at dusk, and had carelessly forgotten to put on the lights (a habit very firmly ingrained in me now). This led to what, in all rights, should of been a fatal car crash, but was instead just an embarassing lambasting.

A few years ago, whilst cycling home from work, I looked behind me before signalling, and in doing so managed to cause the front wheel to spaz off in a different direction and throw me off. During the fall I managed to remember there was a bus behind me, quite close, and this being Oxford, the driver was likely to be a cyclist hater. When my head did hit the floor, I was somewhat relieved to see the bus go past me and not over me. As it turn's out I'd managed to fall out of the path of said bus, just enough to be safe.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have a guardian angel/spirit/whatever, but these are the more major close call's I've had (so far) out of a still larger list, and I can't help but think my luck will run out at some point. This is mostly due to the coup de grace of my "almost" stories, where the amount of luck was considerable:

Again on my cycle, around fourteen, I arrived home from school and in true teenage cyclist style I was hoping to leave a rubber stripe when applying my brakes. Only when I pulled the brake, the brake cable simply popped out of the top of the brake and left me to hurdle into a fence. The near death part happened about 30 seconds previous, when I had last used the brake, to slow down at a junction, where a particularly large HGV was passing in front of me. Had the brake broken there, I would have been splattered over the road in a particularly gruesome pattern.

Apologies for length, it just seem's to keep happening
(ShiftyBastard won the World Cup on World Soccer Champs 2010!, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:41, 1 reply)

Maybe it's time to
change from Shifty to Lucky
(bluemohawkz eating nine types of industrial pollution since, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:37, closed)