I died from respiratory failure and they brought me back.

02 saturation was 80 or so last I was conscious.

7 months of daycare viruses on repeat, noravirus, rotavirus, RSV, gastro, COVID, flu a, flu B, you name it. Finally died from complications of pneumonia, 5 days in resuscitation ward then ICU then acute

Lost 13kgs I assumed I had advanced bowel cancer

1985 at a local swimming pool session with the school-couldn't swim & didn't realise how far I had gone up the pool & I was pretty much centre. Started going underwater & panicking, lifeguard was an imbecile who wasn't paying any attention to anything. Managed to calm down a bit & started taking little steps backwards to where I was safe again & then went back to the shallow end.

Allergic reaction to some dental stuff from a shop that f'd up my breathing-asthamtic so probably played a large part in it. Got through it-but breathing was a hard as hell.

You ended up in the centre of the pool and drowning yet the life guard is the dumbass?

Dumbass.

Well I was 8 years old waving for help, going under etc, he was the adult supposed to be paying attention.

Right. Sadly when you’re born poor and raised in the hood, this is the type of shit you have to put up with even if you’re a respectable law abiding citizen.

After I got robbed, I had to take an afternoon off work to get a copy of the police report so I could have my license replaced. When I told my corporate coworkers the reason, they looked at my like I did something wrong. One of them asked “what were you even doing in that neighborhood?” Bitch, I lived there.

And yeah never getting justice was the worst part.

I used to cope by saying “if he’s in the streets this life will catch up to him” but unfortunately karma isn’t real and that piece of shit is probably still alive doing similar things or got a DEI job and lives a decent life right now.

A few years later I moved to the burbs and stayed there. Now I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

That’s what the cops thought srs. But nah. I knew her well (and still do). She wasn’t the type to be involved in that shit.

What I think happened was one of her neighbors living in that apartment building was a drug dealer. I learned later that people would park at the entrance all the time to buy from him. The robber probably saw me pull up and assumed I was there to buy drugs (I wasn’t).

Jakes on him tho. All he got was a wallet with zero cash and a couple debit cards with little money on them that were canceled within 10 minutes. My phone was recovered like I mentioned, so it was literally all for nothing.

That was 7 years ago. My hope is that he’s dead and his family is suffering today. Srs. Unfortunately I’ll never know.

During college a buddy drove us home from the bar and decided to race himself I guess. Spun out in a curve. Time seemed to slow down honestly. We had gone off the road, just barely squeezing in between a large telephone (or electricity) pole and a small bridge. Barely enough space to make it through that way. We went back a couple of times to look at the tiremarks and how unlikely that escape seemed.

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We were up at a lake house for a friend's bday party. Most of us had arrived earlier in the morning, and we had been in and out of the water all day. One of our buddies shows up late in the afternoon, and after hanging for a bit suggests we swim out to this floating dock in the middle of the lake. It's somewhere around 1/8 of a mile out. I'm beat, so I pass on the swim, but it winds up being that only 3 of us go in the water for the swim. I didn't like the idea of an uneven number of people, since on a swim like that everyone should have a buddy, so I joined bringing up the rear.

First 2/3 of the swim is unremarkable, just putting along, and I notice I'm gaining on the two ahead of me. The bday gal has almost made it to the dock. Then I start catching up really fast, like the other two have stopped swimming. I see the one gal looking at my buddy in the water and I'm close enough I can see she looks scared. I get closer and I can hear him breathing pretty heavily, he's now bobbing upright, just treading water. This is a surprise because he's a strong swimmer, but it turns out he's also got a heart condition and a propensity for panic attacks.

The gal he was swimming with isn't the strongest of swimmers, and she's visibly tired. Distance wise we're closer to the dock, but the longer we swim towards it, the deeper the lake is likely to get. The shore is farther away, but I'm gambling on the bottom coming up to meet us in the event anyone runs completely out of gas. I tell her to head that way and I grab my buddy by the back of his swimsuit and pull him onto my side to head towards shore. The other gal ahead of us is just getting to the dock, she see's what's going on and she jumps in to head towards us. I yell for her to get with the other gal and beat us to shore. There's a beach with a line of buoys and I had been pretty sure I had seen a life ring or a surfboard somewhere up against the pool house so I told her to go find them and send them out to us.

My buddy is still conscious, but he's breathing hard and not moving any air. I figure it's a matter of time before he passes out entirely. There's a point where my pulling arm is starting to wear out and I go to switch hands, so I roll him onto my other side and for a split second his lips drop below the water line. He uses his last bit of energy to grab onto me and try to push himself up and out of the water, sending me under. In that split second two scenarios played through my head; I wasn't sure how much longer I was going to be able to keep dragging us both along, but I could see how much farther we had to go, I would either get us to shore or I would have to choose to save myself. I had this clear image of tucking my knees, placing the soles of my feet on his back, and pushing off, hard, to get myself away from him so that he didn't inadvertently drown us both. That scene played out in my head with so much detail that it could have easily been the real thing. I could see myself crawling up onto shore, alone, having failed to save us both, and I hated it. I knew in that moment that if I made the decision to preserve myself at the expense of my friend that the rest of my life would not be worth living.

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In that moment it was as if someone just turned down the volume on everything to do with the panic. It was golden hour now, in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to, and I remember being in awe of just how peaceful it all was. Birds chirping, trees rustling, sun rays shimmering, what a precious gift it all was. I was eating up the scenery like I knew it could be my last supper. I remember the air started to feel thick, like it may as well have been water that you just couldn't see. It didn't feel like I was swimming along the surface of a lake, it was like I was in a suspension somewhere in between. I had all these thoughts and more, some I can remember and others only faintly, it all felt like it happened in a split second, and like I was never really there, like I was somewhere else. Probably what people describe as out of body experience, though I never really felt 'removed' if that makes any sense at all. Like it wasn't me controlling my legs and arms etc it was just happening, like a flow state.

It was the air that brought me back, like I said it started to feel thick, like water almost, like it was thick and coating my lungs making it hard to breathe. This pulled me back and I looked over to see we had made it to the buoy line by the beach. We probably weren't close in enough to touch bottom, but if we went under, we'd be able to push off and bob back up at least. We had to get through the buoys, and I was worried either myself or my buddy would get caught up, and then I could hear the bday gal splashing into the water. She had found the surfboard by the pool house and I yelled for her to toss it out to us. If you know that feeling when you have to piss really hard and you get home and it feels like your bladder connects to the wifi and senses that now it can finally relax, but you know that you still have to get upstairs, into the bathroom, get your dick out, etc that's what this felt like when I could see the board coming our way. Like every alarm in my body was going off but it was 3 seconds too early. I manage to catch the board and haul my buddy over the side of it and that was the last bit of strength I had. Bday gal was able to drag us the rest of the way in to shore, buddy woke up shortly, and I just lay there while every muscle in my body spasmed for about an hour.

shit was crazy

Lifeguards are just some stoner teenager on minimum wage part time summer job, he was probably checking out the female life guard on the other end of the pool while you almost died

They really entrust the worst possible person for a job with that type of responsibility you got cucked

From memory he wasn't a teenager-looked mid to late twenties. Lucky I am a smart cookie & managed to calm down a bit & back pedal, felt like it was pushing back against a huge force trying to stop me, but one little baby step at a time & I made it.

When I had open heart surgery over 5 years ago the surgeon said they lost me for a moment on the table, I dont recall anything unusual while I was under.