General Stories

My Near Death Experiences

I don’t think I live an extreme lifestyle. For the most part, I am mostly shut in and avoid trouble and people as much as I can. With that said, I am very unlucky/lucky in many ways. Not everything goes in my favor when I have the odds against me. If there is a duality of outcomes, I always have to assume the worst based on the experiences I had. I have some pretty bad luck all around, so I rarely take chances and when I do, it never really goes well for me. Sometimes, these unfortunate events are just out of my control. In any case, here are some various points in my life where I almost had met my end.

Back when I was around 3 years old, one of my relatives thought it was smart idea to leave me all alone on the top bunk of a bunkbed. I didn’t want to be up there because I had always been afraid of being lifted and above the ground so I wanted to get down as soon as possible. I don’t remember the details but I slipped off the edge and fell really hard on my back. It nearly knocked the wind out of me because I certainly remember not being able to breathe. Some relatives were able to hear me fall and get to me right as I was able to get my breathing back after a few minutes. It was one of the most terrifying moments I had so far in my life. I couldn’t cry or scream when I had my wind knocked out of me. Luckily I wasn’t really injured in anyway but it did hurt my back for a while. I must have been really robust as a child.

The next near death experience happened around 6th grade in middle school. Around this time, I had been a constant target of bullying by other students in my grade. One particularly bad prank gone wrong involved one of them trying to write something on my arm but all of sudden, they jabbed it really hard into my gut and stabbed me in the middle of the hall way. The guy who did it got scared and ran off as I was left there bleeding with a pen picked inside my abdomen. I didn’t really feel any pain initially but I was certainly bleeding like crazy and had to find the nurse office immediately. Nobody came to help me while I was limping to the nurse office. Once I got to the nurse office, I felt like I was going to faint right on the spot. I couldn’t stand up any longer and I was going to lose my consciousness. They had to get an ambulance and I was shipped right to the hospital where they would try to remove the pen, disinfect the wound, and stitch up the hole up. It was my first time at the hospital and I was extremely uncomfortable with hospitals. As luck would have it, I wasn’t mortally wounded but if I haven’t gone to the nurse I’d probably would had bleed out. The student who stabbed me ended getting a whole year suspension, no juvenile since my parents refused to press charges against him. I guess they were too lazy to fight for my own life being threaten in court and figured since I wasn’t seriously injured, it wasn’t worth wasting time and money for a court. The little bastard at least deserved juvie in my opinion.

The most recent near death experience happened a couple of year ago at the time of writing this post. I was driving to work early Sunday morning in the middle of summer. I like to leave a little bit early to avoid traffic, but that would be a mistake on my end. As I was crossing an intersection, a suv came in what seemed to be at a rather fast speed and smashed into the side of which I was driving. I heard this loud pop sound and I felt my car smashed and rolled over several times. It happened so quickly, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on until after my car had finally stopped rolling. At that point, I was sitting upside down in my car. There was broken glass everywhere and pretty much my car was inoperable as the engine was completely off. None of the supposed airbags in my car went off as they were supposed to so I didn’t have any cushioning for my arms. At first, I tried to get out by opening the door but it was smashed in and pretty much stuck. I also noticed I couldn’t really move my left arm as much as my right arm. I was bleeding from my elbow and I was shocked to see that I could see piece of my bone in poking out from my arm. The easiest way out was escaping through the front windshield so I ended up breaking it with my foot and unbuckling my seatbelt slowly so I don’t fall on my head. I did my best to not get glass on any of my skin but I had to crouch and crawl out from the wreckage since there really wasn’t any openings that were safe to cross other than the front windshield. Once I made it out of my car, I was able to get back on my feet again, thank God. I didn’t seem to be injured anywhere else but my arm and it was only a matter of time before the other driver who crashed into me was able to see me in person. He didn’t look injured at all. It didn’t take long before there was police and EMT services on the scene but the last time I looked at my car, it was completely unrecognizable. I’d say it sort of looked like a crushed aluminum soda can. I think seeing the wreckage and my arm bleeding out made me feel something I felt back in middle school. The feeling of losing my conscious and my strength to stand up. By that point, the paramedics already put me on the stretcher and drove me to the hospital where I would be reunited with my mom who I called on the way to the hospital. The doctor told me that I was very lucky to survive that kind of crash as most people do not survive roll over accidents. My arm wasn’t too badly damaged and they were able to remove some flesh and glass from my elbow before stitching me up. The thing with trauma is that when you are in the moment, you don’t really feel any pain other than a slight sting if you try to move it. When I was finally stitched and bandaged up, I was good enough to be sent home where I spent a couple of weeks being unable to use my left arm for any activities. Whenever I would shower, I would have to be careful getting my wound wet, and I had to replace my bandage every so often. I think the pain was finally starting to kick in during the recovery period, and there were nights when I couldn’t get any sleep due to the intense pain I would get in my arm. It was awful but I was still alive. After a couple of weeks, I was finally able to do away with my bandage and later on, have my stitches removed, which wasn’t very painful as it wouldn’t have been the first time I got stitches. I do however, have a scar now which will probably be there for the rest of my life. Sometimes, if I bump my elbow into something, it’ll hurt really bad for a bit but as of writing this post, I don’t really experience any additional pain anymore. I still suffer from some sort of PTSD when driving and I had to adopt a new style of driving called defensive driving whenever I am on the road. Some people will get pissed if they are driving behind me but I’d rather deal with that than another accident again. My car that was wrecked was practically worth nothing since it was kind of old but I did have insurance for my car and my health which meant I didn’t have to pay out of pocket for anything.

Sometimes I think God must have a reason for keeping me alive throughout all of these events. I had nightmares and sleep paralysis episodes where I would hear voices telling me that I would soon die and all that, but I am always able to make it out of these awful situations. It’s like a mix of sheer unlucky and lucky circumstances all at once. If something or someone wanted me dead, they had all those opportunities to do it and yet I am still alive and mostly unharmed. I have even been exposed to all sorts of viruses and still usually managed better than my peers whenever they would get something like Swine Flu or Corona Virus. It’s because of these events that I have a reason to live on through hardship. I may not know what my purpose in life may be but if I am still being kept around by the will of God, then I am surely nowhere near complete with my life mission, whatever that mission will end up being. It’s hard to say for sure, but maybe I really am just unlucky when it comes to these events. Eitherway, it made me emotionally stronger.