The 25 Biggest Bullets Anyone Has Ever Dodged

1.

Was chatting with a woman at the bar, nothing flirtatious just casual banter. I told her I needed to head out and she asked if I could give her a ride. I was headed that way so it wasn't a big deal. We pull into her driveway and I can see a guy at a computer in the living room through the window. I ask who it is and she replied "that's my husband, he's a pansy. I'll bring him outside and you scare him off, then we can have the house all to ourselves for the night" Every alarm bell in my head was ringing and all I could think was 'how do I get this crazy out of my truck without a big scene?' so I said "sounds good" as soon as she was halfway to the door I put it gear and burned rubber.

2.

I had some chest pains one night and woke up my wife to tell her. She got a little scared that it might be a heart attack and we agreed that I should go to the ER. The nurses were pretty sure it was a false alarm but would run an EKG as is common practice. In my head I was hoping that the chest pain would come back, not to prove a heart attack, but so that we can find out what the chest pain was. The EKG was done by one veteran nurse and a new nurse. I was watching over their shoulders. Something was flashing on the screen that made both nurses look at each other with disbelief. They ran it again and one nurse went out to the station for help. The other stayed with me and very nicely told my wife and daughter to go back out to the waiting room. A few seconds later 5-6 more people came into the room slowly and calmly and began prepping me for something. It turns out that I was having my second heart attack that night in the ER. The doctors and nurses found an obstruction in my heart and were prepping me to have it cleared and a stent placed. When I got out of surgery, the doctor who placed the stent told me “you probably picked the best time and place to have a heart attack, right here in the ER”

3.

My father-in-law: Was working on the construction of a power plant and was scheduled to work Sunday (was a union pipefitter). Saturday he got a call from another company asking him to run a job much closer to his house, think 5-minute commute vs 50, so he accepted and didn't go to the power plant job Sunday. That day there was an explosion at the plant and people in the crew he was working with wound up getting killed.

4.

A few years ago, I was in a small fender bender. Someone merged into my lane, with me in it, and smashed my driver-side door and their passenger door together. I had pulled my arm in from having it hanging out the window about 15 seconds before that happened. Would have most likely had my arm ripped off.

5.

Almost wound up in the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis years ago. My uncle, cousin, and I were on our way to a Twins game. We were originally planning to take the route that crossed the bridge, but last minute decided to take a more "scenic" route. After it happened, we were talking and we figured it probably would have been within a couple of minutes of the time the bridge collapsed that we would have been on the bridge.

6.

We were in Italy on a school field trip. We decided to play "schweinehaufen", pig pile, dogpile? Anyways, one person is declared the pig and everyone has to jump on them. We played this on a beach at night. Just sand, no danger, right? Well, the last round we got up and realized we formed this pile next to a 1m metal pole sticking out of the ground. It was maybe ten centimeters away and could have easily impaled the first 3-4 people. We didn't play that game again.

7.

I used to work for a drainage company. Drove 5 ton trucks with the roll off bins, used to move machines or material with them. One day, I was super tired. I pulled up to a job, tilted the bed up, got out, opened the dump gates. Got back in cab, roll forward slowly... Nice dump, great. Get out of the cab, go back, and close dump chutes. Oh, crap, still a bunch of sand in there. Dumbass me unlatched the gate of the roll off bin. About half a yard of sand was still in there, and the bin was still on an angle. That door opened SO FAST. The latch got catapulted into my cheek so hard it broke my orbital and knocked me to the ground. Blacked out briefly. The gate itself swung out, somehow missed me, and JUST had clearance over my steel toe boot. Dented the steel, scraped all the fabric off the boot. I ended up with just a small scar under my right eye. But could have easily lost my toes and an eye if I'd been standing about 1 inch to the left. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY EQUIPMENT WHILE TIRED, DRUNK, OR UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DRUGS. Urg.

8.

The second floor of the house I was renting collapsed a month after I moved out.

9.

Yesterday I was helping my fiance's dad cut some tree limbs from his yard. He was on a lift trying to cut some limbs that were dangling dangerously high over a steel propane tank. The tank itself had $1500 worth of propane. Had. He cut off a limb and it hit the tank with the largest bang I've ever heard. Propane came pouring out the top like smoke from a mortar. He struggled to get the lift down enough to jump out run for his life. We would later find out that the limb hit the gas valve and it fell straight down into the tank. If it had sparked once, it wouldn't have mattered how far we ran. We would be dead. Him, me, and my fiance who was showering inside, unaware. Now he has no gas, is out $1500, and almost died. Big twist is that I saw him smoking up there. There's no way we should be alive, let alone could. The gas is still leaking out even after 24 hours.

10.

There was an apartment I really wanted but at the last minute, I found a slightly better one. The apartment I almost moved into burned to the ground a month later.

11.

I quit a job after my boss yelled at everybody for faking being sick when one guy came in with the flu and passed it around the office. He claimed that people don't get sick by being near each other. One guy got it so bad he was hospitalized for 2 weeks. I quit with no backup in October 2019. By February 2020, his company went out of business

12.

I used to own a gym with a partner. I sold my half of the company and took a boring but stable government job about 3 months before the pandemic.

13.

I was moving abroad to do a post-grad degree. My flight was to leave out of Newark early morning on 9/11. A family friend who worked in the Towers kept prodding me to move my flight to the afternoon and come visit him in the office so he could show me around (my parents were pressuring me to go as well since it was a good networking opportunity). I was on the fence, but decided not to since I was a poor student and didn't want to pay the cab fair from my hotel in NJ to lower Manhattan. Our friend made it out, thankfully, and I'm guessing I would have well, but no way would I want that experience burned in my memory.

14.

Not me but a family friend managed to avoid the Pulse shooting where they were having their birthday party because they got had gotten an intense craving for McNuggets so he and his group went to McDonald's down the road. They left roughly 15-20 minutes before everything went down.

15.

My wife dragged my ass to the dermatologist for a cyst I have had for years. While there the doc noticed a mole on my ankle that he didn’t like. Turned out to be melanoma. Would have never gone if my wife didn’t force me.

16.

After a night of partying a bunch of us wanted to go watch the sun come up at a local beach when we had just graduated HS. There wasn’t a sober one amongst us, and one guy volunteered to drive in his minivan. A few of us said no let’s watch it from the deck, but he said he was sober enough. I just had a bad feeling and a bunch of us stayed back and slept it off at the house. We were all woken up a few hours later about 8:00 to the phone ringing off the hook, cops, and freaking out parents. (Pre cell phone days) They were in a really bad single-car rollover accident. 4 of 6 dead. No one wearing seatbelts. They would have had to have taken a curve at about 160 km/h That was a rough summer. Oh, and survivor’s guilt and depression are real.

17.

When driving in the upper peninsula in Michigan last summer a truck full of logs flipped and barreled straight into my car. Completely demolished the car, someone else had to come to open the door for me after the fact because they were all pinned shut by logs. I walked out of there without a scratch on my body.

18.

24 years old, had a pesky sore on my tongue that was really bothering me. My boyfriend’s dad was a dentist so when I was over at his house one night I asked him to take a look. He recommended I go see an oral surgeon the next day for him to check it out. The next day I decided it was feeling better so I tried to cancel my appt but my boyfriend’s dad insisted I go. I went, and the oral surgeon pretty much diagnosed it as cancer on the spot. It was aggressive and by the time of my surgery to remove it, it had already spread to multiple lymph nodes. They ended up removing over half my tongue followed by chemo and radiation. Given how aggressive it was, I often think that if I had put off the doctor’s visit any longer I probably wouldn’t have survived. I’m coming up on my 10 year anniversary in January

19.

I have some acres of woodland that I take care of with a chainsaw to keep a desirable mix of tree species and avoid overcrowding. Often when I cut through the trunk of a tree that’s too close to other trees, it just leans against them rather than falling down. Then I have to make a series of angled cuts and let chunks of the trunk slide off, more or less vertically, onto the ground. Eventually, the trunk winds up vertical enough that I can push it toward a clear space and complete the process of felling the tree. Well, a couple of years ago, I was getting to that point. Tree was basically vertical, a few thousand pounds of wood balanced on its end, reaching thirty feet up. I made another cut, and the rest of the trunk slid down off the 3 feet or so of trunk that I’d separated it from at the base. And then it started to lean. That sucker was coming down. Except it wasn’t going the direction I’d planned. No big deal, just move out of the way. Except I’d gotten careless and left a bunch of branches down there at my feet and I was disturbed to find that my legs couldn’t move. I was stuck rooted to that spot, which was very close indeed to the way the tree was moving. It wound up just nicking my head on its way down. Another few inches and it would have done a lot more than that. I’m always very careful to make sure the ground is cleared of branches when I do this now.

20.

I was engaged to someone, but then came to my senses and broke it off. Nine months later I found out she got married to someone else, then about 1 year after that she killed her husband.

21.

I was driving home from visiting my brother in Vermont when a snowstorm started. I didn't have much experience driving in serious snow and I completely lost control. The car careened off the road and I was heading for a giant boulder at around 50 or 60 mph. I felt time slow down and I reflected on my life for a moment and then said goodbye to my body. Suddenly, I was jolted out of it by an abrupt impact, but I could see that the boulder was still 20 or 30 feet away. When I got out of the car, I saw that I had hit a little skinny tree that I could have easily grabbed with one hand. However, it had a giant root system that lifted the car off the ground and stopped me. The car was totaled, but I was completely fine because of that little tree. There is no way I would have survived the other impact.

22.

Walking to work in the winter. Halfway through a step forward under a sky bridge when an icicle taller than me (6') and probably 2' around at the base crashes down right in front of my nose. If my bus had been a half-second earlier, or if I had walked even a tiny bit faster pace...I would have been impaled from brains to balls. I was frozen in place for a minute, quietly surveying my near-death. There was another pedestrian nearby who witnessed it and the wide-eyed, ashen look on his face as he stared at me confirmed just how narrowly fortunate I was that day.

23.

On a road trip in college with 4 friends. We stopped halfway for a pit stop because I had explosive diarrhea and was getting more sick by the minute. Friends carried on to Vegas and left me with one of the guys who rented us a car to return home. The friends that carried on got into a roll over: 1 died, 2 will be injured for life.

24.

My wife and I were prepared to buy a nice riverfront property in 2019, but the owners ( her dad and uncle) were dragging their feet. We had our down payment, we were approved for the mortgage, and we had even been living there paying rent. Then the river rose 30ft/10m and we had to evacuate. The water kept rising. The house was destroyed before we bought it. So we didn't buy it.

25.

This happened before cellphones existed. I had a long commute home and on a rare occasion, my husband drove into the city to meet me. I started for home about fifteen minutes before he did. On the stretch of Highway 101 that I needed to be on for about twenty miles, there was a big rig in front of me that seemed to be driving erratically. I got this weird feeling and just moved over to the next lane and accelerated past him. In my rearview mirror, I saw the big rig run over the car in front of him, flip to its side crushing the cars in the next lane (where I had just been). My husband was behind the accident and as the police were letting cars file past in single file, he saw one of the crushed cars had a red bumper. He got home a couple of hours after me and said he'd never been so happy to see my red car in the driveway. That he'd been holding his breath as he turned down our street because he really expected me to be under the big rig.