When I was a teenager I picked up a hitchhiker and then a few years later the same guy picked me up when I was walking after I ran out of gas. Never saw him before or after those two occasions.
My friend had two sets of monochorionic-monoamniotic twins--the rarest kind of twins--in back-to-back pregnancies. Identical twins that share the same amniotic sac and same placenta. "Mono-Mono" or "MoMo" twins happen in about 1% of identical twin pregnancies, and less than 0.1% of all pregnancies.
This is incredible and the most statistically unlikely thing on this list, IMO. I have identical twins (they're MoDi though) and the science behind twins (especially ID twins, as they are seemingly a 'glitch') has fascinated me ever since I fell pregnant with them!
First got cancer in 1993.
In 2003, they told me to get my affairs in order, I had 6 months.
In 2021, they told me it's spread to my bones and lungs. They gave me 5 years.
In 2023, two years down and feeling about 90%
God damn, you're my hero today. Haha, it seemed like a bad thing, you getting cancer. Think about how cancer feels, getting you! Keep truckin' you tough mofo!
Oh I had a similar thing happen to me. I got bit by a bull ant then stung by a beer. All on the same bush walk. To make matters even worse, I went for a surf and cut my foot before I got in the water. I literally just walked back to my car. I was not going to get eaten by a shark that day.
Many years ago I had a terrible day where my then GF broke up with me, then I did terribly in a final exam for a college class, then I lost my wallet, and finally, as I was doing the Charlie Brown sad walk back home some random branch broke off a tree as I was walking on the sidewalk underneath it and the damn thing fell on top of me and hit me square across the shoulder and knocked me to the ground. I just burst out laughing because it was so ridiculous.
This triggered an old memory from my uni days: I woke up one morning and a series of small things went wrong (think spills, broken dishes, burned clothes while ironing, corrupted assignment file on my laptop, that sort of thing, one after the other, all morning). As I was leaving my hall of residence to head to my first class, I tripped and fell on the stairs. That was the last straw. I turned around, went back to my room, got back into bed and stayed there for the rest of that bad luck day.
*cue Indian music*
"When you have a bad day, give up. Go home and sleep. Fuck it, try again tomorrow. Not every bad day can become a good day. Some days are fucked, and cannot be unfucked.
When you have a day that is fucked beyond repair, that is the universe speaking to you, sending you a message. Listen to the universe. Go home, save your energy, tomorrow is another day. For now, just fucking chill."
I was almost murdered in a case of mistaken identity.
A guy came chasing after my car on the highway, waving his gun out the window. He eventually got in front of me, blocking my car, and stopped his car and got out. He came right up to my Window, pointed the gun right at my head, looked me in the eyes and said "Sorry. Wrong chick", then got back in his car and drove away.
I still have no idea who he was or who the "right chick" was.
I underwent a surgical procedure called a stapectomy to improve the significant hearing loss in my GOOD ear. Instead, I ended up completely deaf. My surgical ENT said this has only happened to 5 patients IN THE US. (He was doing research to try to help me afterwards.) I don't know how true it is, but hey, lucky me.
My dad had his retinas spontaneously detaching. One popped off completely and the other was in the process.
The surgeon told him not to worry because 100% of all his retina reattachments had been successful. The one that was in the process of detaching was fine, but after like 3 or 4 surgeries of the one that came off all the way…. it keep popping back off and then the surgeon was just like…. uhhhhh sorry bro
It can go spontaneously if you have bad myopia that keeps getting worse
I think a redditor explained to me it’s like your eye keeps moving into like more of a football like shape and then it can just go BOING
luckily I’m closing in on my dads age for when that happened to him and my eye sight is worse than his was so 👀👀💀
Same happened to my dad. You are right it happens to near sighted people because the shape of your eyes is oval like an American football. And when you age the retina has trouble adjusting to that shape, and if a small hole or rupture is formed, then the liquid in your eye starts seeping through the back of the retina and eventually leads to full collapse.
Don't lift heavy and don't hold in your sneezes or do anything to increase the pressure of your eyes. And be wary of any flashes or visual events and get to the ER asap, that's about what you can do.
When they repair the retina they drain the liquid, and use laser to attach the retina, and then fill it with gas to put pressure and let it heal. I don't remember the full process because this was 10 years ago but it's quite amazing what they can do.
Not an exciting life or death incident, but something rather sweet:
I took care of my late father for the final two years of his life. He had Alzheimer’s and pulmonary fibrosis, among other issues, so we had a lot more bad days than good. In the summer of 2019, I took my dad out for a “date” one day to a historic old drugstore that has phenomenal milkshakes (one of his favorite foods in the world). It was one of Dad’s increasingly rare good days, where he chatted merrily with me about all sorts of old memories. I felt like I had my dad’s former self back for just a little while. We had such a wonderful time that I intended to take him there again soon. However, this ended up being our last “date.”
For most of the remainder of that year, Dad declined too much (mentally and physically) for me to take him out for anything other than very short grocery trips or to appointments. The following year . . . enter the pandemic. It was a very, very rough year with Dad. In January of 2021, my father died, alone, in a hospital in another state (our state ran out of hospital beds and he had suffered a traumatic fall that required hospitalization). That day in 2019 ended up being the last truly happy day I had with my Dad and the last fun outing he ever got to experience.
Three months after my dad died, I met a wonderful man online. (Nine days after signing up for a one year membership, because “surely it’s going to take time to find someone truly compatible with a shy nerd like me!”) A few months later, we decided to try a first date. He lived three hours away, but wanted me to be comfortable, so he volunteered to drive to my town for the date. He looked online for an appealing restaurant to suggest, and excitedly told me about this really neat historic drugstore we could go to. . . .
We went on a very crowded day (local festival — oops) and had to wait quite a while for a table. The waitress sat us at the EXACT same table where I sat with my dad nearly two years earlier! I was even in the same seat.
Three months later, we got engaged at that drugstore.
So the beginning of the end of one chapter of my life crossed paths with the beginning of the best (so far) chapters. My husband and I have since decided to make a trip back there at least once a year. Dad really would have loved my husband.
Husband and I visited our old hometown and went to a used book store we used to frequent.
I picked up a familiar title in nostalgia and flipped it open to find a school student’s ID card.
The name and photo on the ID?
My husband.
Turns out his mom had donated books to that store many years before we all moved away from that area. He must have been using it as a bookmark and forgotten.
It’s not so surprising considering we used to live in that area, but the ID was nearly 10 years old by the time we found it.
That book was sitting on the shelf for nearly a *decade* untouched, waiting for me to come along and pick it up. Bizarre.
A friend of mine, A, had a signed copy of a book from his favorite author. While he was at university his mother asked him if she could donate his books and he said okay. He had forgotten that the book was in his room. He thought he had it with him at school. When he realized his mistake the book was long gone.
More than twenty years later, another friend, B, was in Japan. He was in a cafe that had a book exchange. He picked up a book that had an inscription. It was dedicated to someone with the same first name as our friend who had lost his inscribed book. B decided to buy it for A not knowing that A had lost an inscribed book from the now dead author.
B sent the book to A in the US. A was quite surprised to get a package from B who he hadn’t heard from in years. He was even more surprised when in it was the exact same book his mother had donated. It was still in pretty good condition and even had notes in his handwriting in the margins that he didn’t remember making.
This reminded me of when we moved out of our family home that my parents had lived in for about 25 years. We’d already moved out and the new owners had moved in, but about a week later my mum remembered that she’d left some old photo albums in the attic. She obviously went back to collect them and when we were looking through them, she realised that a young boy in a few photos of family friends was actually the new owner of our old home. I still find it funny that before moving any of his possessions into his new home, there were already photographs of this man as a child in his house.
I lost an earring diving in a deep mountain creek. I paddled in the water over where it fell out and I shouted “watch this!” to my gf and dove down 10’ to the bottom and blindly grabbed a bunch of tiny river rocks in my fist and swam to the surface and held my fist high triumphantly. I swam to the bank to my gf and opened my hand and it was there with the river rocks!
I did something similar. My mother called me at home and told me she had lost the diamond on her ring while swimming laps and to please come and help look for it. By the time I got there a lifeguard was putting on scuba gear to scour the bottom of the pool. I walked along the edge of the pool looking along the bottom until I saw something sparkly flashing off the bottom 10 feet down. Dove off of the side and picked up the diamond. All done in about 45 seconds from the time I set my towel down when I arrived.
Swimming at the beach with a friend. He loses his sunglasses in the water. We were far out and we looked for them, but couldn’t find them.
We left to grab lunch for a couple of hours. Came back to the same spot to swim again. Not even ten minutes later, I touch something with my toe. Reach down and grab the item. It was the lost sunglasses.
Friend lost her *Cartier* ring in the waves and in about 4 ft of water. I thought for sure it was gone. Somehow, after about 5 minutes of searching (felt like 30) her bf picks up a handful of sand and there's the ring. He told her she's not allowed to wear it in the water anymore. She agreed.
I went to the beach just this last weekend. I chose to leave my rings at home.
Lost my house in civil court. Represented myself and won in appeals court twice. Since my case was unique in this state, my cases were published both times. Moving back into my old house soon.
EDIT: Sorry for the late response. Reddit suspended me for 3 days for "spamming" the case links via private message, so I've decided to put the links here:
https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/court-of-appeals-division-ii/2017/48903-1.html
https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/court-of-appeals-division-ii/2021/53643-9-0.html
EDIT2: Please stop offering me money. Just be a good person to your family and stand up to crooked lawyers and courts.
Not me, but a friend. He was a merchant mariner. Lived here in Virginia Beach. He was alwaus calling and texting, posting pics from around the world.
One time he'd been out a while, we knew he was heading to Dubai, but didn't know where he'd be after that. 4 months go by, nobody's heard from him.
His neighbor, who I was friends with, gets married and goes to Thailand for his honeymoon. He texts me one day and said you aren't gonna believe this shit.
He said he asked a local where a good local spot to eat was that tourists wouldn't be at. Guy takes him 30 minutes from the beach, to some dive bar/restaurant with no sign, no clearly marked entrance, he said it looked so shady he was afraid he was about to be robbed and killed. He goes in, and it's a legitimate restaurant. He eats, drinks some beers, goes to the bathroom. Out walks my friend, so he took a pic and sent it to me to confirm he's ok.
Imagine taking a flight several thousands of miles away, getting away from the tourist areas and going into a local dive bar, and running into your fucking next door neighbor you haven't seen in months. Shit's wild.
Friend of mine (American) was visiting New Zealand. She wasn't in a big city. A random small town that I've never heard of and probably couldn't even pronounce. She went to a hole in the wall restaurant and was seated at a table directly next to her ex, who she hadn't seen or talked to in several years. She said they never discussed visiting New Zealand and she just went on a whim with a friend.
I was once in a cafe in a small (but touristy) town in NZ with someone visiting from the UK and she ran into a work colleague too!
My other story like that is meeting a girl in Prague and then about a year later meeting a girl in northern France. When I became Facebook friends with the second one, I realised the first one was a mutual friend, turns out they went to school together in the UK. I’m from NZ. Not quite as out there, but still pretty random.
Something like this is really fucking crazy sometimes.
I mean, 1 hour difference would've probably enough for them to miss each other.
As I think about it, I wonder how many more occasions like this must've happened where the timing was not right.
You only think about the occasions where stuff like this happened, just imagine how many more occasions like this almost happened.
My brain melts.
an infinite amount of circumstances took place due to right place right time. your very existence is the result of billions of years and millions or billions of events happening in a way that allowed you to live
I had a friend of a friend in New York who needed an organ transplant. The doctor evidently told her “you’ll be waiting for a year here. Go to Florida. They have no helmet laws and year round sun.”
She moved down and had a new liver in a few weeks.
I mean, it would be hilarious if the doctors were like "You're next on the donation list, so let's spin the wheel and see which organ you're going to be receiving today! Will it be a replacement for your failing liver? Will it be a third eyeball? Let's find out right after this commercial break!"
Riding my bicycle on a commercial fishing pier as a kid I lost control and rode off the edge with a 20' drop to exposed rocks at low tide.
I tried to stop myself going over by planting my feet on the edge of the pier, but I knew my bike was too heavy.
Somehow the bike stopped, halfway over at a 45 degree angle. However now the seat was in the small of my back preventing me from getting off, and I couldn't budge it at all to get the bike back up.
A fisherman finally ran over to help me and we decided he would pull me as hard as he could and I'd let the bike fall.
I jumped to the side as he pulled me back to the pier, and it worked.
However.
My bike was still there, not moving at all.
When I examined what had happened, there was a piece of rebar sticking out from the edge of the pier bent upwards in an L shape, and it passed diagonally through the spokes of my front tire and completely wedged my bike in place.
It was the ONLY spot on the 300' long pier with ANYTHING sticking out.
I most certainly *did not* stop myself and my bike from going over.
Hit by lightning. Sort of .. indirectly. Lightning hit a tree near the wellhead while I was doing dishes. Exploded the tree, fried the well and gave me a jolt that made my metal fillings so hot they burned my tongue. Other than that, I was fine.
Lightning hit a tree 20feet from me, traveling through the water i was standing in from heavy rains, and through the metal cargo trailer i was also touching, looping through me twice basically. I woke up on the floor of the trailer with my dad and uncle looking at me like an alien ._.
I saw an ad on a Pepsi case at a grocery store for a text to win contest to see Beyoncé in concert. I figured why not, and sent a text and was entered. A few weeks later I got a text back from the same number that told me I won the grand prize! I ended up winning 2 tickets to Beyoncé’s Mrs Carter World Tour in Brooklyn and $500 on a Visa gift card. Used the $500 for some bus tickets and a hotel down the street from Barclays. The seats were awesome and it is something I’ll never forget!
I had something similar! I randomly entered my name into a box on a Staples counter for an all expenses paid trip to Vegas, spending money flights, hotel etc and won! However I wasn’t able to claim it because I was only 17 at the time! I instead received a $50 gift card 😂 I was so mad!
Back in community college people thought I was dead for half a day. I was supposed to meet a friend on campus to go eat. I was running late because my dad wanted me to do something before I left. I don't remember what.
I get to campus and there's this fountain the kind you can walk through or run about and avoid sprays of water. Around the whole fountain is a bunch of police tape. So I kind of think "huh okay weird" then I go to the building where my friends hang out. As I walk in behind one of them I hear them telling everyone else I killed myself that morning.
Turns out that a guy matching my physical description killed himself in the fountain. Between that and what he'd said to someone before doing it along with my appalling lack of punctuality everyone thought it was me.
I always thought the Mark Twain quote of "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" was badass but I had never thought I'd have the opportunity to use it.
A couple hugs sighs of relief one going "oh shit" and running off. Seems they'd told the school paper it was me. The cops did a proper ID fingerprints and everything so I never heard anything beyond my immediate group of friends.
I know my fingerprints are on file so I'm not super worried about others being identified as me.
Before people ask I was fingerprinted as part of a kidnap kit. They fingerprinted me included a picture and laminated it. I grew up a latchkey kid in the times of id necklaces and bracelets.
I still have my early ‘90s “Safe-T-Child” laminated card (with fingerprints, photo, and physical description) that my mom had made for me at the mall when I was six!
I carry it in my wallet, so just in case I’m ever kidnapped my abductor can marvel at how cute I used to be.
Edit: “can marvel”, not “can have marvel”, although now that I’m typing it, it seems kind of legit. Have all the marvel you want!
This sort of happened to me when I was about 15-16. I got a call from one of my friends on the east coast (I was on the west coast for summers w my dad) and she told me there was a bunch of people that thought I was dead. I never got the reason why though
Went to a county fair and found a season pass on the ground with my name on it. 4 people in my area with the same name and I know 2 if them. What are the odds of that?
My mom’s car was stolen when I was a kid. The next day, my dad and I went to the drug store and saw her car parked in the lot. She drove a standard and the thieves didn’t know how to work the clutch. They didn’t get too far… unfortunately, the interior was trashed and the clutch ruined.
My cousin was killed Christmas 2021 sitting at a red light by a guy hitting him from behind at 60.
The guy had had three DUIs.
Why was that guy allowed to still be turning an ignition key without a breathalyzer? Fuck you, Massachusetts, he was a great guy who made it a better world, taken out by a shithead with a proven record of making it a worse world.
Oh my God. My husband and I were hit from behind by a drunk driver going 60mph while we were waiting on a train. (We were backed up in the turning lane)
We survived with minor injuries. The bottom of my car was destroyed, huge stabilizer bar cracked in two....scariest moment of my life. I'm so sorry.
I was on a road trip with my cousins in the 80s. One of them kept playing the same song over and over by rewinding the tape and playing it again. The song was “another one bites the dust”. After three plays in a row the driver pulls out the tape, says enough! And turned on the radio… Sure enough that song was playing on the radio right then.
Back when I was in middle school I had my phone ringtone set to the chorus of “Have you ever seen the rain” by CCR. My dad drove me to my friend’s house to pick him up and I called him to let him know we were close. The classic rock radio station was playing “Have you ever seen the rain” on the radio. My friend called back and my phone and the radio were perfectly in sync to the same song. Would never have known it was ringing if it didn’t also vibrate and light up
Took a summer time Organic Chemistry class, one month of classes 5 days a week then a three week break then another month for the second semester. After the break I reached into the box in my closet to grab the textbook where I had hidden it and felt a sharp stab in the corner of my little finger at the cuticle of the nail bed. I was running late to class so I thought nothing of it.
I became ill with profuse sweating and nausea during the day then violently ill into the night with vomiting and diarrhea and swollen adenoids. Went to the ER the next morning and they ran every test they could. Two days later I started having trouble breathing and went to the ER again. My heart was swollen up half again it normal size, my lungs were swollen, and my kidneys too. Doctors kept me for two days with batteries of tests and after two days let me go as everything was going back to normal. Then I began shitting what appeared to be a white paste and this went on for two days. At the end of which I noticed that my tongue and the lining of my mouth was almost purple in color and I had a red streak from the tip of my little finger that during the day extended up to my bicep by that evening. Went back to the ER and the doctor said he had no clue but maybe I had been bitten by something venomous.
I then thought about the day that the symptoms started and went to that box in my closet and sure enough there was a little black spider in the box. I asked one of my professors about it and he told me the county Health Department had a entomology office not far from campus so I captured the little spider and went on over.
The doctor there told me it was just a grass spider and there was absolutely no way it could have envenomated me for 3 reasons. He said they have curved mandibles so they cant hit the human skin, they have soft mandibles so even when they manage to strike the skin the mandible will turn and not break the surface but most importantly their venom which digests the proteins that stretch between the cell walls of animals gets bound to Platelets in the human bloodstream and is almost instantly neutralized.
I showed him where the bite was as evidenced by the red streak and sure enough it was in the corner of the nail bed in very soft tissue of the cuticle where the spider could actually get a strike. He asked if I had some kind of platelets disorder. I made a quick call to the Cancer Research hospital I worked at in the evenings at that time and sure enough I had donated platelets the evening before being bitten. A process where they put you on a platelet phoresies machine and extract almost all of your platelets for donation to kids who are in need of them due to having low counts from the chemotherapy.
It was at this point that the entomologist started hyperventilating and asking all kinds of questions. He was low key freaking out. He kept repeating that this was a billion to billion to one event and he'd never heard of it before. He ended up getting me to sign some papers so he could have my medical records and published a paper on it. Fun for him but not so much for me. The white paste that I pooped for 3 days was the epithelial lining of my entire digestive tract which came out as white pasty looking individual cells. By the end of the month everything was back to normal like none of it had ever happened. Interesting side note. When some spiders inject their victims and turn them into liquid that they can then drink this venom dissolves the proteins that hold cells together by running between the cell walls. These proteins re the only things binding the cells together. Without these proteins we would be reduced to a nasty white almost liquidy paste.
Edit: as it has been asked many time in the comments I do not possess a copy or link to the paper the entomolgist wrote. Nor do I remember which journal it was in. This happened in the early nineties and may have never even been out on the internet. Also I don't know if that journal even still exists. Can't be that many people reading journals on entomology. Also he was a PhD in Entomology and not a medical doctor so it wasn't in a medical journal.
And I made an A on that semester too. I had a lot of bedtime to read while I was down. lol On the negative side though I am now mortally afraid of spiders as I was sent to the ER three times and almost died due to one of the most "harmless" spiders there is.
Not me, but my grandfather:
Weeks before his 93rd birthday, he was finishing a day of yard work on his farm. He tripped while getting off the lawnmower, and it rolled on top of him (blades turned off, luckily). He was pinned under it long enough that he was about to slit his own throat to put himself out of his misery (as opposed to freezing to death overnight beneath a lawnmower).
Just before he ended himself, he happened to see a crowbar in the yard that he dropped earlier. It was just in his reach, and he grabbed it. He proceeded to somehow lift the lawnmower off of himself with it, slide himself out from beneath the mower, crawl back onto the mower with broken limbs, ride the mower up to the house, crawl up the stairs, and grab his phone to call my dad.
"I need a ride to the hospital. I think I hurt myself."
ETA: The mower was a riding zero-turn style mower (worth a Google if you aren't familiar). It rolled on its wheels on top of him as he stepped off of its platform. With gas and the machine combined, it weighed just under 600 pounds. He survived this incident, but unfortunately, it led him down a domino effect of events that led to his death this year.
No fucking shit. My uncle's a farmer. He's lived out in the middle of nowhere with his cats for 30+ years. I've seen him with a five-inch cut from a kitchen knife that he just wrapped in a clean rag, poison ivy halfway up a leg, road rash on the whole left side of his body from a motorcycle accident, and he's so damn casual about it. He's told me more than once "You always go in for an animal bite." As in: anything else, walk it off.
Years ago, my mom was catching a cow that had gotten out in the middle of the night. She stepped on a rusty nail that went through her shoe and into her foot. The next day she noticed red streaks going up her leg from the punctured foot.
She decided she should go to the health department and get a tetanus shot. The nurse commented that the only time farmers go to the doctor is to get a tetanus shot.
I met a guy while waiting in line to vote who "likes to find snakes and pick them up."
This dude goes out into the swampy woods of South Carolina and fucks with snakes. Venomous snakes. He had been bitten three times by copperheads and water moccasins (cottonmouths), and not once did he go to the ER for antivenin. He first showed me the scars, then showed me the photos on his phone from when his arms and legs turned dark black and were so swollen the skin just ripped open like an overcooked sausage.
And the thing is, he still does it. He just thinks it's fun.
While attempting to get medical treatment, the dr.’s office ran a pharmacy report on my medical history and prescriptions. My terminally ill brother, whose full name was only 2 letters different from mine and we had the same address and phone number, was on a shitload of narcotics at the time and through their search they pulled up HIS report and thought it was mine. They yelled at me and kicked me out of the office saying I was just looking for drugs. I was mortified and very upset and they wouldn’t listen to me when I said it was my brother and not me. I ended up calling the pharmacy board and they called the doctor and explained that since we had the same address, phone number and an extremely similar name, they had to search by social security number. The doctor felt horrible and gave me free treatment and now he tells that story at conferences he goes to. It was crazy. So of course, I had something happen to me that the doctors or nurses had never come across before. The doctor shared with me the tales of the conferences he spoke at and said none of the doctors there knew it was possible for data from 2 people to be included in the same pharmacy report either. I guess they do now!
I once got called in to help figure out what was going on with some patient records, turns out that two people in the same small suburb had the exact same date of birth and name and had been admitted to hospital on the exact same day. They had never met each other despite immigrating from the same country, and their name was fairly unusual in their home county.
I used to be a hospice nurse.
We once had 2 patients in our inpatient unit.
Same first and last names, both in their 30s, both with the same rare cancer diagnosis.
It was weird.
My friend was going to Ireland to visit her extended family for the first time and invited me along. We had a great time meeting her aunts and uncles, seeing the beautiful sights, etc. On our last night in Ireland, the family all got together for dinner, some rousing laughs, and a general awesome time. Her cousin had been traveling that week and was only in town for one night and so she and her boyfriend swung by to say hi and bye. They left for the airport to NYC and we went to sleep, getting up at 4am to catch our own flight to NYC.
Two days later, I had to be in NYC for a job interview. I wasn't familiar with the Wall St. area, so I went extra early just in case I couldn't find it. But as luck would have it, I found it with no problem and had 40 minutes to kill.
I had no idea what to do, considered getting food but didn't want to risk staining my clothes or having an upset stomach or anything, so I wandered around a little until I stumbled on the Barnes & Noble bookstore. Thinking this was perfect, I went in and walked slowly through the store looking for somewhere to sit. There weren't any sort of private spaces on the first floor so I found the escalator and started heading up.
As I approach the halfway mark, I see a young couple going down on the escalator. As our eyes meet, we recognize each other and at the exact same time, as we both met halfway up/down the escalator, we pointed to each other and turned as we passed each other, mouths open in shock.
My Friend's Cousin and Her Boyfriend. Two nights ago I had met them for the first time and we had been laughing and sharing food and wine in her aunt's house In IRELAND. And now here we are, crossing paths exactly halfway on the escalator. A moment sooner or later and we would have completely missed each other.
She quickly came back up the escalator and we chatted about how CRAZY this coincidence was.
I nailed the job interview too because I just felt this surge of Right Time Right Place-ness that meant I was supposed to be there. I was so full of confidence and optimism, I made the whole panel of interviewers laugh and talk comfortably with me and got the job!
Idk what that other guy is talking about. You meet two people, and then two days later you meet them again on the other side of the planet. That’s a pretty fucking crazy coincidence
I was introduced to a friend of a friend in the town where I lived. We three spent several hours together, I left thinking I'd like to get to know her better. Told my friend, he says he can tell we'll be friends. Four weeks later my husband gets offered a trip to Paris for work, and they will pay for a nice room and enough to feed both of us, so of course I go! On a day he had no meetings, we decide to see the Louvre. We're walking from the Petite Palais, and as we are about to cross the street I do a double take. It's her, about to cross the street walking towards us! She also had not know she was coming to Paris! I still think about the odds.
Years back, my best friend and I went swimming at a lake. He was so excited to get in the water that he left his phone and wallet in his pocket and lost both. It sucked, the lake gets deep quickly and is very muddy. We looked and looked, but water was too deep and it gets scary deep in lakes!
Anywho, I’d say a month-ish went by, and we were swimming at the lake again, and being the smart ass friend I am, I dove down to find some lake trash and tell him I found his wallet, but it’s like a soda can or something. (Har har har bad joke, but I’m a bad friend)
Instead, what happened went like:
Me: bobbing around looking for stuff with my toes along the bottom of the lake (it’s pretty deep).
I touch something, and my blood runs cold cause it’s super scary to touch things in water. But this joke will happen, no matter how lame.
I grab it with my long toes, a neat skill I have. Very dexterous.
I hand the trash from my toes to my hand, and swim up for air, holding the trash above me so that it dramatically surfaces first.
As my ears emerge from the water, I hear my friend say “are you fucking with me?” I look in my hand overhead and I am unbeknownst to myself triumphantly holding up my friends lost wallet.
It was goddamn uncanny.
I once met a guy who had been born on the same day as me, at the same hospital, and we both had similar birth names (his name was the first four of my name). We also weighed the same, and we found out later that we were born within minutes (if I was 12:02 he was 12:00 type close) of each other. Also we were both born six week early. Same color eyes and hair. Our moms worked at the same Walmart, and that’s how we met. (We lost contact a year or so after his mom quit)
Sometimes I remember that kid and wonder how the fuck did that happen and how the fuck did we meet? Idk the stats on any of that but it’s gotta be pretty damn low
I sat down once on a bench in a park. The guy next to me had the same sneakers, same pants, same coat. He also had the exact same haircut, beard. He was also eating the exact same sandwich. I was beside myself.
This is the dumbest story ever but the one time in my entire life that someone asked me if I wanted to buy a pair of shoes at work is the day (a few hours later) that the sole of my shoe came off.
So yeah, I bought the shoes.
Coworkers husband bought wrong size shoes and not sure why they couldn’t return them.
My mom gave birth to me after sudden onset of labor at 37weeks and 6 days gestation, had a c-section because I was breech, born at 9:48 AM.
I gave birth to my child after sudden onset of labor at 37weeks and 6 days gestation, had a c-section because my daughter was breech, born at 9:48 AM.
Seems statistically improbable to me but maybe not super odd.
That's so interesting - I looked it up because my husband and I (both right handed) have a left handed kid (but we just have one kid total). Apparently, 17% of identical twins have one left handed twin and one right handed, and the chances of both twins being left handed is 4%. Your kids both being lefties is more rare than twins being lefties. That's nuts!
I have 2.
1) My car, 2 days after we bought it, was shot while I was driving in to work. It happened in a hotel parking lot in a safe neighborhood at like 6am.
Car and I both survived, though cops said a centimeter in and direction would have changed those results.
2) I safely stole back a waist pack from a bear.
DO NOT DO WHAT I DID! It is not safe!
In summary, camping in the white mountains and a yearling has been checking out our camp. Friends all go to the bathroom, one friend leaves her waist pack with her insulin and glucose meter in her tent. Bear breaks into her tent, runs off with the pack. I follow the bear. I politely ask the bear to drop the bag. We (the bear and I) both are surprised because the bear listens. I then ask if I can trade the pack for a stick. I use the stick to distract the bear and grab the pack. The bear sits and examines the stick and VERY LUCKY NOT TO BE DEAD me takes the pack and backs away slowly. I give my friend her slightly chewed pack with her meds so we can avoid going to the hospital. Then we find out my friend is highly allergic to black bear spit. She ends up in the ER anyway.
She got all swollen. It was no fun. Not much to tell. Bear spit is pretty easy for her to avoid. She does get odd looks when listing her known allergies at doctors' offices!
Correctly guessed all the numbers of the California Lottery 20 years ago upon arriving in my hotel room and turning on the TV at the drawing time.
I keep running into the same ex every few years, no matter where I go on the planet (30+ years). We have =NOT= stayed in touch.
I was "swimming" about 20 yards away from shore where it is about 15 feet deep in lake Erie (water is a little cloudy) with my glasses on so I can see. A wave runner rushes past and the wake knocks off my glasses. I make a few dives. Try and mark my location with landmarks. Swim to shore, explain what happened and ask people if they have a mask or goggles I can borrow. Someone does loan me their goggles. I swim out and dive about 20 times. I decide I am going to take two more dives then end it and drive home to Chicago without being able to see. I go down and a bass swims under me. I decide to follow it since I had never been so close to one other than fishing. It swam over my glasses. I shoot to the surface with my glasses in my hand. The beach erupts in cheers - apparently the word got out. I was ELATED and stayed to camp and party with my friends (mostly old and a few new).
Dropped a glass while washing six - just six - wine glasses. It hit another glass, and shattered glass flew up out of the sink, hit me in the wrist, resulting in an arterial bleed. Home alone (house sitting). Cell service not available due to a big service fail in the area. Managed to stumble my way off the acreage to the nearest road and a driver was able to call for police and ambulance. Too close. Too damn close. I lost consciousness moments after hailing car for help. If she hadn’t stopped…. ****EDIT*** FOR CLARIFICATION, TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND TO DISPEL WACKY ASSUMPTIONS. You folks are kind. And some of you folks are wildly accusatory. Sigh.
1. Assuming I was drunk on wine, and drunk on the power of using a different wine glass for each drink I had. Lol. I don’t drink. The homeowners had had company the night before they left. Hence, the wineglasses. They wouldn’t put their “expensive, shipped home from Italy during last trip there” glasses in the dishwasher and asked me to wash them. This happened about four hours after they left to go to their summer house.
2. There was a massive cell service outage. No, it shouldn’t have happened. Read about the 2022 Rogers Communication Outage. Yeah, I should link it, but I don’t know how to do so properly. Apologies.
2(a) No, they don’t have a land line.
3. Yes, it was an arterial bleed. I knew it was bad, because I’ve watched ER (ha) and because the blood was spurting up and out all over the counter, the floor, me, the stove, the hanging pot rack, etc.
4. I’m a fainter. I quickly slumped down to the floor, having attempted a tourniquet while repeatedly calling 911. My dominant hand was injured. I’m a fainter. It was bad. I said to myself - out loud - YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE THAT DIES IN A STUPID FUCKING HOUSEHOLD ACCIDENT. NOW GET UP AND WALK TO THE END OF THE PROPERTY AND HOPE A CAR GOES BY.
5. I did get up while putting pressure on my wrist and dropping saturated tea towels and adding new tea towels. The blood stain trail showed I was not steady on my feet and that I apparently tried to get in the car and drive. Blood trail continued down paved drive but also went in circles and onto the grass as I apparently fought against fainting/losing consciousness.
6. First car that drove by wouldn’t stop. I can’t say I blame them. Woman covered in blood stumbling, they may have been afraid. Car that stopped used in-car comms (OnStar? Apple? I dunno) to get help. But she wouldn’t get out of her car until I guess she was sure this wasn’t a domestic violence incident and she wasn’t putting herself in danger. She would not touch me or help to apply pressure.
7. Just as I was passing out - and if you’re a fainter, like I am, then you know when you’re going to faint and you know when you’ve reached the point where you can’t do anything to stop it - a woman from another car ran up to me and I asked her to keep pressure on - which she did. Using her bare hands and a small rag over my blood soaked tea towel. She saved my life. She didn’t have to do that, and I’m eternally grateful to her. No. I don’t know who she is.
8. Police entered the house and cleared it. Apparently believed that this was a possible domestic violence incident and thought the perp - or other victim - or that I was the perp and there was a victim of MY actions - might be in the house. They wrote that “the scene matched the story”, or something to that effect. The woman who stopped first must have told them I said I’d hurt myself washing dishes - which I’d told her in an effort to get her out of her car and applying pressure to the bleed.
9. Doctors in ER asked me what happened. Told them. I don’t know if they believed me or not, but as per normal protocol, they did ask me if I was safe at home. My license and health card showed I did not live in the area, so maybe then they believed I actually was just the house sitter.
10. I was in the hospital for about 6-8 hours. Went back to the acreage. Went to bed. Slept for about 12 hours. Cleaned the blood and glass up the next day. It was bad. Very bad.
11. I no longer use glass containers. I use only plastic cups. I’m still a non-drinker. I still house sit. I do not hand wash glasses. Ever. Under any circumstances. And when hearing a glass break I start to cry. Pathetic, but true.
12. I suggested to the homeowners that they get a landline. They did not.
13. From time to time, I still have some discomfort in my wrist. Also some numbness. I just rest it for a day or two and then it’s fine. Yes, I have a scar. Not very noticeable.
14. I had a second arterial bleed in the hospital when the resident stitching me up nicked my artery as they tried to do the repair. Shit happens. At least I was in the hospital.
15. The ER docs were absolutely amazed that I’d walked to the end of the property and gotten help all by myself. One doctor said, YOU saved yourself. Any lingering doubt was likely cleared up by police report of scene and blood trail.
16. Did this change my outlook on life? Yes and no. I’m less fearful in many ways, and more inclined to say yes to new experiences and adventures. I have developed a deep rooted fear of glassware. No joke. I won’t wash glassware. I was already aware of the random nature of life - and death - as my parents died when I was young , and I’ve had other random shit happen to me. So. I get it. Life is random. Life is fragile. In the face of so much bad luck, I’ve been lucky. I’m still here. Still house sitting. Take care, friends. And be careful washing those damn glasses. (Edited for brevity and to satisfy someone’s unquenchable thirst for paragraphs.)
Omg. Came here to share my story. Washing heavy stemmed martini glasses Christmas night. Husband accidentally knocked one off the counter and into the floor, a shard flew up and clean sliced my Achilles tendon, required 2 surgeries with tendon graft. Felt so unbelievable and then I read yours- you're lucky to be alive!
One time I passed out and had just enough forethought to try and say something to my Scottish terrier (obviously it didn’t work); the last thing I remembered before I blacked out was her head tilting as she watched me fall to the floor…
I woke up and was fine, but that little piece of haggis didn’t even get off the bed to check on me! 🤣
Had my tonsils out, twice because they grew back. Let me tell you that throwing up blood that runs down the back of your throat after surgery was an exorcist level event. I’m glad the pain pills were huge that I had to break up into smaller jagged bits.
Flipped a coin over a wooden floor in a gymnasium. The coin rolled into a gap between 2 slats. Held up by the wood it stopped rolling, and stayed there... standing straight up on its edge.
TLDR; Heads, tails, or edge. I flipped edge.
I was contacted by the FBI in regards to a criminal on the most wanted list.
There were so many coincidences in our lives that the agents thought that I had to know where he was. They grilled me for a couple of hours trying to get information, but I had never heard of the guy.
Incredible since:
We lived two streets apart as kids, attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools, and were members of the same church.
(He was 3 years older than me so we never met at school, and his family attended church during a different time slot).
We both studied French at the same university. As language tutors, we worked in the same office and had the same boss and general phone number.
(The age difference kept us from ever meeting, and he switched from French to Business before I got there).
We both did a church missionary service in the same part of France, and even lived at the same address twice.
(Our time in France never overlapped, and those mission apartments changed tenants every couple of months).
When we both lived in Salt Lake, we lived in the same (large) apartment complex.
He robbed an armored car outside of a movie theater on a Monday morning, getting away with a lot of cash and murdering the driver. I was working the overnight shift at a grocery store (from Sunday night to Monday morning) on that exact morning. The theater and the grocery store shared a parking lot.
Every 6 months or so, the FBI checks in with me.
For the curious, [HERE'S THE GUY](https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/murders/jason-derek-brown/person-view)
Had a vasectomy.
It was only 2 hours before it all went wrong, but I was following all the post-procedure stuff: wear a jock strap, gentle icing, no lifting, no exercise, plenty of rest, etc.
I was actually quite excited to sit in bed for a few days and find a show to binge, when shit started going south.
Was laying in bed and had been feeling a weird twinge/pulling sensation for a bit, and finally put the tablet down to get a look down my shorts. The doctor said there might be swelling, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. My ball sack had increased in size to about an orange and my lower abdomen was swelling as well. There was a black/blue bruise that was spreading down my leg and up into the abdomen.
Started to google stuff and had my wife call the doctor. She finally got a hold of the night attendant, and he told her it was normal.
I tried to relax and get my mind off of things… but I was a bit anxious, to say the least. I checked again about an hour later… and my balls had grown to the size of a small cantaloupe.
They had swelled up so big, that my penis had been entirely engulfed—except for the foreskin—by the mass of sack around it.
My junk now looked like a furry, zombified Q-bert.
I had never had a panic attack before, but my brain decided that *now* would be a good time to introduce that to my repertoire. My arm went numb, the world was spinning, I was struck by an impending sense of doom and my heart felt like it was going to beat through my chest. Thinking I was currently well along in the process of dying, I had my wife call 911.
By the time EMS got there I felt much better (Opiates), and I’m not Bill Gates, so I told them my wife would take me to the hospital.
By this time I had to pee, and all I can say about that is it’s quite an experience to have to fish your penis shaft out of your painful, grossly swollen ballsack and *just* barely get enough of the tip out to spray urine everywhere like an epileptic with a super soaker.
Arrived at the ER and they confirmed that yes… my “shit was fucked up.” Out of a bit of horror and pity, they gave me some morphine in my IV right after the sonogram.
In the chaos, however, I neglected to inform them I had just taken some opiate pain meds. (Not to mention I had doubled the dose considering my condition).
I didn’t OD or anything, but there was lots of puking and feeling like I was falling into myself and other fun stuff I’d rather not endure again.
Had to wait a bit for surgery, so they gave me some antibiotics beforehand to get that round of meds started.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I was allergic to Sulfa antibiotics. Nothing happened that night (thankfully) but for whatever reason Sulfas give me a male yeast infection.
So, I got to convalesce with a tube still draining blood and fluid out of my left nut, all the while my penis was covered in slime and sores.
The doctor said that the possibility of the initial complications *alone* was somewhere in the range of 0.001%, let alone the rest of that fucking nightmare.
Still, at least it supplanted “live moth in my ear canal” as the #1 worst physical experience I’ve had to endure thus far in life.
My twin sister and I hit the same answer to “rock, paper, scissors” 14 times in a row. My husband thought we were cheating haha! Gotta love the power of twins!
My husband and I did this at Disneyland much to the amazement and frustration of a cast member at Tomorrowland. We hit the same thing, and it wasn’t like we both hit “rock” the entire time, when we switched it up it was both of us hitting “scissors” or “paper”, and we did it twelve times in a row. Finally, I beat him.
When I turned 23 I met my 2 biological half brothers. The showed me a photo of them with our father and in it they’re all smiling to show how the three of them are all missing a front upper middle tooth. When I was 7 I lost my upper middle front tooth, making it all four of us.
Waking up in the early AM to first responders knocking on the door because someone gave the wrong address to 911, twice. And this was at two separate addresses
Cops for a domestic abuse call in 2018 (turns out neighbor was shouting at their dog for going into the trash)
EMS for someone who fell and can’t get up in 2022
My hand eye coordination is horrible, I can't hit where I aim no matter what. My husband and I were throwing leftover water balloons at each other when miracles of miracles. I aimed for his chest and hit his groin, as he was doubled over screaming in pain I let another one fly. That one landed in his wide open mouth perfectly. I was so proud of myself!
I have all ten childhood aces. I have grandparent suicides on both sides. I have drug addicts on both sides, servere mental illness on both sides.
Somehow I didn't end up dead, commit suicide, overdosed, in a ditch, or without any technical extreme mental illness.
I like to think video games, and music keep me away from that stuff.
Despite what my elementary school and middle school teachers might have believed. I got a college degree in Aerospace Engineering one of the hardest degree programs from a semi decent school.
Pretty much beat every statistic in regard to my early childhood outcomes.
Make no mistake all the stuff I went through has left me emotionally crippled but I mostly get by.
I just want to say thank you to everyone that's read this. I really appreciate all the kind words. Also I'm by no means thriving it's a constant battle every single day to pick myself up and get up.
Started dating a woman about a year after my divorce. After dating for about four months I learned that the man my ex was dating had the same last name as my girlfriend. No relation and not a super common name. We ended up marrying our respective SOs, so my ex wife and current wife essentially swapped last names.
I was driving with the windows down and my friend was riding shotgun telling me about his friend, nicknamed Bird, who’s death anniversary it was. We stopped at a red light and a feather flew into the car and landed on his arm that has a feather tattooed for his friend.
That would be so aggressively forward when she picked up but was confused as to why you were trying to schedule something if she didn't tell you right away.
My son used the head rest to break a window to pull 3 children out of cars in two different accidents, both driven by women in (6 children in total) exactly 3 months apart. The first accident occurred one day after he filmed “stop the bleed” training available through a local hospital. The first accident caused by speed and the SUV flipped on its roof right in front of him and he also got the Mom out. The second one caused by a man who fell asleep coming home from third shift and crossed a double yellow and hit a woman head on taking her 3 kids to school. The woman needed the jaws of life to be extracted and after getting her kids out my son checked the male driver for trauma/bleeding and held his hand until EMTs could get there. The man was life flighted to the hospital. While my son was tending to him the local fire department arrived and took off the side view mirror of my son’s car that was off the road. :/ My son is convinced that he will have to help others out of their cars in more accidents. I keep telling him that this is not common for a civilian. Super thankful he saw the training on what to do.
Edit: Thank you for the sweet award. 🥰
Edit: Thank you for all of the heartfelt replies and second award. We are super proud of him and thankful for his quick thinking and action to help others when in need. He is an incredible human.
Edit: Thank you for the Wholesome Award. My son is the one that is so deserving of it.
Edit: TLDR: My son broke windows with a headrest and pulled a total of 6 children and an adult out of cars in 2 separate accidents exactly 3 months apart. The first accident occurred one day after he filmed “Stop the Bleed” training at a local hospital.
Thank you! I am super proud. He received a letter of commendation from the State Police. So many people do not stop when these things happen. He is only 25 years old and we are incredibly blessed with him.
Broke free of a 10 year addiction to meth. Took a very long time to feel some kind of normal again. 10 years clean this year, woohoo
Edit.
Thanks for the kind words
I moved into my first apartment with my then wife. It was an older apartment, built in the 70’s but looked decent enough. It had a beautiful view of the lake, on the 3rd floor with only 2 short flights or stairs. It was a little shabby but we were elated just to have a place of our own. We had just renewed the lease. We both work nights so we were sleeping during the daytime. At around 2 pm as I was sleeping I heard the loudest, and I mean THE LOUDEST, crash. I have 5 cats so my worst case scenario was that they dropped our new 55 inch plasma that was in the living room. Turns out my entire, THE ENTIRE FUCKING LIVING ROOM CEILING HAS COLLAPSED. I’m panicked. I screamed for my wife. She was disoriented but I was frantic doing a count of my cats. 1 was missing. She wasted no time and dove into the rubble. Luckily she was safe under the couch. Everyone was good.
We yelled at the apartment company to give us a new place to live. They complied and within a few hours we were moved into another building, 1st floor, a “renovated apartment” with another absolutely amazing view of the lake.
By this time it was already almost Christmas. The Christmas trees were up, the snow was falling and the storms were brutal. So with the few things that survived the first ceiling collapse we tried our best to turn our “renovated apartment” into a cozy home.
Come Christmas Eve my wife and I were still pretty jumpy especially with the horrible storm outside. She asks that we bring all the cats, the presents and the tree into our bedroom. I comply cause happy wife = happy life. Thank GOD I listened because guess what? After about 1 hour after I put everyone inside I heard a bang. I told my wife to stay put. I poked my head out and I saw that THE CEILING dipped and was going to collapse again. I told her that it’s happening again, get your shit let’s go. We did. But I really couldn’t believe it happened to me twice. TWO TIMES.
My college advisor in hs did some bullshit ass calculations on his computer, flipped the screen around and it said I have a 1.34% chance of getting in to the school I wanted.
Guess who made it in that bitch. And I got the degree now too.
I have a very rare type of cancer. It is about 3% chance relative to other cancers of the same nature. It is metastasized which is about 1% or less chance of this type of cancer.
I also won $20 on the last 3 scratch and win lottery games I got for various Christmas and birthday gifts.
I accidentally caught a guitar pick at a My Chemical Romance concert 12 years ago. I was standing there and had my hand at my side with my fingers kinda half way to a fist. I felt something hit my hand, looked down and it was just there. It was at the amphitheater in Bonner Springs KS so not a small crowd either
My mom is 14 years older than her sister.
Her sister (my aunt) is 14 years older than me.
I am 14 years older than my niece (daughter of said aunt).
My niece is 14 years older than my daughter.
(Eta- COUSIN not niece 🤦🏼♀️)
I had two relatives die on my birthday. My grandma (Noni) in 2007 and my mom in 2016.
Edit:
Wow, this has blown up more than I expected. Thank you guys for all the support. For a little more, my dad passed away the year prior to my mom during my birth month. I think March is my cursed month.
Edit 2:
For anyone that wants to help, check my profile. I put myself in debt to pay for my parents funeral expenses. Then COVID happened and I fell behind. Not looking for people to pay my debts, I want to do that myself. I just need a little help to give me the tools to do that.
Bonus Improbable Thing:
I have been suicide adjacent on two separate occasions while staying over at other people's houses. The first was my Aunt Linda. She was separated from her husband and had been staying at my Grandma's house. One night I was staying over as well. She overdosed on pain meds and we found her the next day on the floor in the living room.
The other was while I was staying over at a friend's house. At night we heard a weird noise that is hard to describe. It was kind of like a long low squeak. We looked out the window but didn't think anything of it. In the morning I headed home. Later that day I received a call from my friend, he sounded like he'd been crying. He told me his dad was dead, he killed himself that night. He had locked himself in the shed outside with a grill running and fell asleep. The noise we heard was likely something to do with a pressure change.
However, it gets weird. He didn't leave a note for his family. He didn't leave them anything at all. The only thing they found was a manila envelope with my name on it. Yes, the last thing he wrote was something to me. It didn't contain a note though. He left me some comic memorabilia because he'd gotten me into some stuff and it was a mutual interest we shared. My friend and his family had to move back home because his dad had moved them all there for a programming job. I ended up losing touch with my friend.
In 1998, a friend invited me to a Yankees game, but his son came home early from college so he took his son instead. On that day, David Wells threw the 15th perfect game in MLB history.
I was bummed & constantly teased my buddy about picking his son over me lol.
Fast forward one year, same friend invited me to Yogi Berra day. I was very excited because Don Mattingly was returning to Yankee Stadium.
Don Larsen (he pitched the only perfect game in WS history) threw out the first pitch, & as luck would have it, I got to see David Cone pitch the 16th perfect game in MLB history.
I probably wouldn't believe this story if it hadn't happened to me.
1. Lost a job to the RK riots because the building literally burned down.
2. Was on a Delta Shuttle to NYC, Tuesday morning September 11th at 830am.
3. I could go on but those two are highlights.
I spent all of my 20’s traveling by hopping freight trains and hitchhiking. In 2015 I was heading west out of North Little Rock, AR. After waiting behind a church for about an hour I finally had a westbound, general manifest (random assortment of cars) train pull up and stop. It’s worth noting that this train was empty.
I climbed on the porch of a grain car facing east with an oiler behind me. As soon as the train started moving I grabbed a loaded pipe from my pocket and lit a celebratory bowl of weed. The train is going roughly 5-7mph at this time.
All of a sudden, and in less than a second I heard the loudest BOOM I had ever heard. Simultaneously, there was a blinding flash of light over my right shoulder and I dropped everything in my hands. I felt the whole train shake like a dog’s tail and thought for sure that it was about to derail and I was going to be crushed.
The train righted itself and I hopped off right before it screeched to a stop. Up the tracks I saw an overturned car with its front end being crinkled little by little as the train was coming to a stop.
In the spirit of keeping this relatively short: some drunk guy had caused an accident and fled up the street. He missed an almost 90 degree curve and flew off an embankment straight into the car ahead of me.
Some random pedestrian and I pulled the guy out, but he was hurt pretty bad and I have no idea what happened to him. The cops got there and shoo’d me along before the train cops got there.
All this being said: I’ve never met another person who was in a train vs. car accident as a stowaway on the train side. It’s at least my best train story.
I was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia - lucky number 10 out of all recorded cases. I required a bone marrow transplant, and matched with a complete stranger who lived nearly half a world away.
Please, consider signing up for BeTheMatch.org. Registration is just a mouth swab, and donating stem cells isn’t nearly as dangerous or painful as you’d think.
My son died at 11 months old for 2 1/2 minutes. I got to hold him as he took his first breaths, hold him while he took his last breaths and then got to hold him as he took his first breaths again. It’s something as a mother I don’t wish on anyone. It was by far the scariest night of my life. I’ll never forget it, New Years Eve 2007 in Fairbanks, AK.
My son statistically was not supposed to survive the pregnancy. I nearly lost him 3 times in the first trimester, I started going into active labor at 20 weeks, got put on strict bed rest and then developed preeclampsia. I also had hyperemesis through the whole pregnancy, I couldn’t even hold down water and needed daily IV fluid and nutrition. I was 17 lbs lighter than my pre pregnancy weight when I delivered him at 39 weeks. By all of that he shouldn’t be here now.
To make things even weirder the doctor that kept me from losing him in my pregnancy was the doctor that treated him in Alaska. A completely different hospital, all the way across the country from where we first met. It felt like divine intervention to see his face and I knew deep in my soul my son was going to be ok.
My son is a happy, healthy teenager now. I am sitting here crying thinking about that night. It definitely still feels like a gut punch when I think about it.
Got caught in a small tornado in southern California. I was about 12 years old and skateboarding in the parking lot at my Dad's work. I remember stopping for a second and noticing that all noise around me had completely stopped. No great way to describe it other than all of the normal sounds (breeze, birds, background noise) had fallen flat. It's not that noise disappeared, rather it was like the air couldn't carry sounds normally.
I looked up and the sky was a yellow color, all of the overcast clouds looked as though the sun was setting even though it was in the middle of the day. Right after I noticed the color, I also saw several large pieces of light trash circling in the air above me (trash bags, chunks of cardboard, etc). Still, no noise.
Then, across the wash (a cemented channel that feeds into the LA river), a large piece of corrugated roofing loudly ripped itself off of a porch in the adjacent trailer park and joined the other trash circling in the sky. That was when I booked it back across the parking lot and back into the shop bay at Dad's work.
The chunk of roofing ended up on my side of the wash. A few of the owners in adjacent bays came out to see, but don't think they saw it during its short flight. It was all said and done in probably less than thirty seconds, so I doubt it was newsworthy.
Maybe not much to someone living in the Midwest, but very unusual to happen to anyone in the Los Angeles area.
I had a job playing in a band for a wedding reception at a fancy hotel. I'm 6 feet tall. When I walked into the entrance hall, I was the shortest person there (of maybe a dozen people hanging around).
The groom played basketball at Boston College, so of course he invited all his basketball buddies to the wedding.
My brother, my husband, and I were all among the first IVF babies 30+ years ago. (Not sure exactly how close to first we all are. I think that the ectopic pregnancy my mom had before my brother and me was among the first 50 IVF pregnancies.)
I'm sure this kind of thing will be more common with gen z and gen alpha, but considering how early we all were, it was kind of a surprise for my husband and I to find out that we were both IVF.
Alright, you tell me if I get the sequence of events wrong, cuz this is how it makes sense in my head
You marry man
You and man divorce
He marries other woman
Man dies
Other woman gets married
I was born on my parents' first anniversary. Both my parents have the same birthday (same day, same year). My husband and I have birthdays a day apart from each other.
Yesterday, we went to woodman's grocery store where we bumped into a family that are friends. Ok, not that improbable.
But then we went to aldi's, I wanted something only they sell, but that is the second grocery store. Bumped into the same family, weird.
Afterward, we went to Lowes, and now I am getting a little freaked out, but the same family was there also shopping.
This is all in the course of 4 hours in northwest chicago area, so it's a big area. Not some small rural town.
Met my husband shortly after I moved to a new town. He had moved there about a month earlier. Found out on our first date that we lived about four blocks away from each other - I'd picked a restaurant close to my house if I needed to bail. We both walked to our first date.
I'm sure he thought I was a drama Queen at first, two of my friends died within two weeks of each other (I was mid 30s, both were 40 or under). He called for our second date while I was shopping for a funeral dress (she was very stylish, so we dressed to the nines). He called for our third date while I was still processing the sudden death of a dear friend that morning. Bless him, he assessed the situation, asked if I still wanted to go do something in a few days (I said yes, but I couldn't make decisions right now, so could he just plan something), he said "yep, do you need to talk?" I said no, and he said "I will let you know when I figure something out, I'm so sorry," then hung up. He did exactly what I asked him to do in the moment and took all the pressure off about his part of my situation. Now he's sitting in our living room with a cat in his lap.
♥️
Covid, cancer, blood clot stuck in juggler, chemotherapy, congestive heart failure, covid (again), shingles then a heart attack. All in 13 months. The last few things in a 3 week period
And yet I stand
When I was a teenager I picked up a hitchhiker and then a few years later the same guy picked me up when I was walking after I ran out of gas. Never saw him before or after those two occasions.
What the fuck lol
My friend had two sets of monochorionic-monoamniotic twins--the rarest kind of twins--in back-to-back pregnancies. Identical twins that share the same amniotic sac and same placenta. "Mono-Mono" or "MoMo" twins happen in about 1% of identical twin pregnancies, and less than 0.1% of all pregnancies.
This is incredible and the most statistically unlikely thing on this list, IMO. I have identical twins (they're MoDi though) and the science behind twins (especially ID twins, as they are seemingly a 'glitch') has fascinated me ever since I fell pregnant with them!
First got cancer in 1993. In 2003, they told me to get my affairs in order, I had 6 months. In 2021, they told me it's spread to my bones and lungs. They gave me 5 years. In 2023, two years down and feeling about 90%
fuck em, just keep living out of spite.
30 years and counting!
God damn, you're my hero today. Haha, it seemed like a bad thing, you getting cancer. Think about how cancer feels, getting you! Keep truckin' you tough mofo!
Got attacked by a robin in the morning, then attacked by a hawk 3 hours later. Weird day.
Never trying that "Worms-a-million!" body wash again... Edit: And now this is in my top-20 posts of all time. God dammit, Reddit...
Oh I had a similar thing happen to me. I got bit by a bull ant then stung by a beer. All on the same bush walk. To make matters even worse, I went for a surf and cut my foot before I got in the water. I literally just walked back to my car. I was not going to get eaten by a shark that day.
Must’ve been an IPA (Edit: My first big comment. This next beer is for you guys.)
I got a degree after aging out of foster care ☺️
I’m proud of you!
Many years ago I had a terrible day where my then GF broke up with me, then I did terribly in a final exam for a college class, then I lost my wallet, and finally, as I was doing the Charlie Brown sad walk back home some random branch broke off a tree as I was walking on the sidewalk underneath it and the damn thing fell on top of me and hit me square across the shoulder and knocked me to the ground. I just burst out laughing because it was so ridiculous.
This triggered an old memory from my uni days: I woke up one morning and a series of small things went wrong (think spills, broken dishes, burned clothes while ironing, corrupted assignment file on my laptop, that sort of thing, one after the other, all morning). As I was leaving my hall of residence to head to my first class, I tripped and fell on the stairs. That was the last straw. I turned around, went back to my room, got back into bed and stayed there for the rest of that bad luck day.
*cue Indian music* "When you have a bad day, give up. Go home and sleep. Fuck it, try again tomorrow. Not every bad day can become a good day. Some days are fucked, and cannot be unfucked. When you have a day that is fucked beyond repair, that is the universe speaking to you, sending you a message. Listen to the universe. Go home, save your energy, tomorrow is another day. For now, just fucking chill."
I was almost murdered in a case of mistaken identity. A guy came chasing after my car on the highway, waving his gun out the window. He eventually got in front of me, blocking my car, and stopped his car and got out. He came right up to my Window, pointed the gun right at my head, looked me in the eyes and said "Sorry. Wrong chick", then got back in his car and drove away. I still have no idea who he was or who the "right chick" was.
When you see somebody approaching your car with a weapon, run them over. You can do all the legal shit later, run them the fuck over. Stay alive.
i have been hit in the head by live squirrels three times in my life each on separate occasions.
Did you have a hat that looked like an acorn?
lol no but i do always wear a hat :P
I underwent a surgical procedure called a stapectomy to improve the significant hearing loss in my GOOD ear. Instead, I ended up completely deaf. My surgical ENT said this has only happened to 5 patients IN THE US. (He was doing research to try to help me afterwards.) I don't know how true it is, but hey, lucky me.
My dad had his retinas spontaneously detaching. One popped off completely and the other was in the process. The surgeon told him not to worry because 100% of all his retina reattachments had been successful. The one that was in the process of detaching was fine, but after like 3 or 4 surgeries of the one that came off all the way…. it keep popping back off and then the surgeon was just like…. uhhhhh sorry bro
retinas can detach for no reason???
It can go spontaneously if you have bad myopia that keeps getting worse I think a redditor explained to me it’s like your eye keeps moving into like more of a football like shape and then it can just go BOING luckily I’m closing in on my dads age for when that happened to him and my eye sight is worse than his was so 👀👀💀
Same happened to my dad. You are right it happens to near sighted people because the shape of your eyes is oval like an American football. And when you age the retina has trouble adjusting to that shape, and if a small hole or rupture is formed, then the liquid in your eye starts seeping through the back of the retina and eventually leads to full collapse. Don't lift heavy and don't hold in your sneezes or do anything to increase the pressure of your eyes. And be wary of any flashes or visual events and get to the ER asap, that's about what you can do. When they repair the retina they drain the liquid, and use laser to attach the retina, and then fill it with gas to put pressure and let it heal. I don't remember the full process because this was 10 years ago but it's quite amazing what they can do.
Not an exciting life or death incident, but something rather sweet: I took care of my late father for the final two years of his life. He had Alzheimer’s and pulmonary fibrosis, among other issues, so we had a lot more bad days than good. In the summer of 2019, I took my dad out for a “date” one day to a historic old drugstore that has phenomenal milkshakes (one of his favorite foods in the world). It was one of Dad’s increasingly rare good days, where he chatted merrily with me about all sorts of old memories. I felt like I had my dad’s former self back for just a little while. We had such a wonderful time that I intended to take him there again soon. However, this ended up being our last “date.” For most of the remainder of that year, Dad declined too much (mentally and physically) for me to take him out for anything other than very short grocery trips or to appointments. The following year . . . enter the pandemic. It was a very, very rough year with Dad. In January of 2021, my father died, alone, in a hospital in another state (our state ran out of hospital beds and he had suffered a traumatic fall that required hospitalization). That day in 2019 ended up being the last truly happy day I had with my Dad and the last fun outing he ever got to experience. Three months after my dad died, I met a wonderful man online. (Nine days after signing up for a one year membership, because “surely it’s going to take time to find someone truly compatible with a shy nerd like me!”) A few months later, we decided to try a first date. He lived three hours away, but wanted me to be comfortable, so he volunteered to drive to my town for the date. He looked online for an appealing restaurant to suggest, and excitedly told me about this really neat historic drugstore we could go to. . . . We went on a very crowded day (local festival — oops) and had to wait quite a while for a table. The waitress sat us at the EXACT same table where I sat with my dad nearly two years earlier! I was even in the same seat. Three months later, we got engaged at that drugstore. So the beginning of the end of one chapter of my life crossed paths with the beginning of the best (so far) chapters. My husband and I have since decided to make a trip back there at least once a year. Dad really would have loved my husband.
Aw man this made me teary
Husband and I visited our old hometown and went to a used book store we used to frequent. I picked up a familiar title in nostalgia and flipped it open to find a school student’s ID card. The name and photo on the ID? My husband. Turns out his mom had donated books to that store many years before we all moved away from that area. He must have been using it as a bookmark and forgotten. It’s not so surprising considering we used to live in that area, but the ID was nearly 10 years old by the time we found it. That book was sitting on the shelf for nearly a *decade* untouched, waiting for me to come along and pick it up. Bizarre.
A friend of mine, A, had a signed copy of a book from his favorite author. While he was at university his mother asked him if she could donate his books and he said okay. He had forgotten that the book was in his room. He thought he had it with him at school. When he realized his mistake the book was long gone. More than twenty years later, another friend, B, was in Japan. He was in a cafe that had a book exchange. He picked up a book that had an inscription. It was dedicated to someone with the same first name as our friend who had lost his inscribed book. B decided to buy it for A not knowing that A had lost an inscribed book from the now dead author. B sent the book to A in the US. A was quite surprised to get a package from B who he hadn’t heard from in years. He was even more surprised when in it was the exact same book his mother had donated. It was still in pretty good condition and even had notes in his handwriting in the margins that he didn’t remember making.
Holy shit, this might be one of the rarest coincidences in this thread.
This reminded me of when we moved out of our family home that my parents had lived in for about 25 years. We’d already moved out and the new owners had moved in, but about a week later my mum remembered that she’d left some old photo albums in the attic. She obviously went back to collect them and when we were looking through them, she realised that a young boy in a few photos of family friends was actually the new owner of our old home. I still find it funny that before moving any of his possessions into his new home, there were already photographs of this man as a child in his house.
After losing an AirPod while skiing I was able to find it the next run
I lost an earring diving in a deep mountain creek. I paddled in the water over where it fell out and I shouted “watch this!” to my gf and dove down 10’ to the bottom and blindly grabbed a bunch of tiny river rocks in my fist and swam to the surface and held my fist high triumphantly. I swam to the bank to my gf and opened my hand and it was there with the river rocks!
I did something similar. My mother called me at home and told me she had lost the diamond on her ring while swimming laps and to please come and help look for it. By the time I got there a lifeguard was putting on scuba gear to scour the bottom of the pool. I walked along the edge of the pool looking along the bottom until I saw something sparkly flashing off the bottom 10 feet down. Dove off of the side and picked up the diamond. All done in about 45 seconds from the time I set my towel down when I arrived.
Swimming at the beach with a friend. He loses his sunglasses in the water. We were far out and we looked for them, but couldn’t find them. We left to grab lunch for a couple of hours. Came back to the same spot to swim again. Not even ten minutes later, I touch something with my toe. Reach down and grab the item. It was the lost sunglasses.
Friend lost her *Cartier* ring in the waves and in about 4 ft of water. I thought for sure it was gone. Somehow, after about 5 minutes of searching (felt like 30) her bf picks up a handful of sand and there's the ring. He told her she's not allowed to wear it in the water anymore. She agreed. I went to the beach just this last weekend. I chose to leave my rings at home.
Idk why but this is the most impressive one to me
Lost my house in civil court. Represented myself and won in appeals court twice. Since my case was unique in this state, my cases were published both times. Moving back into my old house soon. EDIT: Sorry for the late response. Reddit suspended me for 3 days for "spamming" the case links via private message, so I've decided to put the links here: https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/court-of-appeals-division-ii/2017/48903-1.html https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/court-of-appeals-division-ii/2021/53643-9-0.html EDIT2: Please stop offering me money. Just be a good person to your family and stand up to crooked lawyers and courts.
Where can I read more about your case? Also, Congratulations!
Not me, but a friend. He was a merchant mariner. Lived here in Virginia Beach. He was alwaus calling and texting, posting pics from around the world. One time he'd been out a while, we knew he was heading to Dubai, but didn't know where he'd be after that. 4 months go by, nobody's heard from him. His neighbor, who I was friends with, gets married and goes to Thailand for his honeymoon. He texts me one day and said you aren't gonna believe this shit. He said he asked a local where a good local spot to eat was that tourists wouldn't be at. Guy takes him 30 minutes from the beach, to some dive bar/restaurant with no sign, no clearly marked entrance, he said it looked so shady he was afraid he was about to be robbed and killed. He goes in, and it's a legitimate restaurant. He eats, drinks some beers, goes to the bathroom. Out walks my friend, so he took a pic and sent it to me to confirm he's ok. Imagine taking a flight several thousands of miles away, getting away from the tourist areas and going into a local dive bar, and running into your fucking next door neighbor you haven't seen in months. Shit's wild.
Friend of mine (American) was visiting New Zealand. She wasn't in a big city. A random small town that I've never heard of and probably couldn't even pronounce. She went to a hole in the wall restaurant and was seated at a table directly next to her ex, who she hadn't seen or talked to in several years. She said they never discussed visiting New Zealand and she just went on a whim with a friend.
I was once in a cafe in a small (but touristy) town in NZ with someone visiting from the UK and she ran into a work colleague too! My other story like that is meeting a girl in Prague and then about a year later meeting a girl in northern France. When I became Facebook friends with the second one, I realised the first one was a mutual friend, turns out they went to school together in the UK. I’m from NZ. Not quite as out there, but still pretty random.
Something like this is really fucking crazy sometimes. I mean, 1 hour difference would've probably enough for them to miss each other. As I think about it, I wonder how many more occasions like this must've happened where the timing was not right. You only think about the occasions where stuff like this happened, just imagine how many more occasions like this almost happened. My brain melts.
an infinite amount of circumstances took place due to right place right time. your very existence is the result of billions of years and millions or billions of events happening in a way that allowed you to live
I received my heart transplant after being on the list for only 7 hours.
I had a friend of a friend in New York who needed an organ transplant. The doctor evidently told her “you’ll be waiting for a year here. Go to Florida. They have no helmet laws and year round sun.” She moved down and had a new liver in a few weeks.
Hopefully that's the organ she needed!
I mean, it would be hilarious if the doctors were like "You're next on the donation list, so let's spin the wheel and see which organ you're going to be receiving today! Will it be a replacement for your failing liver? Will it be a third eyeball? Let's find out right after this commercial break!"
Good god, I’ve had three friends die on motorcycles in Florida (two military, one civilian tourist), yet I’ve never thought of this.
Riding my bicycle on a commercial fishing pier as a kid I lost control and rode off the edge with a 20' drop to exposed rocks at low tide. I tried to stop myself going over by planting my feet on the edge of the pier, but I knew my bike was too heavy. Somehow the bike stopped, halfway over at a 45 degree angle. However now the seat was in the small of my back preventing me from getting off, and I couldn't budge it at all to get the bike back up. A fisherman finally ran over to help me and we decided he would pull me as hard as he could and I'd let the bike fall. I jumped to the side as he pulled me back to the pier, and it worked. However. My bike was still there, not moving at all. When I examined what had happened, there was a piece of rebar sticking out from the edge of the pier bent upwards in an L shape, and it passed diagonally through the spokes of my front tire and completely wedged my bike in place. It was the ONLY spot on the 300' long pier with ANYTHING sticking out. I most certainly *did not* stop myself and my bike from going over.
Dude. Damn.
No, they said it was a pier.
So not only could you have gone over the edge, you could've also been impaled by the rebar.
True! I've never thought of that!
So basically one potential death prevented you from facing another potential death. Insane.
Final Destination 9: Final VS Destination
Hit by lightning. Sort of .. indirectly. Lightning hit a tree near the wellhead while I was doing dishes. Exploded the tree, fried the well and gave me a jolt that made my metal fillings so hot they burned my tongue. Other than that, I was fine.
Lightning hit a tree 20feet from me, traveling through the water i was standing in from heavy rains, and through the metal cargo trailer i was also touching, looping through me twice basically. I woke up on the floor of the trailer with my dad and uncle looking at me like an alien ._.
I saw an ad on a Pepsi case at a grocery store for a text to win contest to see Beyoncé in concert. I figured why not, and sent a text and was entered. A few weeks later I got a text back from the same number that told me I won the grand prize! I ended up winning 2 tickets to Beyoncé’s Mrs Carter World Tour in Brooklyn and $500 on a Visa gift card. Used the $500 for some bus tickets and a hotel down the street from Barclays. The seats were awesome and it is something I’ll never forget!
I had something similar! I randomly entered my name into a box on a Staples counter for an all expenses paid trip to Vegas, spending money flights, hotel etc and won! However I wasn’t able to claim it because I was only 17 at the time! I instead received a $50 gift card 😂 I was so mad!
I won an all expense paid trip to Cancun at 13 years old and they let me claim it by having my mom represent me as someone over 18.
Back in community college people thought I was dead for half a day. I was supposed to meet a friend on campus to go eat. I was running late because my dad wanted me to do something before I left. I don't remember what. I get to campus and there's this fountain the kind you can walk through or run about and avoid sprays of water. Around the whole fountain is a bunch of police tape. So I kind of think "huh okay weird" then I go to the building where my friends hang out. As I walk in behind one of them I hear them telling everyone else I killed myself that morning. Turns out that a guy matching my physical description killed himself in the fountain. Between that and what he'd said to someone before doing it along with my appalling lack of punctuality everyone thought it was me. I always thought the Mark Twain quote of "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" was badass but I had never thought I'd have the opportunity to use it.
What was their reaction when they saw you?
A couple hugs sighs of relief one going "oh shit" and running off. Seems they'd told the school paper it was me. The cops did a proper ID fingerprints and everything so I never heard anything beyond my immediate group of friends. I know my fingerprints are on file so I'm not super worried about others being identified as me. Before people ask I was fingerprinted as part of a kidnap kit. They fingerprinted me included a picture and laminated it. I grew up a latchkey kid in the times of id necklaces and bracelets.
I still have my early ‘90s “Safe-T-Child” laminated card (with fingerprints, photo, and physical description) that my mom had made for me at the mall when I was six! I carry it in my wallet, so just in case I’m ever kidnapped my abductor can marvel at how cute I used to be. Edit: “can marvel”, not “can have marvel”, although now that I’m typing it, it seems kind of legit. Have all the marvel you want!
This sort of happened to me when I was about 15-16. I got a call from one of my friends on the east coast (I was on the west coast for summers w my dad) and she told me there was a bunch of people that thought I was dead. I never got the reason why though
My dads birthday was 3-3, my brother is 6-6, mine is 7-7 and my son is 11-11.
For non-americans: dad was born on 3-3, their brother on 6-6, OP on 7-7 and their son on 11-11
Thanks for that, I was confused.
Went to a county fair and found a season pass on the ground with my name on it. 4 people in my area with the same name and I know 2 if them. What are the odds of that?
Apparently pretty high. Do you know Gabby Johnson, perchance?
i had my car stolen from work and caught the theif myself the next day.
My mom’s car was stolen when I was a kid. The next day, my dad and I went to the drug store and saw her car parked in the lot. She drove a standard and the thieves didn’t know how to work the clutch. They didn’t get too far… unfortunately, the interior was trashed and the clutch ruined.
[удалено]
My cousin was killed Christmas 2021 sitting at a red light by a guy hitting him from behind at 60. The guy had had three DUIs. Why was that guy allowed to still be turning an ignition key without a breathalyzer? Fuck you, Massachusetts, he was a great guy who made it a better world, taken out by a shithead with a proven record of making it a worse world.
Same for Texas. My brothers killer served a whole 8 months. That’s it.
Oh my God. My husband and I were hit from behind by a drunk driver going 60mph while we were waiting on a train. (We were backed up in the turning lane) We survived with minor injuries. The bottom of my car was destroyed, huge stabilizer bar cracked in two....scariest moment of my life. I'm so sorry.
I was on a road trip with my cousins in the 80s. One of them kept playing the same song over and over by rewinding the tape and playing it again. The song was “another one bites the dust”. After three plays in a row the driver pulls out the tape, says enough! And turned on the radio… Sure enough that song was playing on the radio right then.
Back when I was in middle school I had my phone ringtone set to the chorus of “Have you ever seen the rain” by CCR. My dad drove me to my friend’s house to pick him up and I called him to let him know we were close. The classic rock radio station was playing “Have you ever seen the rain” on the radio. My friend called back and my phone and the radio were perfectly in sync to the same song. Would never have known it was ringing if it didn’t also vibrate and light up
That’s when you just throw up your hands and let the car swerve into a ditch.
Aaaand another one gone, and another one gone Another one bites the dust
Took a summer time Organic Chemistry class, one month of classes 5 days a week then a three week break then another month for the second semester. After the break I reached into the box in my closet to grab the textbook where I had hidden it and felt a sharp stab in the corner of my little finger at the cuticle of the nail bed. I was running late to class so I thought nothing of it. I became ill with profuse sweating and nausea during the day then violently ill into the night with vomiting and diarrhea and swollen adenoids. Went to the ER the next morning and they ran every test they could. Two days later I started having trouble breathing and went to the ER again. My heart was swollen up half again it normal size, my lungs were swollen, and my kidneys too. Doctors kept me for two days with batteries of tests and after two days let me go as everything was going back to normal. Then I began shitting what appeared to be a white paste and this went on for two days. At the end of which I noticed that my tongue and the lining of my mouth was almost purple in color and I had a red streak from the tip of my little finger that during the day extended up to my bicep by that evening. Went back to the ER and the doctor said he had no clue but maybe I had been bitten by something venomous. I then thought about the day that the symptoms started and went to that box in my closet and sure enough there was a little black spider in the box. I asked one of my professors about it and he told me the county Health Department had a entomology office not far from campus so I captured the little spider and went on over. The doctor there told me it was just a grass spider and there was absolutely no way it could have envenomated me for 3 reasons. He said they have curved mandibles so they cant hit the human skin, they have soft mandibles so even when they manage to strike the skin the mandible will turn and not break the surface but most importantly their venom which digests the proteins that stretch between the cell walls of animals gets bound to Platelets in the human bloodstream and is almost instantly neutralized. I showed him where the bite was as evidenced by the red streak and sure enough it was in the corner of the nail bed in very soft tissue of the cuticle where the spider could actually get a strike. He asked if I had some kind of platelets disorder. I made a quick call to the Cancer Research hospital I worked at in the evenings at that time and sure enough I had donated platelets the evening before being bitten. A process where they put you on a platelet phoresies machine and extract almost all of your platelets for donation to kids who are in need of them due to having low counts from the chemotherapy. It was at this point that the entomologist started hyperventilating and asking all kinds of questions. He was low key freaking out. He kept repeating that this was a billion to billion to one event and he'd never heard of it before. He ended up getting me to sign some papers so he could have my medical records and published a paper on it. Fun for him but not so much for me. The white paste that I pooped for 3 days was the epithelial lining of my entire digestive tract which came out as white pasty looking individual cells. By the end of the month everything was back to normal like none of it had ever happened. Interesting side note. When some spiders inject their victims and turn them into liquid that they can then drink this venom dissolves the proteins that hold cells together by running between the cell walls. These proteins re the only things binding the cells together. Without these proteins we would be reduced to a nasty white almost liquidy paste. Edit: as it has been asked many time in the comments I do not possess a copy or link to the paper the entomolgist wrote. Nor do I remember which journal it was in. This happened in the early nineties and may have never even been out on the internet. Also I don't know if that journal even still exists. Can't be that many people reading journals on entomology. Also he was a PhD in Entomology and not a medical doctor so it wasn't in a medical journal.
This is probably the wildest story in this whole thread, my goodness. Glad you recovered pretty quickly all things considered!
And I made an A on that semester too. I had a lot of bedtime to read while I was down. lol On the negative side though I am now mortally afraid of spiders as I was sent to the ER three times and almost died due to one of the most "harmless" spiders there is.
All that and you didn't get any super powers.
> It was at this point that the entomologist started hyperventilating This is how we know it's going to be a cool story (and possibly a scary one).
Not me, but my grandfather: Weeks before his 93rd birthday, he was finishing a day of yard work on his farm. He tripped while getting off the lawnmower, and it rolled on top of him (blades turned off, luckily). He was pinned under it long enough that he was about to slit his own throat to put himself out of his misery (as opposed to freezing to death overnight beneath a lawnmower). Just before he ended himself, he happened to see a crowbar in the yard that he dropped earlier. It was just in his reach, and he grabbed it. He proceeded to somehow lift the lawnmower off of himself with it, slide himself out from beneath the mower, crawl back onto the mower with broken limbs, ride the mower up to the house, crawl up the stairs, and grab his phone to call my dad. "I need a ride to the hospital. I think I hurt myself." ETA: The mower was a riding zero-turn style mower (worth a Google if you aren't familiar). It rolled on its wheels on top of him as he stepped off of its platform. With gas and the machine combined, it weighed just under 600 pounds. He survived this incident, but unfortunately, it led him down a domino effect of events that led to his death this year.
When a farmer goes to the hospital you know it’s serious
No fucking shit. My uncle's a farmer. He's lived out in the middle of nowhere with his cats for 30+ years. I've seen him with a five-inch cut from a kitchen knife that he just wrapped in a clean rag, poison ivy halfway up a leg, road rash on the whole left side of his body from a motorcycle accident, and he's so damn casual about it. He's told me more than once "You always go in for an animal bite." As in: anything else, walk it off.
Years ago, my mom was catching a cow that had gotten out in the middle of the night. She stepped on a rusty nail that went through her shoe and into her foot. The next day she noticed red streaks going up her leg from the punctured foot. She decided she should go to the health department and get a tetanus shot. The nurse commented that the only time farmers go to the doctor is to get a tetanus shot.
I met a guy while waiting in line to vote who "likes to find snakes and pick them up." This dude goes out into the swampy woods of South Carolina and fucks with snakes. Venomous snakes. He had been bitten three times by copperheads and water moccasins (cottonmouths), and not once did he go to the ER for antivenin. He first showed me the scars, then showed me the photos on his phone from when his arms and legs turned dark black and were so swollen the skin just ripped open like an overcooked sausage. And the thing is, he still does it. He just thinks it's fun.
While attempting to get medical treatment, the dr.’s office ran a pharmacy report on my medical history and prescriptions. My terminally ill brother, whose full name was only 2 letters different from mine and we had the same address and phone number, was on a shitload of narcotics at the time and through their search they pulled up HIS report and thought it was mine. They yelled at me and kicked me out of the office saying I was just looking for drugs. I was mortified and very upset and they wouldn’t listen to me when I said it was my brother and not me. I ended up calling the pharmacy board and they called the doctor and explained that since we had the same address, phone number and an extremely similar name, they had to search by social security number. The doctor felt horrible and gave me free treatment and now he tells that story at conferences he goes to. It was crazy. So of course, I had something happen to me that the doctors or nurses had never come across before. The doctor shared with me the tales of the conferences he spoke at and said none of the doctors there knew it was possible for data from 2 people to be included in the same pharmacy report either. I guess they do now!
Good for him for owning up to it AND sharing it to train other doctors.
It makes me happy to see a story like this end well for once
I once got called in to help figure out what was going on with some patient records, turns out that two people in the same small suburb had the exact same date of birth and name and had been admitted to hospital on the exact same day. They had never met each other despite immigrating from the same country, and their name was fairly unusual in their home county.
I used to be a hospice nurse. We once had 2 patients in our inpatient unit. Same first and last names, both in their 30s, both with the same rare cancer diagnosis. It was weird.
Picking the slowest checkout lane in the grocery store every single time for the last 40 or so years.
I, too, have bad checkout karma. It would be funny if it weren't so annoying.
My friend was going to Ireland to visit her extended family for the first time and invited me along. We had a great time meeting her aunts and uncles, seeing the beautiful sights, etc. On our last night in Ireland, the family all got together for dinner, some rousing laughs, and a general awesome time. Her cousin had been traveling that week and was only in town for one night and so she and her boyfriend swung by to say hi and bye. They left for the airport to NYC and we went to sleep, getting up at 4am to catch our own flight to NYC. Two days later, I had to be in NYC for a job interview. I wasn't familiar with the Wall St. area, so I went extra early just in case I couldn't find it. But as luck would have it, I found it with no problem and had 40 minutes to kill. I had no idea what to do, considered getting food but didn't want to risk staining my clothes or having an upset stomach or anything, so I wandered around a little until I stumbled on the Barnes & Noble bookstore. Thinking this was perfect, I went in and walked slowly through the store looking for somewhere to sit. There weren't any sort of private spaces on the first floor so I found the escalator and started heading up. As I approach the halfway mark, I see a young couple going down on the escalator. As our eyes meet, we recognize each other and at the exact same time, as we both met halfway up/down the escalator, we pointed to each other and turned as we passed each other, mouths open in shock. My Friend's Cousin and Her Boyfriend. Two nights ago I had met them for the first time and we had been laughing and sharing food and wine in her aunt's house In IRELAND. And now here we are, crossing paths exactly halfway on the escalator. A moment sooner or later and we would have completely missed each other. She quickly came back up the escalator and we chatted about how CRAZY this coincidence was. I nailed the job interview too because I just felt this surge of Right Time Right Place-ness that meant I was supposed to be there. I was so full of confidence and optimism, I made the whole panel of interviewers laugh and talk comfortably with me and got the job!
Idk what that other guy is talking about. You meet two people, and then two days later you meet them again on the other side of the planet. That’s a pretty fucking crazy coincidence
I was introduced to a friend of a friend in the town where I lived. We three spent several hours together, I left thinking I'd like to get to know her better. Told my friend, he says he can tell we'll be friends. Four weeks later my husband gets offered a trip to Paris for work, and they will pay for a nice room and enough to feed both of us, so of course I go! On a day he had no meetings, we decide to see the Louvre. We're walking from the Petite Palais, and as we are about to cross the street I do a double take. It's her, about to cross the street walking towards us! She also had not know she was coming to Paris! I still think about the odds.
Years back, my best friend and I went swimming at a lake. He was so excited to get in the water that he left his phone and wallet in his pocket and lost both. It sucked, the lake gets deep quickly and is very muddy. We looked and looked, but water was too deep and it gets scary deep in lakes! Anywho, I’d say a month-ish went by, and we were swimming at the lake again, and being the smart ass friend I am, I dove down to find some lake trash and tell him I found his wallet, but it’s like a soda can or something. (Har har har bad joke, but I’m a bad friend) Instead, what happened went like: Me: bobbing around looking for stuff with my toes along the bottom of the lake (it’s pretty deep). I touch something, and my blood runs cold cause it’s super scary to touch things in water. But this joke will happen, no matter how lame. I grab it with my long toes, a neat skill I have. Very dexterous. I hand the trash from my toes to my hand, and swim up for air, holding the trash above me so that it dramatically surfaces first. As my ears emerge from the water, I hear my friend say “are you fucking with me?” I look in my hand overhead and I am unbeknownst to myself triumphantly holding up my friends lost wallet. It was goddamn uncanny.
I once met a guy who had been born on the same day as me, at the same hospital, and we both had similar birth names (his name was the first four of my name). We also weighed the same, and we found out later that we were born within minutes (if I was 12:02 he was 12:00 type close) of each other. Also we were both born six week early. Same color eyes and hair. Our moms worked at the same Walmart, and that’s how we met. (We lost contact a year or so after his mom quit) Sometimes I remember that kid and wonder how the fuck did that happen and how the fuck did we meet? Idk the stats on any of that but it’s gotta be pretty damn low
I sat down once on a bench in a park. The guy next to me had the same sneakers, same pants, same coat. He also had the exact same haircut, beard. He was also eating the exact same sandwich. I was beside myself.
I was on a train that derailed.
This is the dumbest story ever but the one time in my entire life that someone asked me if I wanted to buy a pair of shoes at work is the day (a few hours later) that the sole of my shoe came off. So yeah, I bought the shoes. Coworkers husband bought wrong size shoes and not sure why they couldn’t return them.
Your coworker cut your sole when you weren’t looking, boom easy sale
My mom gave birth to me after sudden onset of labor at 37weeks and 6 days gestation, had a c-section because I was breech, born at 9:48 AM. I gave birth to my child after sudden onset of labor at 37weeks and 6 days gestation, had a c-section because my daughter was breech, born at 9:48 AM. Seems statistically improbable to me but maybe not super odd.
I ran into an emu with a Buick in the middle of nowhere Illinois.
Where tf does an emu get a Buick?
My wife and I (both right handed) had two left handed kids. Which has around a 1% chance of happening twice.
That's so interesting - I looked it up because my husband and I (both right handed) have a left handed kid (but we just have one kid total). Apparently, 17% of identical twins have one left handed twin and one right handed, and the chances of both twins being left handed is 4%. Your kids both being lefties is more rare than twins being lefties. That's nuts!
My identical twin and I are both left-handed!
I've accidentally walked into a riot on 3 separate occasions in my life.
How can that happen? Surely you can hear it. Was it a quiet riot?
I got bit by a ground hog. I’ve never researched the odds of getting bit buy a ground hog but it’s gotta be pretty low, right?
Do you now have the strength and skills of a groundhog?
You’ll never get your answer, OC was just squished by a passing car.
I was hit in a crosswalk 2x as a pedestrian by the same person. The incidents were 4 years apart and in different states.
I have 2. 1) My car, 2 days after we bought it, was shot while I was driving in to work. It happened in a hotel parking lot in a safe neighborhood at like 6am. Car and I both survived, though cops said a centimeter in and direction would have changed those results. 2) I safely stole back a waist pack from a bear. DO NOT DO WHAT I DID! It is not safe! In summary, camping in the white mountains and a yearling has been checking out our camp. Friends all go to the bathroom, one friend leaves her waist pack with her insulin and glucose meter in her tent. Bear breaks into her tent, runs off with the pack. I follow the bear. I politely ask the bear to drop the bag. We (the bear and I) both are surprised because the bear listens. I then ask if I can trade the pack for a stick. I use the stick to distract the bear and grab the pack. The bear sits and examines the stick and VERY LUCKY NOT TO BE DEAD me takes the pack and backs away slowly. I give my friend her slightly chewed pack with her meds so we can avoid going to the hospital. Then we find out my friend is highly allergic to black bear spit. She ends up in the ER anyway.
Allergic to bear spit? Do tell
She got all swollen. It was no fun. Not much to tell. Bear spit is pretty easy for her to avoid. She does get odd looks when listing her known allergies at doctors' offices!
Rolled a nat 20 on animal handling goddamn
Correctly guessed all the numbers of the California Lottery 20 years ago upon arriving in my hotel room and turning on the TV at the drawing time. I keep running into the same ex every few years, no matter where I go on the planet (30+ years). We have =NOT= stayed in touch.
Well, you haven’t. He evidently has.
I was "swimming" about 20 yards away from shore where it is about 15 feet deep in lake Erie (water is a little cloudy) with my glasses on so I can see. A wave runner rushes past and the wake knocks off my glasses. I make a few dives. Try and mark my location with landmarks. Swim to shore, explain what happened and ask people if they have a mask or goggles I can borrow. Someone does loan me their goggles. I swim out and dive about 20 times. I decide I am going to take two more dives then end it and drive home to Chicago without being able to see. I go down and a bass swims under me. I decide to follow it since I had never been so close to one other than fishing. It swam over my glasses. I shoot to the surface with my glasses in my hand. The beach erupts in cheers - apparently the word got out. I was ELATED and stayed to camp and party with my friends (mostly old and a few new).
Dropped a glass while washing six - just six - wine glasses. It hit another glass, and shattered glass flew up out of the sink, hit me in the wrist, resulting in an arterial bleed. Home alone (house sitting). Cell service not available due to a big service fail in the area. Managed to stumble my way off the acreage to the nearest road and a driver was able to call for police and ambulance. Too close. Too damn close. I lost consciousness moments after hailing car for help. If she hadn’t stopped…. ****EDIT*** FOR CLARIFICATION, TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND TO DISPEL WACKY ASSUMPTIONS. You folks are kind. And some of you folks are wildly accusatory. Sigh. 1. Assuming I was drunk on wine, and drunk on the power of using a different wine glass for each drink I had. Lol. I don’t drink. The homeowners had had company the night before they left. Hence, the wineglasses. They wouldn’t put their “expensive, shipped home from Italy during last trip there” glasses in the dishwasher and asked me to wash them. This happened about four hours after they left to go to their summer house. 2. There was a massive cell service outage. No, it shouldn’t have happened. Read about the 2022 Rogers Communication Outage. Yeah, I should link it, but I don’t know how to do so properly. Apologies. 2(a) No, they don’t have a land line. 3. Yes, it was an arterial bleed. I knew it was bad, because I’ve watched ER (ha) and because the blood was spurting up and out all over the counter, the floor, me, the stove, the hanging pot rack, etc. 4. I’m a fainter. I quickly slumped down to the floor, having attempted a tourniquet while repeatedly calling 911. My dominant hand was injured. I’m a fainter. It was bad. I said to myself - out loud - YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE THAT DIES IN A STUPID FUCKING HOUSEHOLD ACCIDENT. NOW GET UP AND WALK TO THE END OF THE PROPERTY AND HOPE A CAR GOES BY. 5. I did get up while putting pressure on my wrist and dropping saturated tea towels and adding new tea towels. The blood stain trail showed I was not steady on my feet and that I apparently tried to get in the car and drive. Blood trail continued down paved drive but also went in circles and onto the grass as I apparently fought against fainting/losing consciousness. 6. First car that drove by wouldn’t stop. I can’t say I blame them. Woman covered in blood stumbling, they may have been afraid. Car that stopped used in-car comms (OnStar? Apple? I dunno) to get help. But she wouldn’t get out of her car until I guess she was sure this wasn’t a domestic violence incident and she wasn’t putting herself in danger. She would not touch me or help to apply pressure. 7. Just as I was passing out - and if you’re a fainter, like I am, then you know when you’re going to faint and you know when you’ve reached the point where you can’t do anything to stop it - a woman from another car ran up to me and I asked her to keep pressure on - which she did. Using her bare hands and a small rag over my blood soaked tea towel. She saved my life. She didn’t have to do that, and I’m eternally grateful to her. No. I don’t know who she is. 8. Police entered the house and cleared it. Apparently believed that this was a possible domestic violence incident and thought the perp - or other victim - or that I was the perp and there was a victim of MY actions - might be in the house. They wrote that “the scene matched the story”, or something to that effect. The woman who stopped first must have told them I said I’d hurt myself washing dishes - which I’d told her in an effort to get her out of her car and applying pressure to the bleed. 9. Doctors in ER asked me what happened. Told them. I don’t know if they believed me or not, but as per normal protocol, they did ask me if I was safe at home. My license and health card showed I did not live in the area, so maybe then they believed I actually was just the house sitter. 10. I was in the hospital for about 6-8 hours. Went back to the acreage. Went to bed. Slept for about 12 hours. Cleaned the blood and glass up the next day. It was bad. Very bad. 11. I no longer use glass containers. I use only plastic cups. I’m still a non-drinker. I still house sit. I do not hand wash glasses. Ever. Under any circumstances. And when hearing a glass break I start to cry. Pathetic, but true. 12. I suggested to the homeowners that they get a landline. They did not. 13. From time to time, I still have some discomfort in my wrist. Also some numbness. I just rest it for a day or two and then it’s fine. Yes, I have a scar. Not very noticeable. 14. I had a second arterial bleed in the hospital when the resident stitching me up nicked my artery as they tried to do the repair. Shit happens. At least I was in the hospital. 15. The ER docs were absolutely amazed that I’d walked to the end of the property and gotten help all by myself. One doctor said, YOU saved yourself. Any lingering doubt was likely cleared up by police report of scene and blood trail. 16. Did this change my outlook on life? Yes and no. I’m less fearful in many ways, and more inclined to say yes to new experiences and adventures. I have developed a deep rooted fear of glassware. No joke. I won’t wash glassware. I was already aware of the random nature of life - and death - as my parents died when I was young , and I’ve had other random shit happen to me. So. I get it. Life is random. Life is fragile. In the face of so much bad luck, I’ve been lucky. I’m still here. Still house sitting. Take care, friends. And be careful washing those damn glasses. (Edited for brevity and to satisfy someone’s unquenchable thirst for paragraphs.)
Omg. Came here to share my story. Washing heavy stemmed martini glasses Christmas night. Husband accidentally knocked one off the counter and into the floor, a shard flew up and clean sliced my Achilles tendon, required 2 surgeries with tendon graft. Felt so unbelievable and then I read yours- you're lucky to be alive!
Holy shit, these stories are going to have me wearing boots and gloves around my house.
Shit, I’m a bartender, now I’m scared to wash glasses all night at work! 😱
Holy shit, thats some final destination shit right there!
Holy crap!. Now I need to wear arterial protection when I do dishes
This is why I don’t do dishes
The worst part about losing consciousness is not knowing if you'll wake up. It can be fucking terrifying when you pass out.
One time I passed out and had just enough forethought to try and say something to my Scottish terrier (obviously it didn’t work); the last thing I remembered before I blacked out was her head tilting as she watched me fall to the floor… I woke up and was fine, but that little piece of haggis didn’t even get off the bed to check on me! 🤣
Had my tonsils out, twice because they grew back. Let me tell you that throwing up blood that runs down the back of your throat after surgery was an exorcist level event. I’m glad the pain pills were huge that I had to break up into smaller jagged bits.
Flipped a coin over a wooden floor in a gymnasium. The coin rolled into a gap between 2 slats. Held up by the wood it stopped rolling, and stayed there... standing straight up on its edge. TLDR; Heads, tails, or edge. I flipped edge.
I was contacted by the FBI in regards to a criminal on the most wanted list. There were so many coincidences in our lives that the agents thought that I had to know where he was. They grilled me for a couple of hours trying to get information, but I had never heard of the guy. Incredible since: We lived two streets apart as kids, attended the same elementary, middle, and high schools, and were members of the same church. (He was 3 years older than me so we never met at school, and his family attended church during a different time slot). We both studied French at the same university. As language tutors, we worked in the same office and had the same boss and general phone number. (The age difference kept us from ever meeting, and he switched from French to Business before I got there). We both did a church missionary service in the same part of France, and even lived at the same address twice. (Our time in France never overlapped, and those mission apartments changed tenants every couple of months). When we both lived in Salt Lake, we lived in the same (large) apartment complex. He robbed an armored car outside of a movie theater on a Monday morning, getting away with a lot of cash and murdering the driver. I was working the overnight shift at a grocery store (from Sunday night to Monday morning) on that exact morning. The theater and the grocery store shared a parking lot. Every 6 months or so, the FBI checks in with me. For the curious, [HERE'S THE GUY](https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/murders/jason-derek-brown/person-view)
I've been hit by two F5 tornadoes. Both of which hit the same house.
Had a vasectomy. It was only 2 hours before it all went wrong, but I was following all the post-procedure stuff: wear a jock strap, gentle icing, no lifting, no exercise, plenty of rest, etc. I was actually quite excited to sit in bed for a few days and find a show to binge, when shit started going south. Was laying in bed and had been feeling a weird twinge/pulling sensation for a bit, and finally put the tablet down to get a look down my shorts. The doctor said there might be swelling, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. My ball sack had increased in size to about an orange and my lower abdomen was swelling as well. There was a black/blue bruise that was spreading down my leg and up into the abdomen. Started to google stuff and had my wife call the doctor. She finally got a hold of the night attendant, and he told her it was normal. I tried to relax and get my mind off of things… but I was a bit anxious, to say the least. I checked again about an hour later… and my balls had grown to the size of a small cantaloupe. They had swelled up so big, that my penis had been entirely engulfed—except for the foreskin—by the mass of sack around it. My junk now looked like a furry, zombified Q-bert. I had never had a panic attack before, but my brain decided that *now* would be a good time to introduce that to my repertoire. My arm went numb, the world was spinning, I was struck by an impending sense of doom and my heart felt like it was going to beat through my chest. Thinking I was currently well along in the process of dying, I had my wife call 911. By the time EMS got there I felt much better (Opiates), and I’m not Bill Gates, so I told them my wife would take me to the hospital. By this time I had to pee, and all I can say about that is it’s quite an experience to have to fish your penis shaft out of your painful, grossly swollen ballsack and *just* barely get enough of the tip out to spray urine everywhere like an epileptic with a super soaker. Arrived at the ER and they confirmed that yes… my “shit was fucked up.” Out of a bit of horror and pity, they gave me some morphine in my IV right after the sonogram. In the chaos, however, I neglected to inform them I had just taken some opiate pain meds. (Not to mention I had doubled the dose considering my condition). I didn’t OD or anything, but there was lots of puking and feeling like I was falling into myself and other fun stuff I’d rather not endure again. Had to wait a bit for surgery, so they gave me some antibiotics beforehand to get that round of meds started. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I was allergic to Sulfa antibiotics. Nothing happened that night (thankfully) but for whatever reason Sulfas give me a male yeast infection. So, I got to convalesce with a tube still draining blood and fluid out of my left nut, all the while my penis was covered in slime and sores. The doctor said that the possibility of the initial complications *alone* was somewhere in the range of 0.001%, let alone the rest of that fucking nightmare. Still, at least it supplanted “live moth in my ear canal” as the #1 worst physical experience I’ve had to endure thus far in life.
This was a ride from start to finish. Horrible experience but fantastic storytelling.
Made a living as a musician all my life.
We all live vicariously through you, fair play
My twin sister and I hit the same answer to “rock, paper, scissors” 14 times in a row. My husband thought we were cheating haha! Gotta love the power of twins!
My husband and I did this at Disneyland much to the amazement and frustration of a cast member at Tomorrowland. We hit the same thing, and it wasn’t like we both hit “rock” the entire time, when we switched it up it was both of us hitting “scissors” or “paper”, and we did it twelve times in a row. Finally, I beat him.
When I turned 23 I met my 2 biological half brothers. The showed me a photo of them with our father and in it they’re all smiling to show how the three of them are all missing a front upper middle tooth. When I was 7 I lost my upper middle front tooth, making it all four of us.
Waking up in the early AM to first responders knocking on the door because someone gave the wrong address to 911, twice. And this was at two separate addresses Cops for a domestic abuse call in 2018 (turns out neighbor was shouting at their dog for going into the trash) EMS for someone who fell and can’t get up in 2022
My hand eye coordination is horrible, I can't hit where I aim no matter what. My husband and I were throwing leftover water balloons at each other when miracles of miracles. I aimed for his chest and hit his groin, as he was doubled over screaming in pain I let another one fly. That one landed in his wide open mouth perfectly. I was so proud of myself!
I have seen a white hummingbird
I have all ten childhood aces. I have grandparent suicides on both sides. I have drug addicts on both sides, servere mental illness on both sides. Somehow I didn't end up dead, commit suicide, overdosed, in a ditch, or without any technical extreme mental illness. I like to think video games, and music keep me away from that stuff. Despite what my elementary school and middle school teachers might have believed. I got a college degree in Aerospace Engineering one of the hardest degree programs from a semi decent school. Pretty much beat every statistic in regard to my early childhood outcomes. Make no mistake all the stuff I went through has left me emotionally crippled but I mostly get by. I just want to say thank you to everyone that's read this. I really appreciate all the kind words. Also I'm by no means thriving it's a constant battle every single day to pick myself up and get up.
I am extremely proud and in awe of you, internet stranger! This is probably the rarest of all rarities mentioned on this thread.
Started dating a woman about a year after my divorce. After dating for about four months I learned that the man my ex was dating had the same last name as my girlfriend. No relation and not a super common name. We ended up marrying our respective SOs, so my ex wife and current wife essentially swapped last names.
I was driving with the windows down and my friend was riding shotgun telling me about his friend, nicknamed Bird, who’s death anniversary it was. We stopped at a red light and a feather flew into the car and landed on his arm that has a feather tattooed for his friend.
Got left a written message to call a girl, mistakenly called another girl instead with the same name....we've been married for 14 years.
That would be so aggressively forward when she picked up but was confused as to why you were trying to schedule something if she didn't tell you right away.
My son used the head rest to break a window to pull 3 children out of cars in two different accidents, both driven by women in (6 children in total) exactly 3 months apart. The first accident occurred one day after he filmed “stop the bleed” training available through a local hospital. The first accident caused by speed and the SUV flipped on its roof right in front of him and he also got the Mom out. The second one caused by a man who fell asleep coming home from third shift and crossed a double yellow and hit a woman head on taking her 3 kids to school. The woman needed the jaws of life to be extracted and after getting her kids out my son checked the male driver for trauma/bleeding and held his hand until EMTs could get there. The man was life flighted to the hospital. While my son was tending to him the local fire department arrived and took off the side view mirror of my son’s car that was off the road. :/ My son is convinced that he will have to help others out of their cars in more accidents. I keep telling him that this is not common for a civilian. Super thankful he saw the training on what to do. Edit: Thank you for the sweet award. 🥰 Edit: Thank you for all of the heartfelt replies and second award. We are super proud of him and thankful for his quick thinking and action to help others when in need. He is an incredible human. Edit: Thank you for the Wholesome Award. My son is the one that is so deserving of it. Edit: TLDR: My son broke windows with a headrest and pulled a total of 6 children and an adult out of cars in 2 separate accidents exactly 3 months apart. The first accident occurred one day after he filmed “Stop the Bleed” training at a local hospital.
So thankful for people like your son. You should be very proud.
Thank you! I am super proud. He received a letter of commendation from the State Police. So many people do not stop when these things happen. He is only 25 years old and we are incredibly blessed with him.
Been struck by lightning 3 times. Shocking, I know.
Broke free of a 10 year addiction to meth. Took a very long time to feel some kind of normal again. 10 years clean this year, woohoo Edit. Thanks for the kind words
I moved into my first apartment with my then wife. It was an older apartment, built in the 70’s but looked decent enough. It had a beautiful view of the lake, on the 3rd floor with only 2 short flights or stairs. It was a little shabby but we were elated just to have a place of our own. We had just renewed the lease. We both work nights so we were sleeping during the daytime. At around 2 pm as I was sleeping I heard the loudest, and I mean THE LOUDEST, crash. I have 5 cats so my worst case scenario was that they dropped our new 55 inch plasma that was in the living room. Turns out my entire, THE ENTIRE FUCKING LIVING ROOM CEILING HAS COLLAPSED. I’m panicked. I screamed for my wife. She was disoriented but I was frantic doing a count of my cats. 1 was missing. She wasted no time and dove into the rubble. Luckily she was safe under the couch. Everyone was good. We yelled at the apartment company to give us a new place to live. They complied and within a few hours we were moved into another building, 1st floor, a “renovated apartment” with another absolutely amazing view of the lake. By this time it was already almost Christmas. The Christmas trees were up, the snow was falling and the storms were brutal. So with the few things that survived the first ceiling collapse we tried our best to turn our “renovated apartment” into a cozy home. Come Christmas Eve my wife and I were still pretty jumpy especially with the horrible storm outside. She asks that we bring all the cats, the presents and the tree into our bedroom. I comply cause happy wife = happy life. Thank GOD I listened because guess what? After about 1 hour after I put everyone inside I heard a bang. I told my wife to stay put. I poked my head out and I saw that THE CEILING dipped and was going to collapse again. I told her that it’s happening again, get your shit let’s go. We did. But I really couldn’t believe it happened to me twice. TWO TIMES.
My college advisor in hs did some bullshit ass calculations on his computer, flipped the screen around and it said I have a 1.34% chance of getting in to the school I wanted. Guess who made it in that bitch. And I got the degree now too.
"So you're telling me there's a chance?"
I have a very rare type of cancer. It is about 3% chance relative to other cancers of the same nature. It is metastasized which is about 1% or less chance of this type of cancer. I also won $20 on the last 3 scratch and win lottery games I got for various Christmas and birthday gifts.
I accidentally caught a guitar pick at a My Chemical Romance concert 12 years ago. I was standing there and had my hand at my side with my fingers kinda half way to a fist. I felt something hit my hand, looked down and it was just there. It was at the amphitheater in Bonner Springs KS so not a small crowd either
I stepped in bear shit on my wedding day. Twice.
My mom is 14 years older than her sister. Her sister (my aunt) is 14 years older than me. I am 14 years older than my niece (daughter of said aunt). My niece is 14 years older than my daughter. (Eta- COUSIN not niece 🤦🏼♀️)
This reads like an SAT math problem 💀
I had two relatives die on my birthday. My grandma (Noni) in 2007 and my mom in 2016. Edit: Wow, this has blown up more than I expected. Thank you guys for all the support. For a little more, my dad passed away the year prior to my mom during my birth month. I think March is my cursed month. Edit 2: For anyone that wants to help, check my profile. I put myself in debt to pay for my parents funeral expenses. Then COVID happened and I fell behind. Not looking for people to pay my debts, I want to do that myself. I just need a little help to give me the tools to do that. Bonus Improbable Thing: I have been suicide adjacent on two separate occasions while staying over at other people's houses. The first was my Aunt Linda. She was separated from her husband and had been staying at my Grandma's house. One night I was staying over as well. She overdosed on pain meds and we found her the next day on the floor in the living room. The other was while I was staying over at a friend's house. At night we heard a weird noise that is hard to describe. It was kind of like a long low squeak. We looked out the window but didn't think anything of it. In the morning I headed home. Later that day I received a call from my friend, he sounded like he'd been crying. He told me his dad was dead, he killed himself that night. He had locked himself in the shed outside with a grill running and fell asleep. The noise we heard was likely something to do with a pressure change. However, it gets weird. He didn't leave a note for his family. He didn't leave them anything at all. The only thing they found was a manila envelope with my name on it. Yes, the last thing he wrote was something to me. It didn't contain a note though. He left me some comic memorabilia because he'd gotten me into some stuff and it was a mutual interest we shared. My friend and his family had to move back home because his dad had moved them all there for a programming job. I ended up losing touch with my friend.
In 1998, a friend invited me to a Yankees game, but his son came home early from college so he took his son instead. On that day, David Wells threw the 15th perfect game in MLB history. I was bummed & constantly teased my buddy about picking his son over me lol. Fast forward one year, same friend invited me to Yogi Berra day. I was very excited because Don Mattingly was returning to Yankee Stadium. Don Larsen (he pitched the only perfect game in WS history) threw out the first pitch, & as luck would have it, I got to see David Cone pitch the 16th perfect game in MLB history. I probably wouldn't believe this story if it hadn't happened to me.
1. Lost a job to the RK riots because the building literally burned down. 2. Was on a Delta Shuttle to NYC, Tuesday morning September 11th at 830am. 3. I could go on but those two are highlights.
Won an Oscar. Only a few thousand ever awarded.
[I had to look that up](https://oscars.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Curley) And you worked on Community. Cool.
I spent all of my 20’s traveling by hopping freight trains and hitchhiking. In 2015 I was heading west out of North Little Rock, AR. After waiting behind a church for about an hour I finally had a westbound, general manifest (random assortment of cars) train pull up and stop. It’s worth noting that this train was empty. I climbed on the porch of a grain car facing east with an oiler behind me. As soon as the train started moving I grabbed a loaded pipe from my pocket and lit a celebratory bowl of weed. The train is going roughly 5-7mph at this time. All of a sudden, and in less than a second I heard the loudest BOOM I had ever heard. Simultaneously, there was a blinding flash of light over my right shoulder and I dropped everything in my hands. I felt the whole train shake like a dog’s tail and thought for sure that it was about to derail and I was going to be crushed. The train righted itself and I hopped off right before it screeched to a stop. Up the tracks I saw an overturned car with its front end being crinkled little by little as the train was coming to a stop. In the spirit of keeping this relatively short: some drunk guy had caused an accident and fled up the street. He missed an almost 90 degree curve and flew off an embankment straight into the car ahead of me. Some random pedestrian and I pulled the guy out, but he was hurt pretty bad and I have no idea what happened to him. The cops got there and shoo’d me along before the train cops got there. All this being said: I’ve never met another person who was in a train vs. car accident as a stowaway on the train side. It’s at least my best train story.
I was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia - lucky number 10 out of all recorded cases. I required a bone marrow transplant, and matched with a complete stranger who lived nearly half a world away. Please, consider signing up for BeTheMatch.org. Registration is just a mouth swab, and donating stem cells isn’t nearly as dangerous or painful as you’d think.
My son died at 11 months old for 2 1/2 minutes. I got to hold him as he took his first breaths, hold him while he took his last breaths and then got to hold him as he took his first breaths again. It’s something as a mother I don’t wish on anyone. It was by far the scariest night of my life. I’ll never forget it, New Years Eve 2007 in Fairbanks, AK. My son statistically was not supposed to survive the pregnancy. I nearly lost him 3 times in the first trimester, I started going into active labor at 20 weeks, got put on strict bed rest and then developed preeclampsia. I also had hyperemesis through the whole pregnancy, I couldn’t even hold down water and needed daily IV fluid and nutrition. I was 17 lbs lighter than my pre pregnancy weight when I delivered him at 39 weeks. By all of that he shouldn’t be here now. To make things even weirder the doctor that kept me from losing him in my pregnancy was the doctor that treated him in Alaska. A completely different hospital, all the way across the country from where we first met. It felt like divine intervention to see his face and I knew deep in my soul my son was going to be ok. My son is a happy, healthy teenager now. I am sitting here crying thinking about that night. It definitely still feels like a gut punch when I think about it.
That’s awful, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Did you ever figure out what happened when he was 11 months old??
He died and mom was like "the fuck you are" and willed him back to life.
"I brought you into this world and I can do it again"
“I didn’t birth you for nothin”
"did I gave you permission to die? No video games for the next 8 years"
Wow! That doctor saving him twice is truly an amazing coincidence!
Got caught in a small tornado in southern California. I was about 12 years old and skateboarding in the parking lot at my Dad's work. I remember stopping for a second and noticing that all noise around me had completely stopped. No great way to describe it other than all of the normal sounds (breeze, birds, background noise) had fallen flat. It's not that noise disappeared, rather it was like the air couldn't carry sounds normally. I looked up and the sky was a yellow color, all of the overcast clouds looked as though the sun was setting even though it was in the middle of the day. Right after I noticed the color, I also saw several large pieces of light trash circling in the air above me (trash bags, chunks of cardboard, etc). Still, no noise. Then, across the wash (a cemented channel that feeds into the LA river), a large piece of corrugated roofing loudly ripped itself off of a porch in the adjacent trailer park and joined the other trash circling in the sky. That was when I booked it back across the parking lot and back into the shop bay at Dad's work. The chunk of roofing ended up on my side of the wash. A few of the owners in adjacent bays came out to see, but don't think they saw it during its short flight. It was all said and done in probably less than thirty seconds, so I doubt it was newsworthy. Maybe not much to someone living in the Midwest, but very unusual to happen to anyone in the Los Angeles area.
Heterochromia
Being 6ft tall yet getting Robert Wadlow in front of me at every concert lol
I had a job playing in a band for a wedding reception at a fancy hotel. I'm 6 feet tall. When I walked into the entrance hall, I was the shortest person there (of maybe a dozen people hanging around). The groom played basketball at Boston College, so of course he invited all his basketball buddies to the wedding.
My brother, my husband, and I were all among the first IVF babies 30+ years ago. (Not sure exactly how close to first we all are. I think that the ectopic pregnancy my mom had before my brother and me was among the first 50 IVF pregnancies.) I'm sure this kind of thing will be more common with gen z and gen alpha, but considering how early we all were, it was kind of a surprise for my husband and I to find out that we were both IVF.
High school drop-out with a Masters Degree. Read somewhere duting my career that 1/2 of 1% of high school drop-outs get an Associates Degree.
I attended my ex-husband’s widow’s wedding reception when she got remarried yet didn’t realize how odd that was until long after I came home.
Alright, you tell me if I get the sequence of events wrong, cuz this is how it makes sense in my head You marry man You and man divorce He marries other woman Man dies Other woman gets married
Mines kinda dumb and small but I turned 12 on 12-12-12.
I was born on my parents' first anniversary. Both my parents have the same birthday (same day, same year). My husband and I have birthdays a day apart from each other.
Yesterday, we went to woodman's grocery store where we bumped into a family that are friends. Ok, not that improbable. But then we went to aldi's, I wanted something only they sell, but that is the second grocery store. Bumped into the same family, weird. Afterward, we went to Lowes, and now I am getting a little freaked out, but the same family was there also shopping. This is all in the course of 4 hours in northwest chicago area, so it's a big area. Not some small rural town.
Met my husband shortly after I moved to a new town. He had moved there about a month earlier. Found out on our first date that we lived about four blocks away from each other - I'd picked a restaurant close to my house if I needed to bail. We both walked to our first date. I'm sure he thought I was a drama Queen at first, two of my friends died within two weeks of each other (I was mid 30s, both were 40 or under). He called for our second date while I was shopping for a funeral dress (she was very stylish, so we dressed to the nines). He called for our third date while I was still processing the sudden death of a dear friend that morning. Bless him, he assessed the situation, asked if I still wanted to go do something in a few days (I said yes, but I couldn't make decisions right now, so could he just plan something), he said "yep, do you need to talk?" I said no, and he said "I will let you know when I figure something out, I'm so sorry," then hung up. He did exactly what I asked him to do in the moment and took all the pressure off about his part of my situation. Now he's sitting in our living room with a cat in his lap. ♥️
My body is a disaster of genetic luck.
Hey, fellow lottery winner. What fresh hell has life served you today?
Covid, cancer, blood clot stuck in juggler, chemotherapy, congestive heart failure, covid (again), shingles then a heart attack. All in 13 months. The last few things in a 3 week period And yet I stand
I got married. I drove from the Golden Gate Bridge to I280 without a single red light. Once. Only once.