We don't realize it but every action we make determines how our life turns out. The smallest actions can lead to big consequences that aren't always good. The people in the following story were going about their day normally when suddenly something they did almost cost someone their life.
(Content edited for clarity).
The Game Will Never Be The Same
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“Playing junior hockey I checked a kid, and the bench door opened, and he hit his leg on the corner rupturing his femoral artery. He almost bled out and ended up losing his leg. It was a freak accident, but you never want to see anyone get hurt especially like that.”
A Cry For Help
“I was driving home after dark, and realized several hundred feet after that there had been a person with a dark hat and clothes walking on the line of the road. Inches from my mirror. At 75mph.
I made a loop, put on my emergency flashers and slowly drove by again to find him now SITTING in the road. I called the cops and parked with my emergency lights so people would hopefully get out of the lane to go around me. Dude just sat there in my headlights until the cops showed up.
Turns out his wife had died. He was hoping to get hit and had been sitting there sobbing when I showed up the second time. He stopped at my window and thanked me for making sure nobody hit him.
I hope he’s doing better now.”
“He Wasn’t Like That Before The Accident”
“During recess in preschool, we were playing hide and seek on the playset. There was a bridge that we could pass under if we crouched, but there were fairly large screw bottoms sticking out above our heads. I found a kid hiding under that bridge, and I snuck up behind him and scared him. He jumped straight up, and one of the screws went through his skull. I don’t remember much about what happened next, but flash forward about 5 years and I see him with his mom at the store. He had a gigantic bald spot/scar where the screw hit, and he was mentally challenged. He wasn’t before the accident.”
Keeping The Speed On The Track From Now On
Vlasov Yevhenii / Shutterstock
“I almost killed my best friend with my own stupidity and recklessness. I was out one night with my friend in my car for what was supposed to be a burger run turned into a trip to the designated racing road to see if anyone was out there. For the record, this road I am talking about is a windy mountain road with one way up and one way down with a vista point at the top.
We headed up to the top for a cruise, eating our burgers and talking, expecting there to be people at the top. To our surprise, there was no one up there, so we just sat at the top for a bit and checked out the city lights. When we were pulling out to leave a car came up behind us and got close to the point where it hurt to look in the mirrors. So I knew what this guy wanted, and I obliged him and sped up. It turned into a race with both of us lane-splitting like a couple of idiots flying through these corners downhill at 110 kmh. Eventually, I began to get a lead on him to the point where he backed off, but on that last long corner, I wanted to end it with a bang and brought it up to a whopping 160 kmh through the corner.
At the very end, my wannabe racecar began to go into an uncontrollable oversteer as the front tires dipped onto the grass.
At that point, my friend looked up from his phone to see the treeline coming towards him. I just shut my eyes and held onto the wheel listening to my friend yell at the top of his lungs. At that moment I honestly had no final thoughts before I felt the turbulence from breaking through trees and the car rolling in the forest like a kid in fresh snow.
I opened my eyes expecting to look down and see my lower half gone or some other mortal wound but found myself with only a sore neck and a bloody nose for my friend. We crawled out of the thankfully upright wreck and heard the guy behind us drive by above us oblivious to the event that just transpired. We waited for the cops.
If those trees were any bigger, I’d have been dead as well as killing my best friend. It was the last night I street raced. I keep it to the local tracks now, and I don’t take passengers.”
Skipping Rocks Is Supposed To Be Relaxing
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“I used to live near some big cliffs and I walked there one day during the summer when I was bored. The cliffs were about 50 meters high and angled in a way that you could barely see where the ocean touched the floor, basically a blind spot of beach that you couldn’t see from the top of the cliff. I wanted to see how far out into the ocean I could throw a rock. I found a roundish rock next to me about twice the size of a baseball that I decided to throw. Instead of going into the water, it fell into the blind spot, and I heard it hit the rocky beach. Two seconds later, a man (probably in his mid-50s) came out from the blind spot and said, ‘You hit someone in the head, YOU IDIOT!’
I panicked and ran away, but just three minutes later I was so overwhelmed with emotions I couldn’t live with myself, so I walked back to apologize. Apparently, it was a tourist family, and their younger daughter was bleeding from the head. I fell on my knees and apologized for what I had done. Then they recounted the story from their point of view. They were just chilling on the beach when suddenly a large rock hit the rocky beach next to them, a smaller rock had flung up and hit their youngest daughter in the forehead. Had that rock hit just one meter away, her head would’ve been crushed. They initially thought that it was a piece of the cliff that had broken off, but when they saw how round it was, they realized that it must’ve been someone who threw it off deliberately, so their father looked up and saw me. I cried and apologized once more, before heading off.
And that’s why you should be careful before doing stupid things near a cliff.”
You’d Think Having A Baby Would Make Her More Careful
“I was turning right on green. All the crosswalks had their don’t cross lights up. Two women with a baby carriage, who were walking in the direction I was driving before the turn, step off the sidewalk into the street without ever looking up. They’re crossing the street I’m turning onto right as I’m entering my turn.
They start shouting at me when I make a quick stop to avoid hitting them by a few feet. One of them screams ‘that doesn’t matter’ when I point to their ‘Don’t Walk’ sign. Then the one with the carriage throws her smokes at my truck after I lay on my horn to try to get them out of the intersection. Classy.”
A Saw Is A Terrible Weight
Gorodetskaya Nadezhda / Shutterstock
“I was helping my dad ‘trim’ large branches from a tree in our garden. To avoid a telephone wire, he wanted me to throw a rope over a high branch so I could pull as he cut it down. Weirdly, the part where I nearly killed him was while I was tossing the rope. To make the rope heavy at the end (easier to throw) he tied a retractable saw to the end of it. It was the only heavy thing we had handy. I suppose coming to think of it; we could’ve just used another branch. I threw it up but completely misjudged how it would fly. It went straight up and came plummeting down with the blade now having opened up. I shouted at my dad as he wasn’t looking and he put his hands over his head. The blade plunged straight into the wooden platform about an inch from him. He would have died if it had been any closer. He’s never asked me to help out again.”
It Was The Maps Fault
“For my senior homecoming, my small private school rented a venue in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t a competent driver and easily missed road signs in the dark.
I printed out the directions ahead of time and read them over a few times. Then I had them in my car just in case, and this was just a couple months after Apple Maps had come out (and was still giving directions to go the wrong way down one-way streets), but I also had my date navigating with my phone.
So we were right around where the place should be, 40 minutes from home, and I saw what I thought was the turn but I’m not sure because the road name was different. I asked my date, and she was going, ‘I’m not sure, I don’t know.’ Then the light turned yellow, and she said, ‘No this is it! Turn left NOW.’ Which I did. Unfortunately, the oncoming truck my panic brain thought was stopping was speeding up to catch the light. We got T-boned HARD on my date’s side. We were incredibly lucky that no one was seriously injured, but I still have flashbacks to how easily I could have killed my date that night.”
Should Have Been A Life Lesson
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“I was drinking one day. My friends and I thought we were gangsta white boys in the ’90s. I was on the phone with my mother while hanging out with homies in a run-down apartment.
I kept loading and unloading a sawed-off weapon we found. I then started spinning it in my hand (it was loaded).
I still think about it to this day. There was like a 40-percent chance it would hit me, probably 30-percent chance it would hit one of my two buddies across from me. But instead it somehow luckily shot downwards into a wooden chess set which exploded.
My friend Cockroach sprung into action. I told my mother on the phone, who was screaming, ‘What happened! OH MY GOD what the heck is going on?’
‘Uh, fireworks mom.’ I said and hung up the phone. My man across from me was looking down at his legs and saying, ‘Dude, I think you shot me.’
Everyone was fine. The gods smiled on me that day. I wish I could say I took it to heart as a lesson and got myself together. Unfortunately, that would take another three decades.”
He’ll Never Look At Marbles The Same Way Again
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“When I was 11 years old, a friend and I were out playing in front of my building one Saturday afternoon. A lot of people were hanging out outside along with us, as it was a nice summer day.
Long story short, I ended up throwing a marble at a car which ended up not cracking, but SHATTERING the front windshield of the car as it drove about 30 mph through a busy two-way street. The car swerved and skidded for about 20 yards and ended up crashing with a lamppost on the sidewalk, barely missing a group of nearby kids. The driver not knowing what just happened to his windshield, jumped out of the car, infuriated. He was holding an aluminum bat, shouting god-knows-what at the top of his lungs.
I was frozen with fear. The only person who had seen me throw the marble was my friend, who was also frozen in place. Seconds later, an adult walks over to us and asks us if we knew what happened. My friend tried to tell the person what he just witnessed, but due to the level of shock he was in, couldn’t put a proper sentence together. I gave him the death stare and eventually pulled him aside to threaten to end his life if he ever tried to snitch on me again. The police showed up instantly, the driver was infuriated, and everyone was confused.
This happened directly in front of my building at around 5 p.m. I was so scared, I walked upstairs to my apartment, got in my bed, and fell asleep. I woke up the next day, and it was as if it never happened.”
Bringing A Story To Life
Zdorov Kirill Vladimirovich / Shutterstock
“Back when I was a kid, I would hang out with two of my neighbors in their yards. Our houses all had relatively high wooden fences, with sturdy bars running lengthwise along the middle of it, like a ledge separating the top half of the fence from the bottom. So one day we were playing in a kid’s backyard, I think we were enacting a hanging scene for a video game character for some reason. We decided to get a karate belt from that kid, wrap one of the ends over the top of the wooden spokes along his fence, and create a noose loosely around the other end so he could slip his neck through, all while he was to be standing on the middle horizontal ‘ledge’ of the fence. We emphasized ‘loosely’ over his neck because obviously, we didn’t want him to get hurt. In hindsight, this was foolish, but hey, we were prepubescent kids who had free time, what do you expect?
So we got the belt/noose ready, the kid got on top of the ledge, inched himself close to the noose and slipped it on. We started reciting dialogue for a few moments and then… the kid on the ledge decided to shift his weight a little, and his foot slipped. The next moments were a blur, as we just saw him drop – then stop. The noose, as loose as it was, somehow tightened itself around his neck as he dropped – it was a real execution! The fence shook with a thud, and the force of the drop jerked him forward and then slammed with kid backward onto it. Instinctively, he started thrashing with his feet; his arms immediately pulled to his neck to relieve the tension. The rest of us were hit with a wave of shock – all of this happened within a split second.
You could see his eyes bulge and strain with tension, his face turning red and the veins starting to pop through the skin. I immediately felt a shot of adrenaline and nausea shoot through me as I could barely digest what was happening. We all cried out his name impulsively, and he gurgled back. Since we were kids, we weren’t thinking clearly, and none of us had any real idea what to do. Most of us were just too shaken to do anything but watch. For a few moments he just violently rocked, thrashing about, trying to pull himself up and gasp for air. It started to look like his neck couldn’t take much more. The karate belt was much stronger than it looked. Then, amazingly, one of us got the bright idea to grab his legs and replant them on the ledge. Instantly the noose was loosened again, and after collecting himself in a few moments, he was able to undo it, pull the belt down, and jump back down to the ground.
Boy, was he shaken up. His face was flushed, and his breathing labored for like five minutes after that. He had heinous red marks coursing around the edges of his neck where the belt-noose had gripped and twisted it. He took a long-eyed stare into space for a good few moments, reflecting on what could have been – as did we all. We all vowed never to be so foolish ever again and to stay off that ledge. Thankfully his parents never knew or became too suspicious; he just told them that he got a little bruised playing sports with us. Within a few days, the wounds started to heal, and he didn’t have any serious injuries, but we knew the truth – and it was one of the scariest moments in my childhood.”
Quick On Their Feet
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“When I was 18 I drove downtown with a couple of friends to go to Burger King because we were in the mood for fast food. It was a cold day in late fall, and my car was old and poorly insulated, so when we got out of BK, all the windows of my car were completely fogged up. I used to have one of these sponge windshield wiper things, but I lost it shortly before this, so I turned up the heat and air flow to the max and waited for the windows to clear up.
After about five minutes or so of waiting, I got impatient and figured, ‘Well there’s a small patch already cleared up, I can get going fine and the rest will clear up on the way.’ So being a dumb teenager and still relatively new to driving, I headed out and the friends I had with me, likewise being dumb teenagers, didn’t stop me.
With all of my windows still mostly fogged up I didn’t see an upcoming crosswalk or the person starting to cross it. I was doing 40 or 50 kmh at this point and when I reached the crosswalk, all I saw was a person jumping out of the way of my car and back onto the sidewalk as I blazed past them. Nearly pooped my pants as the realization hit me of what just almost happened and I immediately pulled into the next available parking lot and waited until my windows were fully cleared up before I started driving again. Don’t think I stopped shaking for the rest of the day.
I’m thankful that this person had better awareness than me and good reflexes to add onto that. If they hadn’t, I would have run them over and at the very least severely injured them. Ever since then I’ve never driven without thoroughly clearing my windows first and make sure to always have something in the car to wipe them free.”
Something You Don’t Expect From A Car Accident
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“I was driving late at night after work in a Jeep Cherokee. I was switching lanes over to the right lane to turn soon and looked down at the radio to change channels. I looked up in time to see a man in the road, swerved to miss him, and clipped him with my passenger mirror (I was going 45 mph).
I slammed on my brakes, came to a screeching stop and got out. I dialed 911 as I was speed walking to where the guy was sitting, looking dazed.
The operator answered, ‘911, what’s your emergency?’
I said, ‘I just hit a guy!’
The operator responded, ‘What do you mean?’
I answered in a panic, ‘I WAS IN MY CAR! HE WAS IN HIS SHOES!’ I got over to the guy who was now up and holding his left arm, hobbling away. I added to the operator, ‘I’m trying to get to the guy, but he’s running away.’
The operator advised me not to chase him, but I wanted to make sure he was okay.
I got close to him and said, ‘Hey man! You alright!?’
He turned to me, twisting at the hips to see me, and screamed, ‘BWAAAAAAA!’
I stopped in my tracks, and he turned back around and hobbled off into the night.
The cops eventually got there, and I thought I was in deep trouble. The cop talking to me got all the info from me, and I asked him if I was in trouble. He said probably not.
The area had/has an illegal substance use problem, and I doubt they will find the guy I hit. I never heard anything more about it.”
Still Can’t Stop Thinking About It
Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley / Shutterstock
“I have a story about when I did accidentally kill someone:
I was probably 5, running around my grandma as we walked through the mall. My grandma told me to settle down and stop running back and forth. I then ran into an elderly (70+) woman who had been walking in front of me. She tripped over me and fell backwards somehow. I freaked out and ran back and hid behind a column. A group gathered around the woman and my grandma started helping her. She was unconscious and blood was flowing from under her head.
After the EMTs showed up, my grandma came back and got down to my level and said something like, ‘That’s not your fault. It was just an accident. It’s going to be ok.’ I think she felt bad because earlier she had said something like ‘stop horsing around or someone could get hurt.’
About a week later I overheard her telling my mom that the woman from the mall had died. She had seen her obituary in the paper. 25 years later and I can still hear the thud of her head hitting the ground and see all of the blood flowing from behind her head and the way it darkened her white hair. I hate it. I hate that some kid probably lost her grandma because I was being careless.”
Will Never Be The Same
[Alexander Kirch][1]/Shutterstock
[1]: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Alexander Kirch
“When I was 17, someone broke into my house when it was just me and my younger sister home. I heard him kick in a window so I grabbed my father’s weapon, ran upstairs to my sister’s room (she was asleep), locked us in and called the police. He heard me running through the house and knew where I was. He started taunting me saying he would kill us if we didn’t stay quiet. Then he tried to break down the bedroom door. I was on the phone with the dispatcher and was screaming at him that I had a loaded weapon and would shoot him. I remember screaming and screaming and my sister crying. Then the lock broke and I asked the dispatcher if I could shoot. They said yes, so I did. And he died. And I am a killer. It’s hard to live in normal society being a killer. 15 years later and even though I am married and have a good job I still don’t think of myself as a regular person.”
From Now On Daddy Works Alone
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“When I was about 9, my dad was fixing the dishwasher. I was asking him about some nonsense, and I was a fidgety kid. I flipped the switch that starts the dishwasher, and some moving parts started whirring about a half inch from his hand. It could have ground his hand off, and he could have bled out on the kitchen floor. I never saw him as shaken as he was in that moment. He also made sure to cut power whenever he did anything like that for the rest of his life.”