What's Going Through Your Head When You Are Certain You Are About to Die? | People Stories #10

serious redditors who've been 100 certain they're about to die what was going through your head at that moment when i was in college i got held up at gunpoint at half-price books of all places i wasn't scared of dying i just remember thinking that i hoped it wouldn't be hard to find my body i didn't want my parents to be put through that they ended up letting me go when a few other people came out of the store and called the cops i told my dad once about the thoughts i had in those five minutes he tied up and told me to never tell my mom i actually fell 16 feet at one point through a shoddy football stadium onto concrete i basically slipped on nachos and went through an opening nowadays i know that people can survive that but in my head as i was falling everything was in slow motion and i thought man this is a really stupid way to die man i'm so stupid trying to save a drowning woman she was big and panicking so she was pushing me down trying to keep herself above water after struggling for quite a while i started to go under the water all i thought about was my three young kids at home aren't going to have a dad and i feel so foolish trying to save this lady weirdest feeling i swam to the surface and we made one last push for the shore someone caught us halfway back we both made it and i laid on the shore and vomited i was 10 minutes into a three-hour flight and seated in the back row next to the toilet there was a huge bang the lights in the cabin flickered and dimmed the plane wobbled hard in the air i could smell smoke instantly and a near-deafening bad engine sound started up i looked over at the flight attendant who was still strapped to the fold down seat right next to me she has a look of pure terror on her face that's when i knew i was going to die i was profoundly payoff i thought rick this is how i go now i thought about all of the crap i made it through in life and really regretted that i wouldn't get to continue that progress i was mad that i was going to die when traveling for work i thought about trying to text the people i love but didn't want to mess with the navigation systems of the plane in case there was some way we could survive we had lost an engine because we struck a goose the plane turned around and returned to the airport easily and safely as we still had three of four engines it always cheers me up to know that i will never be flying anywhere where we can't reach an airfield if we lost an engine even a twin engine airliner like the 777 can get home from over the north pole on just the one you're in a pickle with a total engine failure but they're so rare they're not worth worrying about as a passenger i was in tokyo on the metro in a long tunnel my phone and everyone else's phone in the car went off at full volume it was the earthquake warning system 9.1 magnitude quake coming in 13 seconds protect your head there wasn't any time the train bounded forward suddenly at full power apparently in an effort to escape the tunnel and give us a sliver of hope no one in the car said a word i thought ha this is really going to be something i knew that even if i survived the initial shock i'd be trapped in a tunnel if we'd gotten out i'd die eventually anyway just by being surrounded by flooded raised magacity it was a false alarm the system had never misfired before that day a 9.1 earthquake under tokyo bay would have decimated the city first and then washed away the loose ends with a series of aftersharks and tsunamis comma coming in 13 seconds that's terrifying why won't he help me i was in a swimming pool when i was maybe nine stroke ten my brother who was about six at the time couldn't swim and he was attempting to hold himself above the water by pushing me beneath it we were both struggling to stay afloat screaming for help and a man was stood on the bridge smiling at us i don't think he spoke english and maybe he thought we were just playing around but he didn't bat an eyelid that was the grim reaper dude i was taken to hospital for extremely low blood pressure the only thing i could think of was wow this is peaceful had no idea how close to death i was at the time a doc later told me that if i had waited 20 minutes to come to the air i would not have survived had a similar experience with a ruptured appendix only it wasn't so much me waiting as the ambulance driver wheeled me back out to the waiting room after they asked me intake questions and left me there for a half an hour i was in surgery less than 20 minutes after that can't honestly say i thought it was peaceful though i was in iraq working as security for eod bomb disposal our army team had rotated back to the states and we were now working with an air force team they were blowing up some unexploded ordnance and they placed the charge wrong which caused a 155 millimeter alum round big flaming artillery shell full of white phosphorus to be launched at my humvee i'm standing in the gunners hatch watching this bull of fiery death fly my way and all i can think is that i managed to survive insurgents for over a year and i'm going to get killed by the air force after only a week you would have been that guy they used to scare new recruits glad you're okay though i fainted flying off the highway after we hit a patch of ice after we spun a few times and were heading for the edge of the highway and i knew that we were going off and that i was about to die out i went rolled a few times and landed in a snow bank i came to hanging upside down banged up a bit but still alive much to my surprise the fainting may have helped you escape more serious injury oddly enough i fell down a rock face some years ago it probably only took a few seconds tops but it felt like ages my mind was racing thinking what to do while simultaneously panicking so hard that i couldn't do even the most basic thing that day i learned that when in mortal peril i won't have any bright ideas to save my life i also won't have any cool last words but i will let out a rather unmanly whimper in your defense you fell down a rock face not like there's anything but nothing on the way down i was about 10 years old and down at the beach with my brothers the waves coming in were pretty decent two foot at shore three or four foot further out my brothers were good swimmers so they headed straight out to the back with their surfboards i was stuck on the two footers with a scrappy foam rectangle board i decided to try a bigger wave and instant regret set in the board flipped forward knocking me off and the water was no longer shallow enough for my feet to touch the bottom i tried making my way to shore but the water was pulling me back every time i surfaced i was met with a wave to the face and a mouth full of sea water every time i went under all i could hear was the peaceful bloop bloop sound you hear when cameras go underwater with microphones i was in full panic mode and was sure i would drown until i felt something under me pushing me to the surface i couldn't think and was still in survival mode clawing upwards to keep my head above water as this thing under me kept pushing i realized i was moving closer to the shore and suddenly the giant waves were now two footers again that's when i planted my feet into the sand and bolted to the shore crying my eyes out turns out the thing under me was my brother's friend who had been at the beach he told me he was under me trying to put me on his shoulders and my kicking made it much harder for him he was only two years older than me but god dang old he hadn't been there i wouldn't be here today probably to answer arp's question specifically it was terrifying being underwater felt isolated because you can't hear anything and once your head goes above you hear the waves crashing people laughing playing near you and i felt alone and scared out of my mind i may have been crying screaming but i don't remember it was all mostly shock that i was dying may have been a riptide i got caught in one and sucked out about 50 meters same story totally would have died if a surfer hadn't happened to be out there first ambush i was ever in in afghanistan 2012 i had been to iraq and been through a few fire fights and ieds but this was different in many ways first off the fighters in afghanistan were a lot more tenacious in fire fighting they normally stuck around and maneuvered on us all the way up until either they figured they had lost lost two men a fighter or air support showed up but this was my first real contact against them what started the whole thing off was what seemed like a barrage of rpg fire seemed like 10 15 all fired in rapid succession and they fired them all down our line of dismounted soldiers and vehicles then came the ak and pkm machine gun fire it was relentless and accurate while my position was not receiving contact at the time i immediately got a call that three of my soldiers were pinned down receiving fire from two different directions from about 75 meters away so i made a decision and told my squad we were going to support them here's the kicker i'm pretty sure they baited us as soon as we grouped up and started maneuvering to help we immediately came under withering pkm fire like they knew exactly where we were going to come from to support them in two conflicts i've never had so many rounds impact next to over and around me than i did at that particular moment the crack snap of a bullet traveling at supersonic speeds as it flies past you from a near miss is a terrifying sound and one i will never forget miraculously we all got past this linear danger area without getting shot and dove into a wadi stream bed that had us undercover i really think that the dude on the other end of the machine gun had too many targets to choose from and just fired wantonly hoping to land a shot i had one soldier with a bullet hole through equipment and two more including myself with bullet fragments in various places but no casualties i've been through many near-death situations before and after but this one sticks in my mind for some reason i was in afghanistan we had been loading up some aerial flares they are used to light up an entire battlefield we have to stuff them into the pods with a big butt metal pole because a crapton of them go into a pod i'm talking we have at least two three full pod loads ready in the building that we're working out of and the pods are on trailers so we're stuffing these things in which are like three feet long and the guy holding the pole drops it which knocks off the initiator cap so here we are like eight of us and we hear the countdown buzzing off so instantly it's all frick frick frick frick frick we raise alarm start telling everyone to get out now i know we got max 30 seconds to go the first guy who gets to the door is freaking fiddling with it and can't open it so i push him out the way open the door and we get out i start running for the first bunker since i know i sure as crap can't make it to the second bunker which everyone else continued on too so i got to the first bunker and just said frickit if i'm gonna die i wanna see some cool crap at least it didn't detonate and then we found out that not only did the cap have to initiate but it also has to have pressure from the canopy as it's floating slowly down we just taped on the cap and continued on like nothing it also has to have pressure from the canopy as it's floating slowly down someday you need to find the engineer that designed the redundancies and buy him a beer it was around 10 years ago in december i was playing ice hockey and i have a guy a shove and somehow his skate came up and sliced my neck open i remember falling to the ground and holding my neck with my hockey glove then all the guys from both teams started throwing their towels over to me i looked around and there was nothing but blood around me his skate had hit the artery in my neck i lay there thinking that my life was going to end i started thinking of the flights with my grandfather in his beachcraft bonanza and all the talks we had and how i wasn't really going to be experiencing anything anymore just around that time a guy that worked at the rink named elgin ran onto the eyes and started propping my head and telling me a story back when he was in vietnam and a guy in his platoon got a similar injury then he told me he didn't make it so that was amplifying my thoughts what seemed like a minutes later the fire department was trying to get onto the ice i thought i would be dead if i didn't get off the ice and over to where they were because they were slipping and sliding all over the place so my dumbbell gets onto my feet and skates off the ice right over to the stretcher and they started getting all my equipment off i have a leopard skin goalie cup that i have had since i saw it and it's my favorite piece of equipment because guys will always talk about how bad acid is they wanted to cut it off i told them no way and heck i am whisked away in the ambulance and they are constantly reading out my stats little did i know how low they were due to loss of blood we get to the first hospital and the doctor says i can't do that my mind is just like what the freak you're a doctor you should be able to stitch me back up and i would be home and a few then we call the next hospital and they said that they don't have that kind of trauma doctor there so we drive to the hospital downtown i remember that they already had the or prepped for me crazy thing was i was apologizing to them for freaking up their night i remember praying with a nurse and saying call my grandparents at their house gave them their number and asked if something happened to tell them that i love them i awoke and i was still alive i later learned that i had 30 seconds worth of blood in my body or i wouldn't be typing right now first time i have written on reddit reading out my stats damn it johnson he's got 2.930 save percentage there's no way we can let him die had a really crappy boyfriend in college start hitting me around the neck and head with a cat scratching post the kind that's just a pole on a heavy base i remember hoping that he would at least call the police so that my mom would know what happened to me and being scared that he would bury somewhere and lie about it so they would never find me then i blacked out and woke up in the shower he tried to convince me that i had slipped and fallen please tell me they put that psycho away for attempted murder that slow motion feeling is real your mind is trying to process but it seems surreal wow lots of great feedback it is hard to imagine such a universal feeling yes i was driving way too fast on an old country road and flew off into a field of crops time passed so slow and my vision was so sharp i could watch bits of plant matter fly in one window and out the other it was pretty awesome especially since i didn't die or get hurt lost the car though unfamiliar road early morning i was late for school and decided to take what i hoped was a shortcut and take it at unadvisable speeds black ice 40 miles an hour heading towards a tea intersection with a huge oak tree directly on the opposite side of the road the brakes they do nothing this was 1989 my car was an emerald green 1972 ford pinto it barely had seat beats airbags weren't even science fiction yet i am going to die this realization the certainty that these are the last seconds i have on earth floods my system with adrenaline instantly the air feels like it drops 30 degrees and presses on me three times as hard and my last thought is that my mother is going to be so disappointed with me but two other things happen i become extremely calm and the world slows to a crawl i can see the dusk boats in the air catching the morning light the varied colors and types of flowers in the past flanking the driveway of the house on the corner to my right i can no longer hear my cassette deck it suddenly feels like i have all the time in the world to figure a way out of this and i do i crank the steering wheel hard left putting me into a spin and then try to push the accelerator pedal through the floor when the nose of my car is facing the way i came the fates are kind it works bleeding off most of the cars speed and then the engine dies and i roll backwards into the driveway i'd seen a few hours or heartbeats i go and break to a stop i sit there shaking for 20 minutes i missed my classes that day and i've never driven that road again my last thought would have been oh man i'm going to die in a freaking pinto disgustingly that i didn't care if those around me were killed just as long as i got out alive the knowledge of that being my thought process at the time has haunted me my entire life after people asking i was in a national safari park at night in zimbabwe with some friends on a school trip aged around 15 strokes 16 we were told not to walk around at night because of honey badgers and other dangerous animals but we wanted to go and see the watering hole at night so decided to ignore that advice so we start walking towards the watering hole in almost pitch black save a few lamps here and there halfway to the watering hole we heard the bush rustle around 5 meters from the path we were walking on followed by an unmistakable lion's roar none of us either bother to look and all run madly towards the watering hole where we know there's a fence i've never run so fast in my life all i remember is being terrified i'd trip over my flip-flops and wishing that the lion would go for one of the people behind me and not for me it's that final thought that fricks with me the next morning we went and saw that two three meters from the path there was a fence that in the darkness we couldn't see obviously the lion was directly behind the fence i think the majority of people feel like this if they are honest with themselves it is our survival instinct one day when i was briefly home alone at 13 i jumped into my backyard pool wearing a t-shirt over my bathing suit my shirt had a very tight neck but it was just the shirt i happened to chuck over my bathers and as i jumped into the water the shirt inverted over my head and suction tight around my face i immediately felt so much panic and tried to rip the shirt off every way i could but the combination of the suction power and the tight neckline made me start to see bright white lights and get lazy in my struggle to remove the shirt i felt pain in my chest and realized i was literally just staring at the light holding my breath with a huge final effort i ripped the thing over my head and threw it as far away as i could taking in a massive breath and looking everywhere for my parents then i remembered they were out very briefly and that's all it could have taken to come home to a drowned child then it hit me how silent the whole thing was nobody would have heard me fighting to get this shirt off my face because it was underwater i cried and never told them in january of 2015 i got caught on a burning public transit train the fuse on the track had burnt out and we were waiting for the train to get power again so we could get moving then the whole thing suddenly went up in flames everyone was panicking did i remember sitting there thinking i guess this is how i go totally calm absolute peace it was in that moment that 18 year old me was 100 okay with dying someone managed to pry open an emergency exit and then the adrenaline kicked in so i got out without any injuries but looking back i'm still a bit shaken by my response to the whole thing one a few commenters asked me if this was in dc nope this was in cleveland ohio and the press never reported what happened as a major headline i remember going online and thumbing through newspapers only to find absolutely nothing and there had been people on the phone with a few media outlets and claire right after emergency services got there i left as soon as i saw that everyone had gotten out safe and had a very shaken walk home so to everybody in january 2015 there was a massive train fire in cleveland and nobody knows about it some 50 people almost died because of a crappy public transit malfunction two why was the emergency exit so hard to pry open the cleveland rta trains are notoriously old and badly functioning the operators probably couldn't tell you the last time there's been a safety check of the vehicles they drive there was a similar fire in april 2014 that i found while researching train fires in cleveland after the incident and almost no cleveland-based newspapers media sources reported on it i found like one local news video colon this may or may not be relevant but i work in hospice and death is a very regular thing whether or not this contributed to me sort of accepting my impending death or if it was just a traumatic response is up in the air i 15 yo was in a head-on collision in the middle of a turn on a country road in high school i was being driven by my older girlfriend who was mad at me and driving recklessly coming around a blind corner about 20 miles per hour over the limit there was tall grass on the inside of the turn preventing loss on the other side we met another suv in the middle of the road i remember time seemingly slowing down i didn't have my seat belt on and i remember reaching across her with my left and reaching for the os handle with my right hand the most bizarre part was due to the angle of the accident for a split second i was face to face with the other driver before impact i'll never forget locking eyes with her and seeing the panic in her face after the initial impact the other car stopped but we glanced off spun sideways and when the tires caught the grass on the side of the road we began to roll the turn was near a fairly steep hill with a creek at the bottom the suv slowly rolled down the hill as i continued to hold on to the os handle and my gf for dear life i remember hearing the windows exploding and seeing the pillar in front of me crushing in towards me we finally came to rest with the driver's side in the creek and water flowing in it wasn't very deep so i knew we'd be fine i helped push my gf out of my window as the doors obviously couldn't be opened my gf hurt her neck so i took her to a spot away from the car and walked up the hill to a nearby house i checked on the other driver who was scared but okay after making sure 9-1-1 had been called i helped my gf up the hill and we waited for emergency services and my father to come during that time i still remember realizing how many times i assumed i was dead the impact the repeated roles but oddly enough it was a sense of peace a year or so earlier my aunt had died after a long fight with cancer and i learned early to not fear death as it was unpredictable and was pointless to be scared off it wasn't until i heard a police officer ask how many people died and until i saw the fear in my father's eyes that i broke down my dad was a single parent and half my best friend half my authority figure as his only child i realize then even more now that he was afraid he was coming upon the sight of the death of his only offspring etl dr i felt peace in the moment i felt complete dread sadness fear afterwards if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

Views: 14,440

Rating: 4.9473686 out of 5

Keywords: certain yo uare about to die, fear of death, fearing death, fear for your life, fears, handle fear, coping with fear, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, /r, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub

Id: 1aaWCYb9iwA

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020