You're lucky to be alive, because when you were a kid you ______?

almost fell down a 15 storey building. Fortunatelty or unfortunately I had(have) a fast-acting, wide-awake mom who got there at the right moment!

fell throat first onto a clothesline.
Could not breathe properly for half an hour afterwards.

Almost thew myself down my school in my depression.

When I was a kid, I was stupid….that’s what almost killed me, countless times.
If I made a list of each encounter that could have killed me, it would take several hours if not days to write down.

“Played” in an abandoned cinder block factory for a few years.

Hitched rides on the back of passing, rusty, old, freight trains into the city.

Climbed to the top of a very tall billboard overhanging a busy highway.

Rode my bike on the elevated median strip down the middle of a busy highway.

Walked along a semi-frozen river in the dead of winter for about a mile or two.

Plus the usual: climbed trees, hopped fences, rode bikes over ramps and off curbs, etc.

^^ This was all between age 11 and 15. Then I got my license, and the answer was basically “drive like a maniac”.

@cookieman sound like a stuntman!

Okay, but I did quite a few stupid things. At four years old I drank a bunch of pipeline cleaner acid, at 8 I was riding my bike like a wildman and popped a wheely and caught the front wheel in the rope swing we had in the barn. That slammed me into the concrete barn floor. I don’t know how long I was out on that one. We also used to like to jump off the barn beams into the hay. One time I missed the hay. Wood doesn’t make a nice landing. There was also the filling the gas tank of the mower and getting a shitload of gasoline right in the face. That hurt a bit. Want me to go on?

@Adirondackwannabe
Yes, please.

You would want me to go on wouldn’t you?

I am dripping. Reading about how people almost died… hmm hmmm.

I don’t know how to take you. Sometimes you’re so nice and sometimes you’re really rough. Laughs, okay, worst one, when I was driving, I had the big V-8 with a wide tires. If I threw it into a 20 MPH corner when it was wet and floored the gas pedal it would kick sideways and I could fly threw the corner. I tried it a bit too fast and it didn’t work. I woke up looking down at the roadway hanging from my seatbelts and shoulder harness. That one cost me 18 months of severe back pain.

There were so many instances of craziness, I wouldn’t know where to start.

For my fifth Christmas, I received a Superman costume (complete with cape!) and while everybody else was busy opening their presents, I climbed to the top of the barn and leapt into space. I woke up in my mother’s lap in the front seat of the car while my father was driving us to the hospital like a bat out of hell. I had a mild concussion, but was otherwise fine.

@Espiritus_Corvus Hey, if they give you the cape, you have to try it out.

Once upon a time I raced my bike down a hill.
At full speed I turned into a bend at the precise moment a car was about to exit.
I passed the car with maybe a 5cm gap between me and the side of the car.

Hopped a moving train. Hitch hiked. Jumped off a bridge because everyone else was doing it.

I had a friend that had a badassed motorcycle. He was doing about 130 or 140 MPH and he came on a construction site, he split the DOT vehicles.

…were rescued from the bullrushes by one of Pharoah’s maidens.

Ran faster and faster down a steep hill in the woods until I finally fell and hit my head on a boulder. I was alone, so I don’t know if I blacked out, but it raised a black knot on my forehead literally the size of ½ an egg. Forever changed the landscape of my skull.
We were on vacation at a cabin in the Ozarks, so it was never looked at by a doctor, and I don’t remember even putting ice on it.

I remember getting a stick about the size of a pencil jammed in my calf about an inch+ before it broke off. I was in the woods alone so I hobbled around for a while, then went home and treated it like a extra big splinter – pulled it out, disinfected and bandaged.

One thing I remember freaking me out the most was running through the yard and stepping on a garden hose, then realizing I was too far from the house for hose. Also the time I felt a bump on my ankle and looked down to see the snake venom down my harness boot. Again, alone in the woods, far from home.

The scariest spill I remember having as a kid—in retrospect, probably the most dangerous—was off my bike. I was pedaling very fast, and when my tire hit a curb I flipped me over the handlebars, hitting the top of my head on the pavement. I can still see what I saw then: the entire landscape in front my eyes sort of flattened out. Minor concussion, I guess. A passing car stopped and a stranger took me to my house, which was about three blocks away. I don’t remember anything else about the incident.

Drowned.
I was at the bottom of a swimming pool for a bit. I remember passing out. I was pulled out just in time.
Regardless, I have never had a fear of water.

God. Because as a kid…I had the parents I did…who were probably no different than the other parents of the time, early 60’s.

We lived with a salt water canal in my back yard in Florida, which rose and fell with the tides. No fences. I was 5 -8 years old. Mom kept ZERO eyes on me, as did all the mothers of the other kids in the neighborhood. I was expected to watch out for my little sister, who was 3 years younger than me. She fell off the seawall once. She was 3 or 4. Thank God the tide was out, because I know I would have gone in after her, and I couldn’t swim either.

There was an island over yonder, in Tampa bay. My little girlfriend procured a row boat. We wanted to go across the bay to the island and have a picnic lunch. Told Mom. She packed a lunch and sent us on our way. No life jacket. I think I was 7 at the time, my friend was 8. I didn’t think we were going to make it back. In retrospect we were probably pulling against the tide on the way back. This was Florida. There were probably alligators and venomous snakes on the island.

Those metal roller skates that strap on to your shoes..yeah. Those tried to kill me on more than one occasion.

Mom would send me to the convenience store, which meant I had to cross a very busy, 2 lane highway, by my self.

I was going to add my own example of death defying youthful cluelessness until I read the episodes above and realized that if we all have these examples and yet the overwhelming majority of kids escape the perils of childhood judgement, it can’t be that big a deal.

Had numerous horse wrecks and falls, including the worst, being run over by a pony that stepped on my knee and abdomen and narrowly missed my chest. I had perfect horse shoe shaped bruises on my stomach and couldn’t walk for several weeks from the torn ligaments in my knee. As a teen I jumped off of may cliffs and bridges into our local river and was quite the little rafting/kayaking babe. I had numerous brushes with drowning from exhaustion and once was slammed back first in rough water into the pillar of a bridge and had the wind knocked out of me.

The stupidist move was shooting the rapids on a moonless night under the influence of LSD. We survived. :-)

@ZEPHYRA: Just dumb and reckless (like most stuff listed here).

The condition of believing you are immortal while wanting to feel alive.

I was 12, and it was winter in the small rural Illinois town. Most of the snow from the plows had been deposited in one pile, at the top of a hill, across a sidewalk that went down to the railroad crossing. February had brought an unusually early thaw, melting most of the snow and ice, so Charlie and I got our bikes out to the first kids in town to ride that year. We stopped at “Mrs. T’s” corner store to get a drink. We saw that snow pile and just knew we had to jump it. we rode up to the crest, lifted the handlebars, and proceeded to wheelie down the back side…and this was decades before anyone had heard of “BMX”!

Anyway, I decided to go over a spot neither of us had traversed. Charlie warned me not to, but I thought I would get enough speed to be able to glide right on over. I made it up the hill. The front wheel went over the ridge; the rear wheel did not. The bike stopped; I did not; I flew over the handlebars, carrying the bike behind me, landing nose and knuckles about 15 feet past the snowpile. I remember seeing stars, but I’m not sure if I blacked out or not. The next thing I remember is some workers from the railroad carrying me over to Mrs. T’s for first aid.

Ran away all the time. I was on the streets of downtown LA in the wee hours. I took rides from people I didn’t know. Oy.

Oy.

Vey.

I can’t even begin to describe…

I hitchhiked a few times as a teen, mostly with friends, once by myself.

I also used to sometimes walk home late at night, going through some bad neighborhoods to get to my good neighborhood. The walk was a few miles – about an hour or hour and a half walk.

We never saw a real doctor it was always a vet for large animals so: my brother lit an m80 (¼ stick of dynamite) in a bucket, pieces of plastic lodged into our faces and arms. Hit by a car whilst riding my bike. Lived a dream life for a couple days after waking up, had no idea where I was. The worst: sunbathing my 12 year old self next to the woodpile. When I turned over, I was bitten by a brown snake and airlifted to hospital for anti venom. A year of physiotherapy.

depressed and had an eating disorder.

A violent, sociopathic boyfriend in my teenage years.

I don’t know if this would have killed me, but I loved the taste of aspirin before it got the coating on it. I would put an aspirin on my tongue and love that bitter sourness. I’d eat 3 – 4 aspirin a day every day.

^eww

I used to eat a spoonful of Crisco a few days a week….

@keobooks I like the taste of aspirin too!
I remember loving the orange flavored baby aspirins as a kid and I like the regular adult flavor too.

Mmmm!

I saved my friend’s life as a kid, which endangered my own. I wrote this in a question here like, years ago…don’t know which thread now. But this is what happened, it was Winter and my friend and I were playing around on the frozen river. On the shore there was one of those big sewer things that dumps sewer water into the river. Since it’s warm in there, the water around it wasn’t frozen. My friend decides to go right on the edge of the ice near the sewer mouth and I go, dude don’t go there, the ice will break. But she just goes, no it won’t, goes over there, crouches down on the ice and what do you know, it breaks and she falls in.

At first I try to shout encouragements at her like, come on, you can do it! as she’s trying to climb back out. She was holding on to the edge of the ice but couldn’t do much more, so I just said fuck it, dashed over there, grabbed the back of her jacket and yanked her out. So, I was pretty lucky the ice didn’t break under me. If we both were in the water, I think we might be dead today. We had on our big puffy winter coats, that shit absorbs water like mad. And I don’t know how long you can just sit in water in the middle of Winter before freezing, even if we had something to hold on to. This was right besides a busy bridge, so maybe someone would have seen us eventually. Hell for all I know, someone did.

So when she was out, we bolted to the other side of the river and she hugged me haha. Then we went to this kid’s club thing where you can hang out, play air hockey and shit. She didn’t want to tell her mom what happened, because her mom didn’t want her to ever go play near the river. The mother actually lost her first daughter, who drowned in the river, so…she dried her clothes in that club, and we never told anybody. She didn’t tell her mom, I didn’t tell my dad.
But that was a close call for both of us, I knew it then, and I know it now.

That was extremely brave and a little nuts. Walking on ice after it has just broke was nuts, I’d do my belly crawl.

I swam in 62 to 64 degree F water last year and I had to concentrate and focus to stay on the surface. She was damn lucky you were there and willing to risk it.

I was lucky I didn’t fall in, too. Suprisingly, she didn’t seem affected by the cold water much, although that’s probably because she was freaking out. Plus I guess big jackets protect you, at least, from the initial impact. And third reason, the water from the sewer was warmer. Still. Looked pretty fuckin cold to me lol.

Well, the stress and adrenaline probably helped. Plus the big jackets do help. But you don’t have long in that cold water. But sewer water gross. I might have thrown her back in. :)