Image Credit: Andrea Kirkby

In keeping with the Steemit habit of daily themes, @andrei recently posted “How I Dodged Death” and mentioned it on slack. I responded that I too should have been in the ground many times by now and I was going to write about it … so here it is! :)

This is something I’ve only mentioned a few times to a few people and one of my friends I’ve told these stories to said one day we should make a movie out of my fucked up, yet quite entertaining, life. Here are some previous examples for reference, “I Played Poker with a Murderer” and “I Grew Up in a Nudist Camp - and Loved It!”.

Now back to my “Brushes with Death”. I’m not really sure of the best way to write about my life’s series of unfortunate events, but I guess the best way is chronologically. So I will do my best to entertain you with some really messed up stories of how I should probably be dead, but for some reason I survived.

Sibling Rivalries

Image Credit: Aimanness Photography

I don’t remember this incident, but I have heard about it from both my Mother when I was young and a friend of my brothers when I was much older, which reinforced my Mothers version. In all the years between the two telling’s of the story I’d never heard it mentioned and never really thought about it much.

My brother is somewhat of an asshole and I’m sure people who know me AFK that are on Steem will likely attest to this in the comments if they come across this post. When I was 6 months old, so the story goes, my older brother was quite a bit jealous of me. So as I’m in the bath and my Mother has left the bathroom, he was left to watch me and decided it was a good time to take me out.

No not out of the water, out of this life for good!

He was 4-½ years old and proceeded to run more water into the bathtub and force my head under the water. He held me down until I went out and when my Mom came back in and saw what was going on she snatched me out of the water and was able to resuscitate me. I got lucky.

I never heard what his punishment was for trying to kill me, outside of having to watch me become the favorite child of our parents and him becoming eaten up even more by jealousy throughout his life. Decades later my brother got into an argument with a friend of his and I contacted this person on a forum asking about the details of the situation, because my brother was telling me a version I just didn’t believe to be true.

His friend proceeds to fill me in on his version and throws in, “Did you know that your brother told me that he tried to drown you when you were 6 months old?”. It had been nearly 30 years since I’d heard the story from my Mom, but now I knew for sure it went down just like she had told me. For some reason I became angry with my brother, even though this happened decades earlier, it was the beginning of the end of our tumultuous relationship.

Car’s And Little Kids Don’t Mix

I’m not sure if I actually remember this story from telling it repeatedly when I was younger or if I just remember hearing it from my parents when I was younger. 

When I was four years old we lived in a circle. I had just received a brand new pedal go-kart that I’m pretty sure I loved, because I’ve seen many pictures of me riding it in the short time it existed. 

One day I was outside by myself riding in the circle. This was back when parents in America let four year old’s play outside by themselves, which means it was a long time ago. While I’m pretending to be a race car driver going around in the circle I noticed a car backing down a driveway.

I say I noticed it, because what probably saved me somewhat was the fact that I put my hand up in front of my head right before the ladies bumper plowed into my skull.

The rest I know for a fact that I don’t remember, but this was how it was told to me over and over again. Our neighbor thought she had run over her trash can, because it was trash day and her cans were sitting out in the street for pick up. This is the only reason she stopped, to get her trash can from under the car.

When she got out she realized it wasn’t her trash can, so she went behind the car to see what she had hit. Underneath her car was me and my pedal go-kart. Lucky for me, if you can call it luck in this situation, she hit me dead center near her license plate and I was not crushed to death under her tires.

She started screaming for help and my Dad, who was probably supposed to be watching me instead of watching television, came outside and pulled me out from underneath her car and rushed me to the hospital. They all thought I was dead I’ve been told. Well, they did until I pooped in the blanket they were using to carry me into the hospital. Trust me, I got to hear that part more than any other over the years!

I managed to come out of this one with nothing more than a broken hand, a concussion (which back then was called, “you got knocked out”) and some scratches here and there. I was very lucky.

The Time I Was Dog Food

Image Credit: Mark Lincoln

This one I’m pretty sure I remember and not just the stories. I have retold this story many times in my life whenever someone wonders why I didn’t hear what they were saying.

One day my brother and I walked to the neighborhood store, which was called “U Totem” back then. On the way home he looked over to me and said, “Let’s race home!”. I was a pretty fast little kid and he knew it, so he cheated and took off in a sprint immediately. 

This pissed me off, because like I said earlier, my brother is an asshole and I wanted to beat him soooo bad. This is when I noticed that I had an opportunity to shave a good distance off of my path compared to his as he rounded a curve in the street. I got the bright idea to cut through someone’s backyard because they had no fence. 

As soon as I get to the end of their driveway and enter the grass to their backyard, I see a big ass German Shepherd looking at me from the other side of the house. I froze immediately, just standing there, staring him down. He however was not staring me down, he began to charge at me. 

Being 8 years old or so at the time, I wasn’t too bright. I see the dog is on a chain and think, “He’s never going to reach me, that chain is going to yank him back!”. So I stood my ground just watching him run at me.

A few seconds later I realized, “This is one long fucking chain!!!”, but it was too late.

That dog was on me like my asshole brother on a 6 month old in a bathtub (see what I did there!). The first thing this dog did was grab my left ear and rip it damn near off my head. I mean he was really going after me non-stop. I was pretty sure this was the end of me on this day.

I had no clue what to do other than scream for help and cry, because by now I had seen the blood on my hands, and whenever I saw my own blood, I freaked out! I couldn’t get this dog off of me, he seemed to be almost as big as I was and probably weighed about as much as I did, because I was a scrawny little kid.

Finally I managed to get my hands around his snout and somewhat hold his mouth closed so he couldn’t bite me any more. A few seconds later my brother shows up and redeems himself for trying to kill me earlier in my life. He knocked the dog off of me and the dog then pounces on him. 

My brother is now holding the dog’s snout so it doesn’t bite him and I’m wanting to just leave and get home as fast as possible. I mean, this is the asshole that tried to drown me and beat me up most of my childhood years. I’m pretty certain that the last thing on my mind was saving him. But he was yelling for help so I didn’t leave. 

I found a stick and poked at the dogs eyes while attempting to hold my now floppy ear to my head as blood streamed down my body and seeped into my clothes. At some point I must have hurt the dog enough because he ran off yelping and we were able to escape.

The rest of the way home consisted of me screaming my lungs out and running.

We lived in a rather new neighborhood at the time and there were men still building houses. As I would run by a house that was being built I can remember looking up and seeing the guys stop all of their hammering and saws to look at the screaming bloody mess running down the street, probably wondering what the hell was going on.

Once we made it to the house I couldn’t even speak, I’m just crying my eyes out and trying to catch my breath. My brother tells our Dad what happened and he threw me in the car as fast as he could. From that point on I don’t remember anything. I lost a lot of blood and just passed out in the back of the car.

When I woke up, my ear was reattached to my head but I noticed I could not hear as well out of that ear. I had quite a few stitches and several scars from the dogs teeth around my head and hands for years. But the dog ended up getting the worst of this exchange. Animal control came and picked him up and euthanized him. I remember asking my father repeatedly, “Did they kill him? Are you sure they killed him?”. At the time, I never wanted anything more dead in my life than that dog.

To this day I don’t really like dogs all that much. I’ve had a few of my own since then, but never really became attached to them and when I see dogs walking around loose, I pretty much begin to fear them, and they know it. For that reason, I try to avoid dogs as much as possible, unless others are around to tend to them. 

Motorcycle Sandwich

Vehicles don’t like me. I don’t know what it is, but they seem to have it out for me about as much as dogs and brothers. From the time I was seven years old I rode motorcycles in The Big Thicket. My Dad worked for Honda and he bought all of us motorcycles. Mine was a Honda MR50 and I had that little thing for years.

I loved riding bikes out in the woods. We started off with a tent and years later my Dad bought a camping trailer and it was just the coolest thing to do every weekend. Except one weekend when we went riding with some neighbors.

The Big Thicket had trails all through it and there were races out there sometimes. But the main way to get to some trails was by using dirt access roads that tanker trucks used. After a while these trucks would make tire ruts in these roads and they would fill up with gravel so they were hard to see at times.

One afternoon we’re riding as a group and I’m in the front with the other kids with all the parents riding behind us. Sure enough I was unlucky enough to find one of these truck’s tire ruts full of gravel and I hit it going about 25MPH, which was probably the top speed of my little bike.

My handle bars began to rock back and forth and I lost control, eventually falling over and ending up laying on top of my bike spinning around on the gravel. That’s all I remember, but I got to hear the rest many times over the years.

Our neighbor was directly behind me on a pretty good sized bike and he was a big burly man. He saw me go down but had no way to avoid hitting me with his bike because he was sandwiched in the middle of the other parents. So being the nice guy he was his immediate reaction was to jump off his bike so he didn’t land on top of me as well.

The only problem was, his bike still hit me, and it hit me hard! His Suzuki went over my back, then it fell on top of me, creating a little kid sandwich between my bike and his. I spun around a few more times between the bikes and finally came to a motionless rest in the middle of the road. Our neighbor ended up losing most of the skin off of one of his forearms when he hit the gravel.

The next thing I remember is waking up laying down on the side of the road with my head on my helmet and everyone crying. They all thought I was dead or seriously injured and we were out in the middle of nowhere with no help in sight. When I woke up, I looked over at my Dad who was just bawling his eyes out and I called out to him letting him know I was OK.

My back had the Suzuki’s tire print indented into my skin and I had a bone poking in my chest that wasn’t there before, but otherwise I was doing pretty good! I was sore as hell and once they determined I was going to survive, we needed to get back to camp.

My bike’s handle bars were stuck to one side, yet my front tire was still facing forward. So as I’m riding back to camp like this I had to stop and have someone pick up my front end and move it to the left to make a left turn. We got back to camp, packed up and went straight home to get me checked out.

Honorable Mentions

Image Credit: Frank de Kleine

This turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated and I’m not even halfway through! So I’m going to stop here and simply list some other highlights of my “Brushes With Death” that weren’t quit as “deathy” as the others, but sucked all the same.

• Fell off a top bunk and fractured my skull.
• Fell through a glass sliding door head first. Never let your kids put their feet onto a wall and lean backwards in a chair.
• Took a baseball bat to the temple. Ouch!
• Took a hatchet to the knee. Trust me, you don’t want to see the inside of your body. It’s pretty gross.
• Bit by something in the middle of nowhere in a Lake. I never saw what it was, but it got me good. Luckily we reached a hospital in time as my entire foot swelled and turned dark purple. It was the worst Summer ever soaking my foot in near boiling water and taking medication until they squeezed my foot and puss shot up to the ceiling. Gross!

Well that’s what happened to me before the age of 13. It’s not an exhaustive list, but those are the major “near death”, or as close as I ever want to be again, experiences in my early years. I hope you enjoyed reading about my misery. Join me next time when I tell you about running away (literally) from home, twice! :)