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I Could Have Died, A Lot

An exciting childhood

By Heather LunsfordPublished about a year ago 5 min read
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I Could Have Died, A Lot
Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

I am either a very fortunate person or a very unfortunate person, depending on how you look at it. I choose to go with fortunate. From time to time my kids make me list all the times I could have died. This is not going to be a complete list but here are some of the ways I could have died.

My birth is a bit of a family story. I have heard it many ways but the gist is always that my mothers water broke but she had no contractions. The doctor felt my mother was his patient and I was expendable. Finally a nurse explained things to my dad and he carried my mother out of that hospital into my grandparents Thunderbird. by grandfather sped to another town with another hospital, where they induced contractions and I was born, not brain dead like the first Dr said I would be.

A couple weeks after that I got sick with double pneumonia, meaning it was in both of my lungs. I was in the hospital for weeks. I have no memory but it counts.

A couple months later my mom was going somewhere and after starting the car and laying me on the front seat, (it was 1972, this was totally legal and normal, which is not to say it was a good idea) she went back into the house for something she forgot. The running car started on fire. A neighbor saw what was happening and ran out and saved me.

Drowning was apparently a constant threat. I think I nearly drowned about 4 times before I learned how to swim. I will just share the first one, it is one of my earliest memories. We were visiting our grandmother in California and spending a day at the beach. My brother who was probably 7 or 8 and I, 3 or 4 at the time were playing on the beach and a huge wave came up and washed us out to sea. Our older siblings saw what was going on and saved us. All I remember were lots of bubbles then waking up on the beach. This is the only one of my stories that include actual resuscitation. So maybe it is the closest I came to actual death.

On another family trip we went to an amusement park. I have no idea which one or even which state it was in. There was a roller coaster and everyone but my mom went on it. There was no "you must be this tall" sign but for safety they made me ride with my dad. (again this is 1976 ish safety has come a long way.) The only thing I remember was at the top of one of the hills where the thing starts going back down I kept going up. My dad caught me by the foot and pulled me back in.

I have been shocked with electricity many times. Changing a outlet, cleaning fluorescent lights, even an electric fence once or twice. these are not near death experiences. But when I was 10 I was getting into a motor home that had a short and I got electrocuted. That is very different from a shock. When you are electrocuted your muscles contract and you cant let go of the thing that you touched, then your organs begin to contract. First you pee yourself then your heart stops, or explodes. Some time after the part where I peed myself and before my heart exploded my dad unplugged the thing.

My dad was a logger when I was a kid and I was always in the woods with him if I wasn't at school. The woods is a dangerous place and my dad did try to be safe but you really cant eliminate all the risk. We all had jobs to do. I can trace my age by what my job was. There was a time my job was to carry gas oil and water to the cutters. I got to the spot they were cutting a little early and sat down on a log near where my dad was cutting trees. All of a sudden I was surrounded by pine tree. Not one limb touched me but they were all around me.

I have had a couple rattlesnake run ins. Once one striked at me and caught my pant leg. We were in rough country miles from help. Another time I was swimming in the same creek all by myself and I came up from under the water to a coiled rattlesnake inches from my face.

As I got older the near deaths got less frequent. But I was nearly hit by a train at a stop with no cross bars. I was grabbed by a friend as I was about to step off the curb in front of a city bus. And once again I was nearly swept out to sea by a rogue wave.

There are things I don't count but they made for interesting days, car wrecks are always a near miss, people die in what seems to be small car crashes and I have been in a lot of those. Only 2 when I was driving and I was young then. The only real injury I had was on my 8th birthday, that wreck let to 16 stitches in my lip. There are probably more these are just the ones that popped into my head at the moment.

My latest and perhaps greatest cheating death is that I have had terminal cancer for 6 years now and I'm not dead yet.

Let me know in the comments if there are any of these you want a whole story about. And as always thank you for taking the time to read this. If you liked it feel free to give it a heart and consider following me. If you really really liked it you could consider leaving a tip. No pressure just happy if your enjoyed it.

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About the Creator

Heather Lunsford

I am a 50 something year old mother of grown children with stage 4 breast cancer. I have been told I should write a book about my life. I am probably never going to do that, but I do want to record some of my stories, so here we go.

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Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

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  • Test11 months ago

    You are a skilled storyteller. It was an odd idea for a story, I suppose, but you really made it work in a compelling way. Nice job.💙Anneliese

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