There are a handful of brief points in life when time seems to stand still, and the decision you make right there and then has the power to fundamentally change your future for better or for worse. In some cases, your quick reaction can save your life. A stroke of luck or listening to your intuition can protect you from the worst.
We’ve collected some internet users’ stories from a powerful online thread where they shared how key actions and listening to their gut helped them avoid disaster. Scroll down to read them and for a reminder that every tiny little thing that you do really does matter.
#1
Not taking that pill. And then decided to quit all d***s. 🤞🏽🙏🏽 two months sober.
Image source: DonOday_, Towfiqu barbhuiya/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#2
My son is a lifeguard. One of the girls in the pool got a suddenly intense headache. He sat her down and looked her over. There was fluid coming out of her ear. He put her on a spinal board just to be on the safe side, and called emergency. He found out later that the fluid leaking from her ear was spinal fluid she’d had a rupture of some sort that caused her spinal fluid to leak out her ear. If he hadn’t spotted that, she would have died later that day.
Image source: nevertoolate2, Kenny Eliason/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#3
I’m here today because I woke up late on Sept. 11th and decided not to go into work.
Image source: butimstillill, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#4
I went to ride my bike and almost forgot my helmet, I honestly debated grabbing it since I was only planning on doing a few miles; last minute I decided I might as well have it and then half a mile out I got hit by a car. Helmet was busted as hell but other than a concussion I was fine.
Image source: SunfireElfAmaya, Murillo de Paula/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#5
I woke up in the middle of the night because of a voice in my head yelling at me, telling me to lock a nearby door. I reluctantly got up, locked the door then fell back asleep immediately. About 30 minutes later somebody tried breaking in.
Image source: TopSpinner22, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#6
Grabbing a middle schooler’s backpack as she was about to cross without looking and staying on the sidewalk instead of crossing the road. (I was in high school at the time)
The reason?
The red car that had almost ran me over a few weeks before was barrelling down the street at high speed.
Car zooms past at the moment the kid and myself would have been in the middle of the road.
Same driver. I recognized the shade of blonde hair.
Image source: MerryMelody-Symphony
#7
Previously I was a biker. I’m sure you all know the risks. One time it was any other day riding to work. I pull up to the lights and check the car next to me. Girl mid 20s on her phone – revved my engine to get her to look at me. She doesn’t. She proceeds to go straight on into my lane.
I had planned for this. Half the reason I don’t ride now is other people being morons.
Image source: contradiction_762, Atyenz Photographer/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#8
English is not my first language, sorry if I make some mistakes.
My friend and I were chilling at a skate park. There was a Basketball hoop made out of stone. I was sitting right underneath that hoop. Suddenly I got the urge to stand up, Seconds later this massive thing came crashing down where I sat seconds before.
I didn’t comprehend it in that moment but I often think about it from time to time and a shiver goes down my spine.. my friend was scared as f**k..
Image source: anon, Jason Hawke 🇨🇦/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#9
Driving 80 miles per hour on a lonely interstate in the middle of the night. Decided to change lanes for no reason, and ended up missing a crumpled car in the middle of the lane I just left. It looked like a professionally crushed car that had fallen off of a truck. No light lenses or reflectors.
Image source: Upper-Job5130, Sebastian Pociecha/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#10
Was in a bombing. Knelt down to sign something when the detonation happened. Glass shards were a hair away from ki**ling me. The person who gave me the paper to sign technically saved me, they’re fine too.
Image source: anon, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#11
Years ago, I parallel parked my car on a busy street in Hollywood where I lived at the time. The street was on a hill and my car was parked on the downhill side of traffic a couple hundred feet from a blind curve in the road. I checked for cars and got out of the driver’s side of the car, being careful not to step too far in the street. There were no cars going by at the time.
Suddenly, a voice inside my head shouted “FREEZE!!! DON’T MOVE!!!” I instinctually froze and pressed myself up against my car even though I had no idea why. Out of nowhere a large city bus came barreling around the curve going at least 60mph and missed hitting me by just a couple inches. I can still feel the wind from the bus on the back of my neck at it blew past me. If I had taken just half a step back to lock my car door, I would have been flattened and that would have been it.
Even worse, my future husband was with me and would have witnessed it all. It still shakes him up to think about how close he came to losing me that day.
Image source: Sgt_Booler, Ravi Patel/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#12
I got a couple, but I’ll go for the biggest one.
Fell snowboarding, and had a splitting ‘migraine’ the next day. Went to the GP, deciding after a night without sleep it was worth the early phonecall and appointment. He took one look at me and proceeded to give me a course of oral steroids and schedule an MRI. I was completely dissociated, just kinda thought maybe he was looking to see if I’d twinged my neck.
Damage **at C1**. For context, C1 is your first vertebrae at the base of your skull and by damage I’m referring to spinal cord damage. A very small lesion and some swelling which was now being treated by the oral steroids course. After the course, another MRI showed the area of damage more clearly – I also now had a severe movement disorder, and minor issues with my breathing alongside chronic neuroinflammation which would eventually result in another lesion (C5/6) that hit 4 years later, paralysing me.
BUT if my GP hadn’t seen fit to prescribe outside of his remit and give me those initial steroids there is no telling if that C1 lesion could have enlarged and just straight up k**led me at 21. My neurologist tells me that he did possibly save my life that day.
Image source: cripple2493, Adrian Swancar/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#13
Deciding to go to A&E over the “gas pains” in my abdomen instead of going to sleep (I was already in bed).
Appendix was about to blow by the time the surgeon got to it that same night.
I remembered something specifically about looking out for pain when you lift your left leg, and since healthcare is free here, decided not to chance it despite the symptoms being relatively mild.
Image source: proximalfunk, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#14
When I was in 9th grade I was walking to church on Sunday morning. My friends stopped and asked if I wanted to go riding with them. I thought about going but something stopped me from getting in the car. Later that afternoon 2 of my friends in the car died in an accident.
Image source: No-Independence-6842, Will Creswick/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#15
A bit of a story, but here goes.
Back in 2020, I was in an a*****e relationship. Not so much direct physical violent (although that was there); instead, it was constant mental and emotional abuse with some sexual a*****t thrown in. This was particularly damaging as I struggle with mental health. To be honest, I was contemplating ending my life for most of the last 6 or so months her and I were together. One day, her and I had a MASSIVE fight that ultimately ended the relationship.
Her and I ended up splitting up during quarantine, roughly around mid April. Most of the people I was close to were immunocompromised, some lived states away, and the rest just weren’t good for me to be around in my fragile mental state. Aside from a few nights at a hotel I was gifted from my parents (one who lived 15 hours away, the other one is badly immunocompromised), I slept in the bathroom at work. She (and whatever flavor of the week she was dating) continued to harass me, call my work, call my parents, and (later, during summer) somehow found the contact information of a girl I had just begun dating and began harassing her as well.
While I am eternally thankful for my boss giving me shelter *and* giving me an air mattress, it was so incredibly lonely in that bathroom. I remember hugging a pillow and convincing myself, through tears, that the pillow was my friend and that I wasn’t alone. I spent my birthday, which falls towards the end of April, alone in a grocery store parking lot bawling my eyes out. Never in my life was I so desperate for a hug.
After a couple months of this, my mother found me a new apartment. Quarantine restrictions had JUST lifted in my state (I live in SE Wisconsin). While I still had to keep a massive amount of distance from my mother, it was still nice to see someone who actually liked me.
As a bit of background, I am very interested in meteorology. I love stormchasing and dream of making a career of it, or anything related to meteorology for that matter. I had not chased a single storm for over a year, for obvious reasons. The week I moved in, I saw on my weather app that there was a storm scheduled to hit about two hours or so away during the weekend. I went and chased it, and, for the first time in years, I started to recognize the reflection in the mirror.
A week later on Friday, I realized that I badly wanted to chase another storm. So, I began checking my weather apps. Nowhere in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, etc was forecasted to even have rain. So, in desperation, I dug deeper and found that there, in fact, was going to be a storm. Issue was, it was all the way near Rapid City, SD. Eleven to twelve hours away from me.
I decided at noon on Friday that, once I got off at 6:30, I would pack a bag, eat dinner, talk to a couple friends, and then take off to South Dakota, driving through the night. I had never been to South Dakota nor traveled by myself, and I had never driven through the night before. But, screw it, what do I have to lose?
I was in southern Minnesota on I-90 around 4AM, about to break the South Dakota border. I was exhausted, losing strength, and about ready to give up. I tried to check into a hotel, only to find that I had forgotten my cards at home and that the hotel did not take Apple Pay. Regardless, something told me to keep going. Something told me everything would be okay. So, I plodded on into South Dakota.
Then I saw the sunrise. That sunrise was the light at the end of the tunnel. It was a beacon of hope that my past tried to convince me no longer existed. That sunrise told me that the excruciating pain, loneliness, and s******l ideations were temporary. It was then that I learned everything was going to be okay.
I still remember audibly screaming “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this! I’m actually doing this!”. It was always my dream to travel the country to chase storms. I turned the nightmare I was living into the dream I always wished for. I took so many pictures, videos, live streamed both chases (two for one weekend!), took in the alien landscape I found myself in, and finally felt human again.
Not only was I free, I actually believed it too. Ever since then, although I still struggle with mental health, I have a new purpose. The driver’s seat became my home, the open road became my best friend, and the sun became my wife. I didn’t care if she wasn’t human. The warmth, guidance, and support was all I ever wanted in marriage. The unlovable, burdensome, and ugly man turned into mother nature’s devoted husband. I finally found love.
Ever since then, I have continued to regularly travel the country on a whim. I have chased storms in Kansas, tasted wine in California, got lost in the desert in Arizona, saw the rocky mountains for the first time, walked along both coasts, went to the beach in Florida, and so much more. I ended up driving to every state in the lower 48 that summer (took three months) AND doing something in each one.
The decision to chase my dreams saved me from ending my own life. All I had to do was see the sun.
Image source: TheeAltster, lo Heimplatz/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#16
Fell asleep at the wheel, woke up and corrected my steering without panicking.
Drowsy driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving. Never again !
Image source: Nielas_Aran_76, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#17
When I was 9 I loved sleeping in my older brothers water bed upstairs when he decided to live with my dad instead. One cold January night I decided against it for some reason. I ended up sleeping in my own bed downstairs. A massive earthquake hit in the middle of the night and the headboard with tons of shelves on it ended up crashing down onto my brothers water bed. I would have been seriously injured if I had been sleeping in that bed that night!
Image source: anon, Beazy/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#18
I was in high school, and driving home from a robotics team party when it felt like instinct took over, and I slammed the brakes from 50 mph. A car plowed through the intersection in front of me, hit a curb, and left with a drunken weave. I realized that if I hadn’t stopped, I likely would have gotten hit. At that point I found the nearest parking lot, and had a panic attack for an hour before driving to my parents.
Image source: zoeartemis, Hareez Hussaini/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#19
When I was in my early 20’s I was working with a company laying deep services for new neighborhoods. In the winter, at the end of the day, the laborer crew would spend a few minutes scraping mud off the excavator tracks.
One day I was in between the two tracks scrapping away mud. Suddenly, my colleagues are shouting (almost screaming) my name. Although I didn’t see it, it instantly occurred to me that they would only be that terrified if the excavator was still in motion and I was about to be pinned between the rear counterweight and the track.
I dropped to my knees and rolled away with less than a second to spare. The rear of the excavator swung across where I had just been standing. Had I been any later, I’d have been cut in half.
The operator had thought we were done. We didn’t mention it to anyone… you know how you are at that age.
Once in a while I still think about it. Scary stuff.
Image source: mikeInCalgary, Yunus Tuğ/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#20
Nowhere near as extreme as some of these, but I used to go for walks in a nature park right behind my neighborhood, usually with headphones. On one such walk, I happened to look down to see the foot I was currently stepping with was about 6 inches from coming down on a diamondback rattlesnake. It was arched back, ready to strike, rattle going, but I couldn’t hear it over my music. Leapt back immediately and walked around it without issue, but holy c**p, it gets my heart going just thinking about it.
Image source: pownij, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#21
Riding my bike from Uni in the dark, and as I passed a silouhete of a person on the edge of the path, I stood up on the pedals. They struck me with a bat, landing the blow on my biceps. I was able to keep my balance/grip on the bars and ride through it.
Staying seated on that bike would have been my face meeting that bat. Plus, who knows what to follow on tbe ground.
Image source: Magumbo_Sweat, Vladislav Klapin/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#22
I was caught in a bar brawl. Tumbled to the bottom of a crowd and was pressed to the floor when some psycho was on my back choking me. Couldn’t move and couldn’t breathe. I thought that was it. I was gonna die on the floor of a New Jersey nightclub. Suddenly I remembered a move my wrestling coach taught us to break grips. I found his thumb, folded it like a fist and squeezed as hard as I could. It c*****d like a stick. I could hear him scream in my ear and he hopped off. I pushed up and swung my way out. I was choked so hard that both of my eyes were full blood red, no whites and I cracked a molar. That was a close one and who knows what would have happened if I didn’t recall that one random move or if I never wrestled to begin with. Scary.
Image source: anon, Aleksandr Popov/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#23
I was driving on the highway on a dark moonless night. Suddenly with about 30 yards of distance, I saw 4 lines on the road in my headlights. I had about 1 extra second to swerve lanes after I realized it was a F*****G COW.
Image source: hamsterwheel, Joshua Woroniecki/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#24
Almost went to the midnight showing of The Dark Knight in Aurora, Colorado when and where the shooting happened. Changed our minds enroute because a friend called us and we had to turn back and get them.
Image source: nouseforachef1, Darius Bashar/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#25
I was carried away by a current while swimming at a beach. The beach was protected by a rock formation but I stupidly swam past it and I was swept away. The rest of the coastline was more or less a sheer rock cliff. I managed to spot a very tiny spot that I could swim ashore to but the waves kept throwing me against rocks that sat just below the surface. I decided to try to swim ashore by grabbing onto the rocks between waves and to hold on for dear life as the waves came over me so that I don’t end up like shredded cheese. I managed to get to shore and I later realised that if I hadn’t done exactly what I did I’d be dead.
Image source: PckMan, Karl Fredrickson/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#26
Realizing that me being gone would have long-lasting effects on everyone that knew me.
At the time, I had just returned from living overseas with my parents to being back Stateside living with my brother, who was living with his wife while they were still dating.
The first month was fine, but then she started to open up about her myriad problems with me. It got to the point where we would constantly be getting into arguments. The problem was, I wasn’t working and I was only going to community college–my brother was my only option for housing; he knew that, she didn’t. But it then caused them to have arguments frequently.
I would wake up most mornings to listen to her complaining about everything to friends or family over the phone–I was sleeping on their futon in the living room.
One of these conversations, she made it clear that when they do eventually get engaged that I wouldn’t be invited to the wedding.
One morning, when both my brother and her were out of the house, I went into his closet to find his pistol. I was kneeling there staring at it for a long, long time. My body compelled me to bring the barrel up against my chin.
I never pulled the trigger. I put the gun back where I found it, called my dad in tears. To this day I never told my brother that I was on the verge of s*****e because I thought in that moment it would make things better for him to not have to worry about me, anymore.
Image source: or10n_sharkfin, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#27
I was in an accident back in 2008. I was going to college on my motorcycle (pretty common where I come from). It had just ended raining. I was about to overtake a vehicle when a tuktuk came out of nowhere from the street. Hit the break real hard but still rear tyres touched I was in air. That when it dawned on me that it is either my right arm or my head. Chose let my right arm get crushed and saved my skull. Properly healed on 50days. Have trouble writing with my right hand ever as I cannot handle pen properly. Learnt to write with my left hand and went on with my life.
Image source: sindhichhokro, Ravi Sharma/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#28
Step on the brakes for no reason other than a bad feeling in the midle off the street, sudently two Cars racing pass on the next corner with no head lights.
Image source: DrMaao, Evgeny Tchebotarev/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#29
Maybe not died but been serious injured and facially disfigured.
Rescue dog for some reason freaked out and attacked me. Right before it happened I sat up and gently pushed his face away from mine (he had been whining and trying to lick at my face while I was stretched out on the couch). Some instinct told me to sit up and push his face away and do it now.
Ended up with a huge hole in my arm and he kept coming trying to take me down. If my husband hadn’t been there the dog would have kept going til he got me down and kept me there.
Image source: NeverEnoughSleep08, C Perret/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
#30
I made a horrible decision to intervene in parking lot machine robbery.
As I was at the caged gate of the parking lot he swung his crowbar at me. Somehow I moved in the right way to avoid his strikes. I still don’t know how his crowbar didn’t hit me. He also screamed like a gorilla. But I didn’t die that night. And I was very close to it. Never felt so stupid and also so relieved he didn’t tag me. H****n is bad kids. It will make you a coin robber who almost became a m******r for like 8 dollars in coins.
Image source: mdotca, Zoshua Colah/Unsplash (not the actual photo)
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