Reply #22: Couple of times-

[Guaranteed]

The first was when I was nineteen. I had gotten in a fairly bad bike accident (the particulars of which I'm rather ashamed of, so I won't get into them here), and my face got banged up really bad. Lots of stitches in different places- lip, eyebrow, cheek, etc.- and my eye was swollen shut, bruised, all messed up. Basically, the right side of my face got half torn off.

So the next morning I was in the shower, and I was cleaning out my nose, as many smokers have to do. I blew my nose and MASSIVE globs of blood came out- not like a bloody nose, but a mixture of blood and tissue and mucusy stuff. And the volume of it was amazing. My blood pressure immediately skyrocketed as I thought "internal head injuries." I thought my brain might be bleeding.

I was living in a dorm, then, and I went to my RA and he drove me to the hospital. I was still scared out of my mind- thought I might die.

The doctor took some x-rays, and figured out that my right cheek sinus was fractured. BIG relief- no brain damage that they could tell. The damned idiots from the night before had given me a CAT scan, but hadn't found the fracture.

Damn, that scared the hell out of me.

The second, more recent time, was a few years ago when I was deliverying pizzas. I was making a left turn onto a fairly busy, fast moving street in the city where I lived. It was two lanes going one way, and two lanes the other. I looked a bunch of times both ways, but for some reason when I pulled out I looked to my left and suddenly there was a car coming straight at me at about 45 miles per hour. I pulled the wheel hard left, and somehow he went around, in front of me. To be honest, though, I have no idea how he did it. It seemed to me that the car passed right through me. Felt like I should have been dead, there.

2 lives down, 7 to go. :)