Thanks so much to
@NWICY for this thread suggestion!
The premise is simple - tell us about your near death experiences! What happened, has anyone seen a white light. Who has been shot, and who has not.
I was in a car accident when I was 17, the summer after I graduated from high school. We were going to a movie I didn't want to see (The Abominable Dr. Phibes) but my buddy, who was driving, talked me into it. We were driving 60 going down a county blacktop when a car full of guys about our age ran a stop sign on a gravel road and we T-boned them. This was in one of those big old cars of the era that didn't have a crumple zone or shoulder harnesses. It just had lap seat belts, which of course, we weren't wearing being teenagers.
My head went through the windshield and from different witnesses who happened on the scene, I was told various descriptions of what I looked like. One said It look like my brains were coming out of my forehead, one said my left eyeball was hanging out on my cheek.
It was touch and go for a few days as doctors feared I had a brain bleed (I didn't) and worried that I would lose an eye (I didn't but I still can see only light from that eye, which lost a third of it's mass in the accident and required 6 stitches on the eyeball itself after doctors removed a large chunk of glass from it.)
I was told by the doctors at the Mayo Clinic that they were worried my body would reject my eyeball , similar to an organ transplant rejection, after they stuck it back in my head because it had been outside my body for so long, but still attached by whatever an eye is attached to the head by. An eye doctor years later told me this was impossible because an eyeball doesn't pop out of your head like you see in horror/gore movies, but that's what I was told all those years ago. I needed 162 stitches to sew up my forehead.
I was by far the most seriously injured of any of the occupants of the car. My friend had a broken bone in his foot and a guy in the other car complained of back pain. Turns out the guys in the other car were out driving around smoking weed.
We got an insurance settlement, but it wasn't nearly as much as we were hoping. It basically paid our medical bills and left me with about 20K after the lawyer took his cut. 20K seems like a lot of money, especially back then, but it was not the millions we were envisioning for losing vision in an eye and pain and suffering and permanent disfigurement, although you couldn't really tell now unless you looked real close. I still have a scar across the bridge of my nose and at the outside corner of my left eye and there are slighter, all but invisible scars still on my forehead.
