Ever saved someone's life?
- Thread starter Nastycrow
- Start date
No but, I did save a dudes thumbs once. It was back when I still smoked weed & I was high as hell at the grocery store & this chick collapses to the floor like 20 feet from me haveing a sezure (sp). Her idiot boyfriend sticks his thumbs in her mouth trying to stop her from swollowing her tongue. As I was explaining to him that that was just a wives tale (swallowing her tongue) he starts going " ouch ouch ouch" as she starts biteing down on his thumbs. so to make a long story short I end up with the palm of my hand holding down her forehead & pulling on her lower jaw (squeezing so hard on it I'm scared I'll hurt her) & pulling her mouth open just enough the dumbass can gets his now bloody thumbs out. I ran to the bathroom & washed the dudes blood off my arms & hauled *** before they could sue me for what ever.
about two years ago, we where at a pool party and my nephew (3 years old) was running around and fell in the pool. I jumped from my chair and covered about 30 feet in 3 or 4 leaps, the last jump was a full dive in the pool and i came up with him like a trophey. He swallowed a little water (happened in seconds) but he was fine. This happened a few minutes after I had gotten there so when I jumped in I was still dressed, wallet, cell phone, and camera were still in my pocket.
I was driving home from Karate one night when I looked to my left on the overpass to see what looked like a pile of garbage. That garbage happened to be an epileptic walking home from his job at pizza hut. I pull over, put my 4 ways on, and immediately begin to call 911. Before I can get 2 rings an EMT pulls up behind my car and is able to help the man and get an ambulance. I may not have saved his life but not much good can come from being passed out on the side of a busy overpass at 9:30 P.M.
Aside from all the times I showed restraint and didn't kill people when I had the overwhelming urge to do so, there have been a couple times that stand out in my mind.
First time I was 15 and walking home from football practice. I'm walking past the "downtown" area of our little subburb (basically just a pampered up mini-mall with little sideroads where trucks can make deliveries) when I hear this woman scream. 9 times out of 10 I probably just ignore it and think it's people goofing off, for some reason though I get the urge to run down the little alleyway area and I look over to one of the loading docks and this full grown man has this chick pinned up against the concrete loading dock area and is forcing himself on her. I basically just yell at him like, "Hey! Hey, what are you doing!?" and he turns around like he's gonna come at me, but then just bolts off down the alleyway in the other direction Chick thanked me and I called the cops against her request, they came, we gave a description and I actually did get my name in the local paper for helping out. I don't think they ever found the guy, I'm guessing he wasn't from around our area. DId I save her life? Probably not, but I'm 100% sure that I prevented a very bad thing from going down.
There was another kind of a similar situation that happened within a couple months of when I moved into my place. I'm chilling in my condo drinking a few beers, waiting for my frienc to come pick me up when I hear this girl screaming from outside (I live on the first floor, about 20-30 feet from the main enterance). I peak out the window and there's some teenage guy all pressed up on some young girl. I put my shoes on, run about 20 steps to the outside area and as soon as the dude sees me, before I can even open the first set of doors to get outside, he bolts down the street. I walk outside, girl is crying and says the guy literally just ran up to her and started grabbing her, we call the cops, again they come and we give a description and they take off (didn't get my name in the paper for that one). Not sure what would have gone down if I let it play out, again, probably didn't save her life but I'm guessing I did prevent a bad situation.
Last situation I can think of was about a year and a half ago. I'm driving home from my friends birthday at the bar and I see 4-5 guys just wailing on a kid in the middle of the street in the distance. I flash my brights a couple times and the guys all bolt down the sidestreet (they probably thought I was a cop since I know cops will generally flash their brights at suspicious stuff going on). I pull up to the situation and this fat little 18-19 year old kid is crying and bleeding all over the place. I pull over and help him pick his s--- up, I give him a ride home and I make him call the cops (I take off after he calls the cops because I had been drinking a bit and while I probably wasn't over a .08, I didn't feel like taking a breatholyzer). Again, not 100% sure he would have died, but he was pretty messed up, apparently the dudes just jumped him for his wallet and he had no idea who they were. At the very least, I saved him from a further asswhooping.
grapplethis said:
OSUbuckeye4: defeater of rapists. props man. most people don't do s**t when they can stop a r*** from going down. that's why girls are told to yell fire
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Yea, the messed up thing about the first situation is that it was broad daylight and there was a ful grown man who was waking just ahead of me who didn't do s--- about it. (I know he heard her screaming because it was pretty loud).
I'm just thankful that the guy didn't come at me swinging. While I was pretty damn strong for a 15 year old (6', around 160 at that point with kickboxing experience), I knew I was going to get my *** kicked if he took me to the ground and overpowered me.
I'm also not sayin that I'm some person who walks around looking to be a hero. Truth be told, if it was 3 AM in a bad neighborhood, I probably just call the cops and don't walk into a shady loading dock to check on a scream (could be a setup). At 6 PM though in an affulant subburb when it's still light out, I'm going to check every time. Sure, 95% of the time it's going to be teenagers who are just messing around and they'll say everything is fine and laugh at me like I'm some weirdo for popping my head down an alley just to check see what is going on when I hear someone screaming, but that other 5% of the time is what worries me.
I really don't know how I would sleep at night if I went home, turned on the TV and heard that the woman got raped and killed and I could have at least tried to do something to prevent it.
osubuckeye4 said:
grapplethis said:
OSUbuckeye4: defeater of rapists. props man. most people don't do s**t when they can stop a r*** from going down. that's why girls are told to yell fire
Click to expand...
Yea, the messed up thing about the first situation is that it was broad daylight and there was a ful grown man who was waking just ahead of me who didn't do s**t about it. (I know he heard her screaming because it was pretty loud).
I'm just thankful that the guy didn't come at me swinging. While I was pretty damn strong for a 15 year old (6', around 160 at that point with kickboxing experience), I knew I was going to get my *** kicked if he took me to the ground and overpowered me.
I'm also not sayin that I'm some person who walks around looking to be a hero. Truth be told, if it was 3 AM in a bad neighborhood, I probably just call the cops and don't walk into a shady loading dock to check on a scream (could be a setup). At 6 PM though in an affulant subburb when it's still light out, I'm going to check every time. Sure, 95% of the time it's going to be teenagers who are just messing around and they'll say everything is fine and laugh at me like I'm some weirdo for popping my head down an alley just to check see what is going on when I hear someone screaming, but that other 5% of the time is what worries me.
I really don't know how I would sleep at night if I went home, turned on the TV and heard that the woman got raped and killed and I could have at least tried to do something to prevent it.
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yeah going into dark alleys at night, all bad. but if you can see what's going on and it's not a set up and you still don't go do something, you're a punk. and OSU ain't no punk, clearly.
I saved my daughter when she was a baby. She was born early and had breathing problems. Stayed in the hospital for a few weeks before she came home. When she came home she was still congested pretty bad. We made sure someone stayed up and watched her. One night I was sleeping and I got a call from my wife in the living room that my daughter stopped breathing and was turning blue. Now that is some way to wake up! I ran into the living room, grabbed my daughter and put her on the dining room table and did CPR. After like the 3rd or 4th blow, I could feel something clear out like I pushed it through. Then she started to cough and woke up. Ambulance came and it was back in the hospital for 2 more weeks.
That was total auto pilot. I never took a CPR class, just seen some videos in my line of work. I stay pretty calm in situations like that but after it was all over I was like HOLY s---! She was just about dead. It was f---ing freaky when I grabbed her from my wife and she was blue and totally limp like a doll.
rhino78 said:
Nothing major, someone was choking during lunch. I walked over, told her I was going to give her the Heimlich, did it, she coughed out a chip, then I went back to my seat.
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You should add something crazy in that story to make it either funnier or more dramatic... Like 'she coughed out a chip, I ate it, then went back to my seat'. Lol
cmvideo75 said:
You should add something crazy in that story to make it either funnier or more dramatic... Like 'she coughed out a chip, I ate it, then went back to my seat'. Lol
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Or I replaced the chip with my......phone number. You guys are perves.
I don't know if these are saving lives, really. Two of them might have though. Definitely the closest I've ever come to saving a life.
I worked in a youth crisis centre. I had three suicide attempts on my watch. 2 of them were pretty clear cries for help imho but they were deemed suicide attempts for all intents and purposes (report writing, police, hospital, social workers, etc). One involved a girl tying a noose around her neck. From what I gather she attempted to tie it to a window or ceiling, but it didn't worked so she cinched it up tight and pulled. I'm not even sure what the set up was. When I came in to her room with my shift partner her face was beat red and it didn't appear that it was pulling on the rope per se but she'd already cinched it up and was holding it in place. It all happened so quick I really don't know what kind of knot/set up she had. I'm pretty sure she would've panicked and taken it off eventually but I pulled the the thing loose and she gasped for air and exploded into tears and yells. The other ones were involving self-cutters. One was pretty insignificant yet painful looking. We basically just called the cops and did some standard first aid.
Then there was the legit attempt. She(he) was a notorious self-cutter. At least 100 cuts all over her(his) arms and legs. It was sad and difficult to look at. She went really deep one night into the wrist. The blood came out quick but it was weird. I guess where she cut/bled so much before that the way in which she bled (perhaps due to clotting, repeated bleeding, cuts, etc - I'm clearly no expert) the blood kind "clumped" out for lack of a better word. Like a thick liquid. But it came out quick. Shift partner and I quickly went into first aid mode. She had been in her/his room a bit too long and shiftie discovered her and yelled for me. I called 911, grabbed the first aid kit then quickly assisted her in covering the wound. It was f---ing deeep. I honestly don't know if we saved her life as I don't know if she would bleed out the way she was bleeding, but we certainly did our job and the paramedics were able to take over where we left off. She stayed responsive the whole time and luckily paramedics were on scene in less than 10 minutes. There was still quite a mess afterwards and they sent us home early and offered the next day off (the only time in my four years there). I left the job about 3 months later. 17 bucks an hour to have that kind of thing always a possibility on your shift just doesn't cut it. I took a mental beating towards the end of my time there.
BlairBones said:
I don't know if these are saving lives, really. Two of them might have though. Definitely the closest I've ever come to saving a life.
I worked in a youth crisis centre. I had three suicide attempts on my watch. 2 of them were pretty clear cries for help imho but they were deemed suicide attempts for all intents and purposes (report writing, police, hospital, social workers, etc). One involved a girl tying a noose around her neck. From what I gather she attempted to tie it to a window or ceiling, but it didn't worked so she cinched it up tight and pulled. I'm not even sure what the set up was. When I came in to her room with my shift partner her face was beat red and it didn't appear that it was pulling on the rope per se but she'd already cinched it up and was holding it in place. It all happened so quick I really don't know what kind of knot/set up she had. I'm pretty sure she would've panicked and taken it off eventually but I pulled the the thing loose and she gasped for air and exploded into tears and yells. The other ones were involving self-cutters. One was pretty insignificant yet painful looking. We basically just called the cops and did some standard first aid.
Then there was the legit attempt. She(he) was a notorious self-cutter. At least 100 cuts all over her(his) arms and legs. It was sad and difficult to look at. She went really deep one night into the wrist. The blood came out quick but it was weird. I guess where she cut/bled so much before that the way in which she bled (perhaps due to clotting, repeated bleeding, cuts, etc - I'm clearly no expert) the blood kind "clumped" out for lack of a better word. Like a thick liquid. But it came out quick. Shift partner and I quickly went into first aid mode. She had been in her/his room a bit too long and shiftie discovered her and yelled for me. I called 911, grabbed the first aid kit then quickly assisted her in covering the wound. It was f---ing deeep. I honestly don't know if we saved her life as I don't know if she would bleed out the way she was bleeding, but we certainly did our job and the paramedics were able to take over where we left off. She stayed responsive the whole time and luckily paramedics were on scene in less than 10 minutes. There was still quite a mess afterwards and they sent us home early and offered the next day off (the only time in my four years there). I left the job about 3 months later. 17 bucks an hour to have that kind of thing always a possibility on your shift just doesn't cut it. I took a mental beating towards the end of my time there.
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My first girlfriend used to work as a nursing assistant in a nursing home when she was 18-20. She used to tell me all the time how the old men with dementia would grab her ***, some would hit her, some would expose themselves.... And she made like $12/hour. The pay scale in those kinds of jobs are so skewed in comparison to what you have to deal with.
cmvideo75 said:
My first girlfriend used to work as a nursing assistant in a nursing home when she was 18-20. She used to tell me all the time how the old men with dementia would grab her ***, some would hit her, some would expose themselves.... And she made like $12/hour. The pay scale in those kinds of jobs are so skewed in comparison to what you have to deal with.
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Yeah unfortunately that is the case. I get the reason why. I mean, there's no scalability for a job like that, really. We had a 2:3 worker to resident ratio at minimum. It was usually 2:2 or even 2:1. And we rotated shifts. So there were two workers per shift, which meant six workers per days on weekdays. Then we had weekend people that worked 12 hour shifts. So at any given time, with a maximum of three residents (our unit was an exception - it was an emergency unit with my volatile and high risk cases - we had four other units with anywhere from 4 to 7 maximum capacity), there were 6 full time and 4+ part time workers being paid. The whole thing was almost entirely subsidized by government social programs so the funding just wasn't there to make it a viable career.
Most of my experiences were with 4-legged amimals, birds, bugs, etc. Though I do have a couple stories that involved helping people to stay alive that would be appropriate to share in here. I can label the stories so you can pick and choose what may or may not interest you.
Blood clot:
My eldest daughter (18 months old at the time), just had surgery (heart related catheter), and was in her hospital room recovering. Sometime durring the night I walked over to her, put my hand on her leg and noticed how hot it was which then made me check her forehead for a fever. Her head felt normal to the touch so I reached down to touch her other leg, noticed how cold it was and immediately called for a nurse. They treated it as a blood clot and put my daughter on a blood thinning drip. They said that if it wasn't caught it could have been fatal if it travelled to her lungs.
Drug OD / alcohol poisoning:
I helped someone during a drug OD and another going through alcohol poisoning - both unconscious. The OD was pretty traumatizing for me due to who the individual was and my age at the time; while both situations were equally tough to stomach. It was a smorgasbord of sights, emotion, inside panic and smells - blood, vomit, foam/froth, urine, diarrhoea and not knowing if they were going to die on my lap. I had no idea what the hell I was doing during both emergency situations, I guess you could say that I was just following a gut instinct? (which of course included dialing 911).
Suicide:
I tried talking someone out of comitting suicide. It was a homeless person. He was a new arrival as they would say, I found him sitting on a bench I always sat at during my lunch break. He appeared to have everything he owned tucked underneath him and looked particularly frail which led me to offer him my lunch. That lunch turned into me bringing two lunches and sitting on the bench next to him on my break a day or two a week for the duration of my job. A couple of my work colleagues voiced their concern and said that I was naieve/gullible and that he'd run off with my bag or something worse, but I didn't see him that way, I just saw someone needing a friend and some food.
On Thursday I managed to finish work right before lunch due to a cancellation. Initially I was going to go home but then remembered that I had an extra lunch in my bag and would feel guilty if I didn't walk it down to him before heading home.
When I got down towards him, I noticed that he had something in his hand, I walked up a bit closer to find him holding a knife, he was rolling it between his fingers, you could tell something was weighing heavy on his mind. I asked if everything was okay - no reply. I thought about leaving to give him his space but the knife in his hands and him seeming to be in a bad place caused for concern so I decided to sit down a few good feet in front of him on the grass. I have to say I had an uneasy feeling and those uneasy feelings had brought on an excessive amount of nonsense rambling about god only knows what, but it ended up being a positive thing because it eventually got him to open up. I learned that he had contact with his son the day prior who ended their relationship. LSS, he said that he no longer had anything left to live for and wanted to end his life. He and his son had long standing issues; I never asked what they were and he never volunteered to tell me, all I knew was that his son attempted several times to assist getting his father off the streets but was unsuccessful.
After sitting with him for several hours and reaching a point where I felt like it was okay to ask him if there was anyone I could contact to further help him like a friend or a family member, a shelter, the hospital - he said no. I didn't want to leave him alone but equally didn't want to bring him home with me. So I did what I thought was the right thing to do.
Now in hindsight, I get this was not the brightest move I made, however my intent was to help give this person a reason to live and the only thing that kept running through my head was to give him something to love and something that would love him back - like a companion. And it just so happened that my neighboor (who was recently placed in hospice care), had a mature dog that needed a new home. I got up from where I was sitting, walked to a more private area, got in contact with the daughter of the mother in hospice, explained the situation and she said the dog was all mine.
I walked back to the bench, told him that I had a surprize for him and that I'd be right back. I drove back to my neighbors house, grabbed the dog and all of her belongings and headed back to him.
When I introduced them the dog walked right up to him without hesitation wagging her tail clearly thrilled to see him and he in return seemed just as pleased to see her. It was as if they had been in each other's lives all along. He began crying and cuddling her and repeatedly said thank you, which then got my eyes watering. Omg. It just made you feel like you did something right in the world, if that makes sense?
Longer story short, it turned out to be a happily ever after for the both of them and it was definitely one of the best happy endings I had been a part of to date.
I know this isn't about human life but I find animials equally as important.
Dogs:
I grew up with dobermans and loved their disposition and loyalty so when I owned my first home I wanted a doberman of my own. Before I met with a breeder I had an appointment with a rescue for dobermans, pitbulls, Newfoundlands, rotties and mastiffs; we got to talking about her rescue and she happened to mention how the rescue needed some temporary help.
That's all she needed to say.
I offered to take on a male who was tied up to the grill guard of an 18-wheeler durring hurricane Fran, a female with all of her front teeth kicked in and human bite marks all over her body and another female with cancer (who I ended up adopting for myself). She was actually the first to greet me at the gate with a smile. I ended up naming her "Sarah" after Daryl Hall and John Oates' song, "Sarah Smile". Lol.
Anyway, I ended up turning something that was meant to be temporary into many years of rescuing, rehabilitating and re-homing.
More times than none the conditions of these dogs were horrific and while I have a number of stories, I don't have a particular story to share; many we rescued were knocking on death's door due to all sorts of conditions particularly a wide range of neglect and abuse and we tried our very best to save the lives of each and every one of them.
Sarah, to this day, was the best dog I had the privilege of owning. Always so laid back with the revolving dog door through the years. So accepting of the newbs coming in and out but she made sure they knew exactly where she was and where they were in the pecking order, lol. She ended up living 5 years longer than what was expected <3