Being in the hospital near death is a fun time.

Specifically with a kidney stone causing a UTI that went near septic. Yay me. Also the look on the urgent care guy’s face was priceless.

Led a group of engineers in assessing damage to bridges after a hurricane.

Did CPR on an overdose until somebody showed up with Narcan. Dude lived.

Not really a ‘real emergency’, but some time ago electricity in all my zone (a radius of 50-60km) went down for several hours, so even cell towers, ISP routing centers, ecc, were out of power. Not a real emergency, but I had 2 small meshtastic devices, and it was awesome to be able to discuss with people in other nearby cities and communicate ‘offline’!

It’s been a long time, but last one was about 20 years ago. Me and my friend Danielle had just finished our open water scuba diving courses together, and went to do our first dive with a group from the dive shop - including one of our instructors who was leading it.

It was a shore dive, we all walk in in our drysuits and I stupidly drop my mask and lose it in the silty water. Danielle starts swimming around looking for it, while most of us are chatting above the surface. We’re in about 3’ of water at this point on the beach, I’m literally standing up next to her, so danger is the last thing on my mind.

Suddenly someone asks me if Danielle is ok, I turn around just as she stops moving, grab her by the bcd and pull her up. She’s blue and not breathing. The instructor is already on his way over, gives her some rescue breaths and she immediately comes back. We pull her to the shore and she’s coughing up water, paramedics roll up shortly after and take her to the hospital just in case.

She has gotten air stuck in the boots of her dry suit and was stuck inverted. Instead of doing the recovery roll we were trained, or inflating her bcd, she panicked and as a result somehow lost her mouth piece.

She never dived in cold water again, although we did go to belize several months later to do a bunch of diving. I kept up the cold water diving.

It really made me appreciate how panicking can completely fuck you over, and made me a very safety conscious diver. I always stay close to my buddy and keep a close eye on them.

Last week, as a part of my job, I was interviewing a suspect in order to write a pre-trial report for the courts in which I give my recommendations regarding parole and probation in case the suspect is found guilty. The interview was going great and the suspect was a really nice person. Suddenly, my personal safety alarm - which signals that there is a medical emergency or an ongoing assault - goes off and the display indicates that the incident is taking place just across the hall. I tell the suspect to stay put, I jump out into the hallway (first mistake), hastily pull open the door to the room in question (second mistake) and see that a colleague is having a seemingly normal conversation with a parolee. I look into my colleague’s eyes to read their needs and I immediately realize that they want the parolee out of there. I look at the parolee, who’s reeking of alcohol, with a kind smile and tell them, “let’s take a walk 🤗” and point in the direction in which I want them to go with my left arm. The parolee follows my instructions and I keep talking to them in a calming but firm fashion. While moving towards the exit, I also give them positive affirmation on how not everybody would’ve been able to follow instructions in such a calm manner in such a stressful situation.

After following up with my colleague who had sounded the alarm, and who had already been taken care of by our on-site counselor, I learned that the parolee had said to my colleague, twice, “I am going to kill you before this meeting is over”.

My kid is Non-verbal autistic with epilepsy. One day he had an appointment with his neurologist. We are walking down the apartment stairs, mother in front I’m behind. He goes into a seizure. I catch him and hold his head between my legs so he doesn’t hit his head on the cement steps.

Suddenly my phone rings, it’s my sister. We are not no-contact but rarely talk so it must be important so I answer. Her first words as I’m holding a child actively seizing between my legs were “hey, so mom broke her neck”…

I was aimlessly swimming underwater in the deep end of a backyard pool and saw an infant on the bottom, right next to one of the side walls. I grabbed it, rushed it to the surface, and sat it on the edge. Her mom quickly came running. The kid was fine. It seems she instinctively held her breath once submerged and wasn’t under very long. The parents weren’t watching and nobody really knows how long she was under. I’m still struck by the parents’ neglect. Also that the kid had no buoyancy and sank like a stone.

Earthquake. My brother was sleeping next to me, so got him in between our beds, which I went above him in a four leg stand. Told him “I might not make it if the building crumbles, but you will”. Realistically, we’re in a high floor apartment so that chance is really slim, but back then I didn’t really have much of a choice.

The building we had thankfully didn’t collapse and we are still alive. Though a noticable amount of buildings around us did.

Hurricane Michael. I was in Georgia at the time and most hurricanes dissipate and turn into big storms by the time it hits us. Nope. This was a CAT5 when it hit the coast and maintained to a CAT3-CAT2 by the time it hit us. I loved alone at the time, had prepped my Danger Room (inner most closet).

While waiting I had taken a brand new unopened bottle of Bibb & Tucker bourbon into the room with me because I’d joked if I die in hurricane I’m not gonna do it sober. It got really hot and muggy in there and the weather didn’t sound so bad so eventually I get out to try and look outside. I spent the next maybe hour walking from a rear window to a front window but it was late evening and you could only see when lightning flashed. It honestly didn’t seem as bad as Id thought, and when checking the radar the worst had passed us. So I checked outside with my headlamp and flashlight to see it had uprooted a tree in my front yard which had fallen onto my front porch. No real damage but it’s wild I never heard the damn thing fall. Nor did I hear the neighbor’s tree fall and destroy the carport in the back of the house. It took almost a year and a half for insurance to admit there was roof damage.

The whole area was without power for about a week. A couple days later we went to a friend’s house who was having a freezer party with the whole point of grilling food that would have otherwise gone bad. I brought my bottle of B&T to share because I thought i’d drank less than 1/4 of it while waiting out the hurricane. I went to pour my first cup and…nope. I barely had enough left for 1 glass for myself. No idea how I drank that much in 1 night with my legs still able to function and not puking my guts out the next morning

This past weekend.

A wildfire started up a few miles from my parents house in the western US. Winds were fairly high and it was well above 95F, so in a day and a half it went from a sprig of smoke to 10,000 acres fuelling its own weather.

I have spent the entire weekend helping them prep their property under some extreme stress. We ripped out every bit of brush and weed from the house perimeter, cut down 6 trees that were too close, ran a tractor with a disk to start building ground fire lines around the base of their hill, and ran as many water sprinklers on the lawn and surrounding terrain and trees as we could to improve their ability to resist ignition. And on top of that have gotten them packed and their livestock and farm equipment all moved to pastures well out of the treeline.
All of this while the sun was completely obscured by smoke, to the point where I had the lights on the tractor. Hell, we could HEAR the fire from their house. It was like a jet engine was running just over the west ridge. You could see tree crowns torching 150+ feet in the air.

I’ve probably worked like 45+ hours in the last 4 days. I’m so tired dude.

Luckily, whether by sheer happenstance or force of a god unknowing, the wind has held in the right direction and the fire front facing their house has been very mild since Saturday night, and wildfire crews have had a chance to build dozer containment lines there. We’re still on a hair trigger but we are cautiously optimistic they’re going to make it through without any of their land burning.

Fuck global warming dude

Helped pull a man out of the street that was face down drunk yesterday. Was driving past and saw a skinnier feller attempting to pull him up with one arm. Figured one or both of them would get hurt trying to move him so I turned the car around, parked up and helped sit him up on the sidewalk. Guy was piss drunk, about 60 years old and rotund telling me that his wife left him yesterday.

He initially was fighting the help trying to get back into the street but I talked him down and hefted him up to his feet. Had the skinnier guy go into the store and get some water to bring out as it was 90+ degrees. I helped walk him into the shade against a wall outside the liquor store and called an ambulance to pick him up as he couldn’t stand on his own. Talked with the guy while I waited for the ambulance to arrive, he kept switching back and forth from thanking me and telling me that he wanted to shoot the guy his wife left him for. Just keep reassuring him that things will get better and today is just a bad day that will soon pass.

Once the emts arrived, filled them in with as much info as I gathered and headed home.

The only real “emergency” I can think of is when I saw someone get hit by car while trying to run across a three-lane road. Went over the hood. probably a 30MPH hit

The driver sped off. I pulled into the middle (turning) lane, put my hazard lights on, and tried to help the person. They were unconscious at first and then extremely dazed. Some other bystanders tried to get them to “walk it off” but I demanded they stay still and not move their head or neck until paramedics arrived.

Fortunately a nurse saw it from their apartment balcony and rushed out to help. They obviously agreed the person shouldn’t move.

Kind of wild looking back that so many people wanted this person who just got laid out by a car to pretend like they were completely okay. So fucking dangerous in that situation.

Morning about a year ago, I was still in bed. My mom started screaming in shock and surprise, and yelled for me to come quick. This kind of reaction isn’t too uncommon from her for relatively mundane things (like a cockroach) so I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

As I slowly got up and exited my room, suddenly I was breathing smoke. Apparently, she left a pot with oil in it on the stovetop which had turned on somehow. The pot had a lid on, but large amounts of smoke were escaping around it.

If I remember correctly, I rushed to open the window closest to the stovetop and made sure the stove was turned off and the pot was away from new heat, and then the smoke was overwhelming me so I ran back to the other side of the apartment to catch some breath. I was also going to bring over a fan to push out the smoke as much as possible, to make it tolerable to be in the room and deal with the emergency.

While I was away doing that, my dad had come down the stairs and into the kitchen and, in his infinite wisdom*, opened the pot lid to see what was going on underneath it. Then I hear him yell “fire!” and he goes out to grab the fire extinguisher. By opening the lid, he allowed oxygen to get inside and thus fuel the fire.

I quickly rushed back to the kitchen and saw the fire in the pot. My dad was already back with the extinguisher (it was just outside our apartment door). But he couldn’t figure out how to use it. I grabbed it, aimed it at the flaming pot, and extinguished the fire.

Fire is out, emergency over.

I got a little bit of splashback from the flaming oil which gave me a small burn on my finger (which healed just fine, I don’t even remember which finger it was and there’s no scar), and the extinguisher made a giant mess that needed to be cleaned all over the area, but overall I’d say damage was close to minimal. Close to minimal.

My first plan, when I saw the pot with the lid on, was to keep it starving for oxygen and prepare a “bath” of cold water to place the whole pot into to cool it until it stops smoking. If my dad hadn’t opened the lid, I think that plan would have worked, and would have saved us the cleanup and the burn on my finger (though I might have gotten burned another way, who knows).

After I saw that he had opened the lid, my instinct was still to put the lid back on and go back to plan A, which would have been tricky since the lit itself is obviously too hot to touch bare-handed and the fire in the pot makes it hard to get close. But still, I think it was doable.

But when seconds later he was already back with the extinguisher, I knew it was not the best solution, but I also knew that it would work, and that trying to convince him that it wasn’t the best idea would take way too long. In that moment, just accepting the sub-optimal extinguisher plan was the best choice. Oh well, it did work.

* I’m not actually that mad, In an emergency situation it’s hard to blame someone for not thinking things through, and doing an instinctive thing. Still, I expected more of him, he’s a smart man with over 60 years of life experience and you’d think he knew not to let fire get oxygen.

broke my fucking ankle at the Dead Baby Downhill Afterparty falling off the side of like a 10 or 15 foot bridge lol

had to go to the hospital. that was a week ago. still here