What’s the Most Comical Near Death Experience You’ve Had?

Long time readers know me well enough by now to know that sometimes I think about some pretty strange things. Up for today’s thought of the day? Comical near death experiences. This isn’t something that happened recently, but I don’t think I’ve blogged about it before, and so I’ll share it with you all this fine Tuesday.

The justification I often use for not doing some death-defying thing is that I don’t want to die doing that, and then in heaven have to sit around telling everyone how I died time after time after time, and feel stupid about it every. single. time. (This is what happens when you really, truly believe in life after death, I guess.) Honestly, I think this stems from the scene in Defending Your Life, where they’re all talking about how they died, and Meryl Streep admits she died by tripping.

Anywho.

Comical near death experiences.

Despite my best efforts, there have still been a number of close calls with disaster. Calls that would have been very embarrassing had that been the way I had to make my final exit. Some were due to my own stupidity, but the one that stands out the most in my mind would have to be the time the toilet exploded and almost killed me.

See? I told you it was funny.

Denisa and I were living at BYU at the time. Student housing, and they had these high-pressure toilets. Toilets that didn’t flush the water down so much as blast it down with a firehose. (Maybe to reduce clogs? I have no idea why. I’ve always been content with a gentle swirl of water to bid the waste adieu.) In any case, that puppy was *loud.* Flush that in the middle of the night, and you might wake up the neighbors.

Still, you get used to anything after a while. And one day I was simply going about my business. Nothing out of the ordinary. I just flushed the toilet and went to wash my hands.

When an enormous *BOOM* went off right behind me. It took me a moment or two to figure out I hadn’t been shot. Some sounds are expected in the bathroom, but this was like I was on a Mythbusters finale. I turned around to see what had happened.

The toilet had exploded behind me, sending shards of porcelain all around the room, knocking the bathroom light off its fixture. The high pressure tank had just lost it, and the lid of the toilet tank had shot up into the air in pieces. A jagged piece had zoomed right past my head.

I reported it to facilities, of course. They’d never heard anything like it happen before. (Whose toilet explodes? Enough to make the company recall the toilet, it looks like. And you thought I was making it up . . .) And at the time, it was just a funny story. But I look back on it now and then and realize it could have been much worse. If it had exploded when I was closer, or the shrapnel had gone a different way . . .

I could have been stuck telling people “I died when my toilet blew up” for eternity.

Close call.

So that’s my story–and it’s a true one, at that. I wondered if any of you might have had similar brushes with fate. Things that are funny to look back on, but could have been quite different had they gone just an inch or two to the left. If you do, I’d love to hear them. Please share!

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