When I was 7 my moms boyfriend was beating her to a pulp. I was sure he was going to kill her this time.
I wholeheartedly believed I could overpower him and save her so I grabbed a toy hockey stick and ran over. All it took was one measly swing from a scrany, malnourished kid and all his attention on me. That’s all I got in before I realized how wrong I was, followed by watching my mom run out the back door. I knew in my heart she wasn’t leaving to get help and I was right.
I’ve gone through a lot before and after that but I’ve never been more horrified than that very moment. I remember the horror leave me shortly after when I was certain I wouldn’t see tomorrow.
This sounds like BS but is completely true. My mother once locked me in the attic for several months while my father was out of town. I was around 15 years old. There was a bedroom and bathroom, but no food. I survived on an unusually large container of Chichis Hot Salsa that my dad had gotten me for my birthday (it was my favorite snack) and a bottle of cranberry juice. I refilled the juice bottle with water from the sink. I went from ~160 lbs to under 100bs. Near the end I began experiencing seizures.
I will never forget the first meal I had when my dad got back into town. It was a sandwich from a pizza place, and I can still taste it clearly. It was heavenly.
I found my three year old unresponsive during a nap and knew he was dead, but had to try my best to comfort my wife as she broke down screaming while trying to resuscitate him. It’s still hard to think about.
If this happens to someone you know, please let them know about SUDC (Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood). It’s like SIDS but for children older than 1 year. The SUDC Foundation has a website at https://sudc.org/ and provides community for parents, grandparents and siblings that have gone through it. In my case, having community might’ve been lifesaving.
Sorry to come across like a PSA, but March will be SUDC Awareness Month, and this post made me think of it. I’ll be posting about it over in [email protected]. It’s not exactly an upbeat Lemmy community, but I hope that it can help anybody else going through the same thing find the community they need.
Sorry about that. I couldn’t imagine what that is like.
Never be afraid of being abrupt with something you want to get off your chest.
My son turns 3 next month and had no clue about SUDC. Thank you for sharing.
My heart goes out to you and your wife. I hope you both found some sort of peace.
Holy shit. I’m so sorry you had to experience this.
My 2yo is having a bad day, so he’s laying on me and watching the Nightmare Before Christmas. This was a hard 3 paragraphs to read; I’m sorry you, or anyone, had to go through that. I’m gonna hug my son now, until he’s upset again.
Thank you for sharing. I am so sorry that you and your wife have had to endure this.
I appreciate the PSA…. my grandbaby is 3 and I literally, naively, thought “guess we’re out of SIDS territory” a while back.
What is the actual cause if death tho, like does their heart just quit or some other essential process or organ just quits?
No one knows. It’s a diagnosis of exclusion. It’s a lot more common in infants (although still relatively uncommon), and significantly less common in kids. There are some types of conditions that you can’t really tell at autopsy though. So if the heart suddenly starts beating out of whack or if someone had a seizure, there is not necessarily going to be evidence of that for you to know what happened, unfortunately.
My daughter dying.
A stroke that should have killed me suddenly. While being in the worst shape of my life, on the ground with severe vertigo, projectile vomiting, and in the worst physical pain I’d ever been in, the horror really started when I closed my eyes to die and some how woke up…
I had no idea about life saving medicine or what happens when you’re close to death and it’s their job to save your life on a different kind of time where they tell you what is going to be done to you… It’s really a treat being told that you’re getting a spinal tap in the same 5 minute window that you get the spinal tap…
I was on a church work camp trip at age 14 and while changing, one of the adults was filming me with a camera and the other kids in the room were laughing. I even went behind a door to cover myself and the pervert peeked the camera around it.
That was pretty horrific.
What the fuck. I mean, it’s terrible already but to have the fucking balls to just do that out in the open??? The fuck??
In hindsight, absolutely.
He ended up getting caught because he put the original tape instead of the edited one in the church library by mistake. It was supposed to be an inspirational video of our church youth group going out and help people after a flood in the area.
Years later I ended up running into him at a shopping mall, and by this point I was about six inches taller than him and had a good physique. I got in his face and said “Where’s your camcorder now, motherfucker?” It was pretty satisfying.
Fucking gross and disgusting
I would not be surprised if this happened in america
Yup, sadly when it comes to religion, there’s a lot of pedophilia that just gets ignored or swept under the rug.
Mom beaten by my dad during childhood. Images I could not describe that only Alzheimer could take away.
Possibly was listening to my sweet mom crying and softly begging my dad to stop raping her in the other room. I was in denial about it tbh. He was a verbally abusive man, but I never knew that it extended to anything physical. He was not shy about screaming at her in front of us kids, so I honesty didn’t think I was correctly interpreting what I was hearing at the time. Both my patients were very quiet during this event. So I’m not sure how often it happened. I didn’t help my mom or anything at the time like an asshole…I just wasn’t sure what really happened.
It was only many years later when I stumbled across some PDF files of divorce paperwork where she stated that he would rape her. She chose much softer language in the paperwork, carefully avoiding the “r-word”, but I knew she wasn’t lying because of what I remembered. She did say that he often wasn’t very physically “successful” at it, which I guess is a bit more comforting? Anyway, this absolutely and totally enraged me. I fantasized about ways I would torture this man. But alas I never did anything of use and continue to allow this man to speak to me and spend time with me. I’m an asshole for it, really.
Much less significant, but there was also a time where my brother repeatedly tried to record videos of me naked and didn’t stop even after he got caught. That was such an intense violation of my privacy and permanently changed the way I feel about him and view him tbh. We have an ok relationship now, but I’ll never forget it.
Carbon monoxide poisoning when I was like 8 or 9… Just chilling out at a relative’s house, then I just blacked out, next thing I knew there was cold air blowing at my face and I was outdoors. I’ve experienced other terrible things but this is probably the closest “near death” experience I have so…
Something similar, but far from identical, happened to me.
I had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. IIRC, when it was over, the doctor said that it was normal to have sixteen units of blood and I was down to twelve.
As a result, before it was over, I passed out … I think four times. Each time was only for a few seconds, but was an interesting experience. I’ve never passed out like that before, so I didn’t know what was happening the first time; however, each subsequent time, the experience was consistent enough that I could warn the medical staff. The nurses apparently found that a bit amusing.
First, the world would go all purplish, then greenish, then the greenish world would go all wibbly, then I would be an alien mechanic working on a spaceship, then I would be awake with no awareness of the transition to or from. I recall the world going from purple to green looking kind of like a CRT that badly needed to be degaussed.
Also, when it became clear the nosebleed was going to be a lot, my wife gave me a giant mixing bowl to hold under my nose for the drive to the ER. I walked in holding it under my face, which rather alarmed the guard in the waiting room.
The staff didn’t really take me seriously until the first time I passed out, so once I was admitted I spent a while waiting. While I was waiting and simply dripping into my giant mixing bowl, I voiced a comparison to how the demons communicate in Supernatural. One nurse acknowledged me, but sadly, no one laughed.
edit: This wasn’t a horrific thing, which is why I didn’t add it at the top level. I don’t love blood, but it doesn’t bother me, and passing out (while obviously not a good thing) was kind of euphoric in the moment. Each time I woke up I remember coming about with a relaxing sense of “everything is going to be okay.” If it hadn’t happened in a hospital, it probably would have been scarier.
OC, what you described sounds frightening and horrific in hindsight. I’m glad it didn’t go worse.
When I was a teenager I saw someone bleed out.
My friends and I were hanging around downtown at the phone booth outside the all ages club. My hometown had a lot of historic buildings downtown with stuff like the original windows.
One of my friends said bye and began walking home, he rounded a corner and we thought that was all we’d see of him that night.
Not five minutes later he came running back around the corner to the phone booth to call an ambulance, his hands covered in blood.
As he had been walking home, a tweaker had broken into one of the local old machine shops. As he was walking by, the tweaker was caught by a janitor trying to huff gas from one of their tanks, and he jumped through the front window to escape.
My friend was walking by just as this happened. As the tweaker went through the window, because it was 100-year-old glass it came off in huge chunks and sliced the tweakers jugular. My friend tried to staunch the bleeding, an adult in a car stopped, took over, and told him to go call 911.
Shortly we were all crowded around about 15 feet from the scene waiting for the ambulance to show up. It took the ambulance about 10 minutes to get there and the tweaker was long dead by that time.
A runner up is working on a freeway median cleaning crew and finding the aftermath of an Amazon truck that had crashed. All the packages had been spread out all over and clearly someone had come after and looted a bunch of it.
I looked it up, and the driver had died in the crash. I’m not sure if Amazon ever bothered to clean up any of it, I was working for the state and we cleaned up what we reasonably could, but many of the packages were untouched and so we moved on without adding them to the trash pile.
Probably the time when I got arrested for defending myself against a bully in highschool. I thought those pigs were gonna murder me, but luckily, they seems to be enjoying their donuts (figuratively speaking, idk if they were actually eating donuts) so they didn’t really do much physical harm, but I had to spend like 6+ hours at a police station with other juveniles whom did things more serious than what I did, they did things like robbing people on the street, and one kid said he was there after he got caught trying to steal a car (My internal thoughts were like: wtf lol 🤣 that’s wild). Like these kids don’t even look like career criminals, just stupid kids that needs help. They held like 5 or 6 of us in the same room half of the size of a normal classroom. Like… that should be a fire hazard, but again, pigs being pigs. The whole time was psychological torture.
Anyways, charges were eventually dropped. But they did a good job converting someone to anarchism.
Fuck the school admin for siding with the bully
Fuck the police for doing zero investigations and just taking the school admin for their word
ACAB
Harnessed to a large windsurfing sail, I found myself caught between the sail and the water in light rain, close to a reedy shore, out of nowhere.
Someone died under train I was on, I was passenger and haven’t seen it but I did feel when train ran over them.
Probably that time I saw a dead bloated body floating down a tropical river. He must’ve been there in the sun a while.
Lime jello with sliced black olives
