At around 10pm one night I realized I’d forgotten to walk the dog and should probably do so before going to bed. As I step out onto the street I notice a woman leaning against a car with a weird look on her face, like a grimace. It’s a big city and I’ve seen lots of weird people around here so I don’t think much of it and start walking away when I hear her whimper. I turn around and ask her if she’s ok and she assures me she’s fine, her “husband is coming”. At this point I notice she’s heavily pregnant and there’s also a toddler in her car, but she insists she’s fine so I start walking away again.

I get 20 or 30 paces down the street and the woman lets out this blood-curdling howl. I run back to her and ask her what’s going on and she just says “I need to sit down”. I lead her to the steps outside my apartment building where she sits down and I fetch her a glass of water and put the dog back inside. I’ll always regret not inviting her in to my place for what comes next but I’ve been jaded by so many con-artists and burglars trying to get into my building that I didn’t feel like it was an option.

She starts breathing super heavily and stops responding to me completely. Like I’m not even there. I’m freaking out and her husband is nowhere in sight. I have no idea what to do so I rush into the hotel next door to find a “real adult” (I was early 20s) and come out with a few other 20-somethings that “knew first aid”. We immediately call an ambulance.

The ambulance guys tell me they’ll be here in 5mins but to go and get towels just in-case she’s about to give birth. I run in and get all my towels. As I come out the woman gets off the step and kneels on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. I place towels all around her on the floor and she screams in pain. By this point a small crowd has gathered to see what all the fuss is about and some dude tries to convince her to get on her back and starts pulling her around. She fucking screams at him to stop and he backs off. She then drops her leggings down to her knees and screams “CATCH THE BABY” at which point me and one of the guys from the hotel reach down and see a newborn baby dangling in her leggings. Ambulance guys are still on the phone and tell us to wrap the baby in clean towels and, I kid you not, not even 30 seconds later the ambulance and husband both arrive.

Apparently they had rented a place a few doors down from me for the birth but there was a problem with the keys or something. The husband thanks us and they all go into the ambulance. I’m in shock and the only thing I can think is that I need to clean all this blood and poop off the sidewalk so I clean it all off. The guys from the hotel crack open a bottle of wine and we all just stand around in shock at what just happened.

So that’s the story of how I delivered a baby on the street outside my apartment. I can’t watch any birth scenes on TV or movies anymore either because of what I think is probably mild PTSD and it makes me feel instantly sick to my stomach and panicked.

TLDR: delivered a stranger’s baby on the street outside my apartment with zero prior experience

Sort of hard to say. I grew up an illegal immigrant in a big city. When I was 6 or so my parents would bring me with them when they went out to clean offices at night.

I pulled a fire alarm at like 1am without knowing what it was and my parents hid me in the trunk of the car. Told me to be quiet. They didn’t speak English and were afraid the cops could take me away.

I got hit with the belt a few times. When I was around 12 I tried to fight my dad during a belting and got my ass beat.

Also when I was around 12 I was in a car accident on the highway in an SUV that flipped 4 times. Everyone went to the hospital except for me, I was perfectly fine.

I was in Vegas with my brother for his 21st once and he had spent all his money. We were in the airport on the way back and there are slot machines there. He asked me to borrow some money to play some slots- he said if he’d win he would share with me.

On the last $2 bet he hit a jackpot and we each got $600

One time I was playing pool at the bar in my early 20s and hopped a ball to make the game winning shot on the 8 ball - won $50. It was beautiful. I rode that high for a week.

Speaking of high, I also overdosed on heroin (fentanyl, really) and was revived with Narcan in an ambulance once. That was a very confusing experience. Coming to slowly with many lights and people in uniforms around you.

I’ve been robbed before, with 2 guys grabbing me by each arm while a 3rd goes through my pockets. While they talked shit I just stayed quiet.

I’ve gotten in bar fights and have been kicked out of bars. I stood up for a friend at a house party at around 18 and got my ass beat because of it. He was too scared to do anything. Around that same time period I had a short couple months long fling with a woman in her 40s. I felt like a badass at 18 but nowadays I look back and it was weird.

I’ve done intramuscular ketamine injections with exactly the right dosage to be under anesthetic - aka khole. I’ve done a lot of drugs - nothing in my life has ever come close. I’ve also done two cycles of steroids. I’ve never had so much sex as during those cycles. During this time period I caught chlamydia & gono.

Also I made like $5,000 on Dogecoin and like $3,000 on Bepro. (Easily lost more than that overall with coins)

Those are some arguably crazy things that have happened to me. I’m not sure if my life is tame compared to the average. I guess it all depends on perspective. I know people who have seen much more craziness out of life.

A. Riding a freight train from Midwest to California. 3 day trip, very crazy.

B. Taking a motorcycle trip to a small tribal village in Thailand, smoking bong rips with a Buddhist monk, slaughtering a pig and eating it raw, drinking homemade rice hootch until blacking out. Hiking around drunkenly accidentally ending up in Burma, running away from the Burmese military. Them chasing me until I got back to the village.

C. Getting bitten by a unknown spider in Nicaragua, swollen, blistering boil, feverish, infection. Taking a bus to san salvador, then quezaltenango Guatemala, doctor cutting a blister open and pushing out the puss, excruciating pain. Then after days of it not healing, going to a local hotspring, dunking my arm in steaming hot lithium water, and basically watching the infection fall out in one massive puss ball leaving a gaping hole in my arm.

My father took up a side gig consulting for the Russian government. They paid him in envelopes of American $100 bills. Then he met a grad student and started an affair with her and then divorced my mom and left the family to move to his apartment in Russia then moved to China to raise his new child and then unsuccessfully attempted to sue my whole family and I for sharing the same last name with him “fraudulently”.

Visiting my terminally ill father in hospital after he had a fall. I asked him what that huge bruise on his neck was, if it was from the fall.

“No, it’s the cancer.” Was the thing he said, and I’ll never forget it. Crazy. Turns out the tumour was cutting off blood flow to his brain and causing him to pass out. He died a month later. Almost a year to that day now.

Love you, Dad.

Hmmm I’ve got a few.

• Got blackout drunk and woke up in a different city in a random hospital in Spain when I was 15. Loads of crazy details to that one

• Police got called to house party we were having after we got into a fight while tooled up. Left everyone in the house and turned all the lights off whilst us three ran out the back door. I went back and somehow convinced the police to leave. Loads of crazy details there.

• Got blamed for rioting in a newspaper which was bullshit and a total lie.

• Fell off a house and shattered my left foot

• Throat ruptured after surgery and nearly died alone in my bathroom

I’m in the medical field, so there’s a lot of shit I’ve seen at the hospital, but I would say the real craziest thing I ever saw happened when I was in my early 20s. I moved back in with my parents for a time after I had to give up my first apartment. My parents have always had a bit of an unhealthy relationship, they fight like it’s their job. My childhood bedroom is always next to the kitchen and front room where they would fight, so I heard a lot of it and sadly just got used to it after so many years, though listening to it constantly as a child formed some core memories in there somewhere.

When I was there in my 20s I would mostly hang out in the separate garage, it helps me to feel like I still kind of had my own space. I worked graves, and would maintain my schedule on my days off, playing video games through the night. One night my dad came out randomly and was in an absolute state, telling me my mom had said “maybe divorce” and a couple other things. We talked at length and I thought I had helped him calm down. He left and I was up for a few more hours. I passed him sleeping in his truck on my way into the house to go to bed, it was weird but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just figured he needed to sleep it off. I had only been asleep a couple hours, when my mom came running, panic screaming into my room at the top of her lungs. She woke me up shaking and yelling that my dad was going to kill himself right now in the garage, that he had the gun and that he said he was going to shoot himself in the face if she tried to stop him. At that moment I saw him passing my room on his way outside. With only a couple hours of sleep ruining my capacity for reasoning my adrenaline went straight from 0 to full blast. I had discovered the nature of their disagreement the night before talking to my dad, so my mouth just ran away before I could think. I sprinted into the hall and caught him by the shoulder , then immediately started shouting all kinds of heinous shit at them about how they were both being “dumb fucks, stupid fucking idiots, immature as fuck” I don’t remember the exact words but you get the gist. These are two very religious people who never would have accepted hearing the slightest profanity out of me in regular circumstances, not even the word “god” or the word “hell” (mormons). So yeah, neither of them said anything they both just stood there crying or stunned and listened to me tell them what big fucking morons they were and how immature they were acting, this went on for at least 15 solid minutes, easily the most cathartic thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, bar none. At the end they were both just kind of stunned, we had it pretty well resolved and they were both calm and I went back to sleep, a testament to just how tired I was in that moment. The three of us have never talked about it again, I think because it all just got resolved right there somehow. Nothing like it has ever happened with them again according to my sister who still lives with them

I’ve taking a shit and it was clean wipe. Good old times.

Backstory: I met my first girlfriend when I was around 17. Then I met her family, and during that time, O developed arthritis.

The pains were really bad, to the point that some days I couldn’t even stand up from my bed. One day, her parents called me and asked me if they could “help” me.

This is where the story starts, they said they were part of a “religious group” and were called Santeros (so they practiced Santeria).

The thing is, at the time I was so ignorant that I didn’t even know what that was and didn’t even make the effort to find out for some reason.

They told me they could take me to a guy that could pray for my health and whatnot. Since I didn’t want to sound rude, I agreed and we went to the place.

The man (priest? Idk) kept insisting he knew I had noghtmares and I was afraid of someone chasing me, to which I kept insisting that that was not the case. Yhe whole experience was weird.

But then he told my girlfriend’s parents that he wanted to see me again because he meeded to “perform” to be able to help me with his prayers.

For some reason, I didn’t even pay attention to this and just said sure.

A week goes by and I am going, again, to the same place with priest with my gf’s parents. The difference is that, this time, there is a giant box in the back of the car.

I get there and they take me to the second floor of thr place. The floor is completely messed up woth dirt all over the place and weird artifacts, cockroaches, spiders, and a hole on the rooftop.

They tell me to take my clothes off (except my underwear) and pray to a god (I think it was called Oshun? I don’t remember).

After chanting and praying, they tell me to lay down on the ground looking up. I do so and they proceed to take a small calf out of the box, decapitate and dismember it next to me, and afterwards putting the body in top of me in the form of a cross, all while chanting, singing, dancing, etc.

After that they told me to bathe in a specific river using oranges as a sponge.

The whole experience was fucking surreal, after that, I just reject almost everything that has to do with religion.

Got a phone call from my Dad while I was working aboard Queen Mary 2 asking if I was alright. Confused me, because yeah, of course I was. He said something about an earthquake, so I put the news on the TV.

Turns out there’d been an earthquake which had caused the tsunami in Japan. We were off the coast of Japan. The wave went right under us, and I had no idea.

Mad.

Being young and exploring an abandoned farm area quite late at night, entering a hut with a friend, the door jammed as we entered and we got stuck in small box like room with caged windows for a few hours till someone heard us.

Just traumatising childhood things.

First one happened at birth:

I was turned the wrong way as a baby and the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, choking me to death. Doctors had to perform an emergency c-section. In doing so they cut my face with the scalpel in two spots. Almost didn’t make it but have these cool scars.

EDIT: where were these experts during my birth? As the commenters pointed out, I wasn’t choking, but dying nonetheless.

When i was at my first job in a factory as a trainee, they decided to remodel a manufacturing line and had to move some 40t hydraulic presses. They hired a crane, and the crane guy did the proper mounting of the presses. A 20cm steel beam through the mounting holes of the press, attached to the hook of the crane with these nylon carrying ropes. All fine.

As he lift the press through a hole in the roof, the steel beam just fucking breaks into two pieces. The whole 40t press falls to the ground from a height of 3 meters, leaving a crater of 50cm in depth in the concrete. The broken off piece of the steel beam slams into the driver cabin of the crane, which luckily was reinforced with a steel cage behind the window. This cage saved the crane operator’s life.

We were on a smoke break and watched everything. Fucking crazy.

Never step under heavy load hanging from a crane. Never ever.

I transitioned.

The way I move through the world and the way people treat me is just fundamentally different to the way that they used to treat me. I have seen and lived “both sides” as it were

I sometimes still have trouble believing that it’s real…

Probably living through the Tohoku earthquake disaster. That was more than a little chaotic.