10 Things I've Done - and You Probably Haven't

[perzephone]

So Nyah. Of course, one thing I did that anyone else who does this will do is steal this meme from someone else.

1) I got paid to play with nuts for three days.

2) I've seen all 48 continental United States states before I was 10 years old.

3) Installed a 13-speed transmission in a semi using only help from my dad & a come-along. (For those who don't know, a come-along is a ratchet/pulley system used to pick up heavy things from the ground). I thought I was seriously going to die a painful crushing death. My dad also said he saw his life pass before his eyes.

4) Died 4 times in one morning.

5) Owned a butterscotch 1973 Plymouth Roadrunner as my first car.

6) Bungee jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge before the cops got there.

7) Hang-glided from the Columbia River Gorge cliffs before the cops got there.

8) Had a herd of wild dolphins save me from drowning after a harrowing experience with a rip tide off the coast of San Diego.

9) Been bitten by a rattlesnake, a ball python, a rat snake, a Florida kingsnake and a cobra. Not all on the same day.

10) Had to chase an alligator out of a hotel swimming pool.

Comments

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

8) Had a herd of wild dolphins save me from drowning after a harrowing experience with a rip tide off the coast of San Diego.

o.o
Tell more please! :D :D :D

Your list is way cooler than mine.
And 4 times in one morning! Holy hell, what happened?

[perzephone.livejournal.com]

I haven't been working on my lj biography for awhile... when I was 10, I got hit by a car & I died 4 times between the end of the accident & when finally placed into the ICU. The doctors think a piece of tissue was torn from somewhere in my heart & passed through a heart valve like a bullet - or the impact itself tore the valve. They had to put in some kind of balloon, but when I finally regained consciousness about 10 days later, I had been stabilized & the shunt/balloon/heart thingy had been removed again, so all I had were a few extra stitches in my thigh. I've got a torn & scarred valve as a result, and my kidneys were severely traumatized, which is why I've got the high blood pressure.

As for the dolphins... well, I was swimming in the ocean off the beach of Oceanside. I'd seen dolphins the evening before but never could get photos of them because they never got close enough to the dock. So I had this idea that I was going to swim out to a line of buoys and wait for sunset to see if they would show up again. The line of buoys was maybe half a mile from shore, which wasn't that big of a deal to me because I was (and still am) a strong, if graceless, swimmer. However, I didn't realize they (whoever is in charge of that kind of thing... Nat'l Park Service? Coast Guard? The Baywatch people?) had cast those buoys as a riptide warning... and when I got past the breakers I hit a pretty good current - at first it was helping me but then it changed direction and blammo - I got pulled under into what felt like a funnel of hard current that proceeded to bonk my head numerous times against the bottom of the shore, and then bonked me on the undersides of the buoys as it swept me out past them... I lost my camera - which was on a strap around my neck... and then I got tangled up in some shit hanging off the buoy (and when the tide stripped my shorts off they got tangled up around the crap around my knees) and the surface was maybe two or three feet over me but the current was holding me down and I was getting tired and couldn't fight to swim against it, or cross it and I couldn't get up for air, so I started to panic.

I breathed in ocean water, it was being shoved up my nose & I felt like it was being shoved down my ears & eyes, and everything went furry and grey and little sparks of light were going off behind my eyes & I was hearing bells.

I swear, at first I thought sea ghosts were coming for me, and then I assumed sharks, because when the dolphins swarmed around me, I was blacking out & just saw these shapes that grew fins and they (or maybe just one) got underneath me and propelled me to the surface. I was puking sea water & trying to get the crap from around my knees & the dolphins were just shoving me up & forward. They pushed me out of the cross-currents and I just floated, still puking water, and the dolphins were just bumping me along and I could hear them & feel them on all sides of me and then I felt the bottom. I just sort of washed up on the beach like a piece of driftwood. And I just laid there til my sister came looking for me, and by the time we got back to Vegas I had pneumonia & a pleural infection. It scared the crap outta me but it didn't make me afraid of the water.

Jody was all over it, too, "Janelle, you missed the dolphins! They came right up to the dock!" Bitch.

[moonvoice.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you for sharing both of those stories. Just amazing. Holy crap!!!

Especially the one with the dolphins. That is so amazing.

[perzephone.livejournal.com]

Drowning is not a fun way to almost die. It mostly just made me feel like a big stupid dork because I was doing so many things wrong all at the same time. I obviously was in desperate need of a deus ex machina.

1) Who lives near the ocean almost all their life & doesn't know instinctively that big orange & red buoys offshore pose as a warning for something? Coulda been a bad current, coulda been an oilspill, toxic waste, sharks, who knows? Big orange & red buoys are the traffic-cones of the ocean.

2) Who goes swimming with a camera in a plastic baggy tied around their neck?

3) Who does not tell any of their relatives/friends they went to the beach with that they are going to swim way far out into the ocean?

4) When I felt the original cross-current, I was not tired yet and I know how to swim my way out of a rip-tide. I was too intent on reaching my goal to stop and swim back to the beach.

The Gods look after drunks and stupid people. At least if I'd been drunk I wouldn't have tried to go swimming.