What was your closest brush with death?

I've survived the most insane I-should-have-died situations twice.

When I was really little, too little to remember properly, my house had a natural gas leak. My Mom didn't know for the longest time what the smell was, because at the same time, there was construction going on in front of our house for a broken sewer pipe or something, so everything smelled like shit, and it masked the smell of the gas. So the leak went unnoticed for a long time. During this, my Mom was going things like lighting candles and incense to try and get rid of the smell. For context, even turning on a light can cause natural gas to ignite and explode. When the smell didn't go away after the construction was done, she finally called Xcel, and there was such a high concentration of natural gas in the house that the guy who came started literally shaking. We all should have died, and taken a big chunk of the cul-de-sac with us.

Years later, we were at an intersection by a grocery store that had just been robbed. For context, we drove a shit car that got dents in it if you looked at it wrong. The guy that had robbed the store went barreling into the intersection at like 60 miles per hour, but turned too wide and headed straight for our car. At the last second a giant white truck pulled between us, and the car hit the truck instead. The truck only suffered a dented door, but had we been hit, our car would've crumpled like tinfoil.

/r/AskReddit Thread