What's the strangest thing that ever happened to you?

[_Mr. Coffee]

Well, I'm sure by now some people around here are wondering what the hell is wrong with me... I got shot in the head once.

It was late-1994. Clinton was President. Most of the republic formerly known as Yugoslavia was having some sort of violent debacle, or was getting ready to, so my current mood was "GLEEEEE". Perfect time to be an idiotic young sergeant with delusions of leading his warriors to victory against the forces of evil.

At the end of the previous year, I was a newly-minted Marine Sergeant who had graduated from the Basic Reconnaisance Course and was assigned to B Co., 2nd Recon Bn. Battalion Recon, not FORCE; Junior Varsity, in the Recon pecking order.

A detachment was tapped to be assigned to Bosnia in support of opearations. This could be helping the Air Force or Navy find crap to blow up, doing hard assaults on Croat or Serb forces that were particularly reluctant to knock off the ethnic cleansing, hunting artillery, triple-A or SAM sites, coordinating operations with fellow hunters with the UK, Canadian, or French contingents, or figuring out new and inventive ways to ignore ROEs that those UN candyasses set. Oh, and I made fun of the Danes and Belgians every chance I got. Bunch of pussies...

My happy little band of merry cutthroats drew partol around a little shithole called Goražde, trying to find out where those naughty little Serbs were firing artillery from or hunting for their spotters.

During one of these, we hit one of their semi-permanent bases back up in a ridge to the north-east. The actual assault was a walk-through, as such things go, but we had a hard pocket of Serbs in a warehouse to deal with. We hit it with 2 squads while the rest of the force mopped up. First squad went in and got bogged down about 2/3 of the way through, so it was our turn to leapfrog past them.

Buncha needless details later, the King (he did a hell of an Elvis impersonation) and I hit a room. A Serb popped out of a closet just after we cleared the door, on the right, King's side. Zapped King while I was going guns-and-eyeballs to my section (he was okay, the vest stopped it). I heard/saw King go down, turned, and shot at the same time as the Serb. Both mine went into his pelvis, though I didn't know that until later.

He was on my right and I was still wheeling into his line of fire, so the bullet smacked into the bony ridge over my left eye, expended a lot of it's energy there. It carved a furrow along my skull, just under the skin, that went down a little, then turned up so that it ended up exiting just above and behind my left ear.

Still conscious (sorta), and bleeding like a stuck pig, I am reported to have put two more rounds into the dude who shot me and made my way outside. I accused a Staff Sergeant of being the waiter who ordered my steak well when I CLEARLY stated that I asked for it medium-rare. I came back to myself about 20 minutes later, unable to see out of my left eye, having probably raved about some outlandish crap, because everybody was laughing their asses off at me once it was clear that I was probably going to be okay.

I got medevaced with an obvious bullet wound, a respectable concussion, and a skull fracture at the point of impact . I got cosmetic surgery done to reduce the distortions to the flesh around my left eye, though it's still narrower than the right to this day. The scar is more visible when I have a tan, and I grow less hair around the exit point. Headaches when the weather shifts. Since then, I have taken two more bullets (stomach, right hip), been in two chopper crashes (separated vertebra, 3 broken ribs w/punctured lung), fell out of a chopper (multiple fractures left femur, pelvis, massive damage to the ACL/PCL/MCL left knee), and have a lot of little pit-scars on me from near-miss spalling.

So, if you want to get shot the right way, don't let a Serbian do it. Their quality control is for crap.

[_Polygamy Porter]

The strangest thing that ever happened to me?

I went through the SLC Temple in 1987.

Don't believe me? Read about it here:
*WARNING: May cause Mormon garments to get all wadded up **
http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?p=7996#7996
http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?p=8035#8035

[_The Nehor]

The strangest thing that ever happened to me?

I went through the SLC Temple in 1987.

Don't believe me? Read about it here:
*WARNING: May cause Mormon garments to get all wadded up **
http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?p=7996#7996
http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?p=8035#8035

You must have led a tame life.

[_Blixa]

This is a hard question to answer, Shades. It's interesting to see the many ways people have defined "strange," too. From the supernatural to the extreme physical to the unlikely.

I don't think I can come up the strangest, but I can throw a few strange things into the mix.

1) "Supernatural"/Unexplainable: I saw things when I was a kid. Ghostly apparitions and, don't laugh, fairies, you know "wee folk." My mom apparently saw "things" as a kid, too.

As an adult, I saw a UFO once. It was flying and unidentified to me. When it went over all the streets lights flickered and went out.

My husband and I used to joke about a "ghost" in our previous apartment: things would go missing and turn up in the most unlikely of places. I guess that kind of mischief is probably closer to "poltergeist" than ghost, but whatever. Its not happening in our new place.

I had a friend who had severe mental problems. I don't know what the technical diagnosis would have been, but he had some kind of multiple personality syndrome. He had a fear of evil things coming to get him and explained the "other personality" as some kind of "guardian angel," who would take him over to protect him. Once I called him on the phone and the "other personality" answered and I thought I was talking to a completely different person. A woman, not a man.

2) Physically extreme: I don't know if Mr. Coffee's experience can technically be called a 'trepanning', but I came close to that once when I had surgery on my skull to remove a bone tumor (or horn if you want to be medieval about it). It was benign and they only had to chisel a bit out, not make a big hole. I thought I might have a plate, but only got some metal staples that came out later.

I had to have a small, not that unusual, bit of minor surgery to my, ahem, lady parts. A few days later the stitches popped out and I bled a whole damned lot. I called the doctor who was kind of a dick about it---first he told me it was just my period. No, bright arterial blood does not equal menstruation. Then he asked if I'd "done something." No I had not. Instead of sending me to the emergency room, he had me come into the office and put the stitches back in. With no anasthesia and with me helping to tie them off (it was post 5:00 pm and the nurses had left). I thought I would go into shock from the pain, but keeping up a constant stream of curses at him helped me remain conscious. I very nice, slightly TBM friend had driven to me to the doctors and when it was over she said, "Do you think you should have talked to him like that?"

3) Unlikely: I got to have at it with the hot bartender everyone else wanted.

[_Dr. Shades]

1) "Supernatural"/Unexplainable: I saw things when I was a kid. Ghostly apparitions and, don't laugh, fairies, you know "wee folk." My mom apparently saw "things" as a kid, too.

What did the "wee folk" look like? How tall, what sort of clothing, skin color, build, etc.?

3) Unlikely: I got to have at it with the hot bartender everyone else wanted.

Not unlikely at all. If he was male, then everyone else female got to have at it, too.

[_Blixa]

One of the fairies I remember seeing was all silver: silver skin, hair, wings clothes. She and the wee folk I would see in the garden looked an awful lot like the pictures in children's books---straight out of Arthur Rackham illustrations. Not suprising since I loved these kind of pictures and drew them myself:

http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/rackham5.jpg

http://www.fantasyarts.net/Fairies/fair ... kam%20.jpg

http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/images/child/fairy2.jpg


As for my lovely one off with can't-remember-his-name, I still think it was unlikely that he would pick me.

[_KimberlyAnn]

I awoke during surgery once. All I remember was a tremendous sense of pressure in my chest and panicking because I felt like I couldn't breathe and reaching to pull the tube out of my mouth. A nurse or doctor standing near my head mumbled something and knocked me out again. The next day I asked if that really happened or if I'd somehow imagined it. The doctor told me it did happen and that it took more anesthesia than normal to keep me down.

And Blixa, I know what you mean about stitches in the female area. I had four kids with no painkiller, and oddly enough, some of the pain I remember most was being stitched up afterward. It hurt like crazy and they used what looked like a freaking fish hook to do the job!

I really don't have any other strange experiences, but I have lots of really, really strange and vivid dreams and I remember many of them well. Last night I dreamed a poster from this board wrote a note to me on his dirty sock and mailed it to my house, lol! I'm not telling who it was or what the note said...

KA

[_The Nehor]

I awoke during surgery once. All I remember was a tremendous sense of pressure in my chest and panicking because I felt like I couldn't breathe and reaching to pull the tube out of my mouth. A nurse or doctor standing near my head mumbled something and knocked me out again. The next day I asked if that really happened or if I'd somehow imagined it. The doctor told me it did happen and that it took more anesthesia than normal to keep me down.

And Blixa, I know what you mean about stitches in the female area. I had four kids with no painkiller, and oddly enough, some of the pain I remember most was being stitched up afterward. It hurt like crazy and they used what looked like a freaking fish hook to do the job!

I really don't have any other strange experiences, but I have lots of really, really strange and vivid dreams and I remember many of them well. Last night I dreamed a poster from this board wrote a note to me on his dirty sock and mailed it to my house, lol! I'm not telling who it was or what the note said...

KA

Yeah sorry about that.

[_Gazelam]

Song for the people who see fairies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZhM75aGMg

[_Blixa]

I would have been mighty impressed with the Cottingham fairies had I known about them as a child, Gaz. I teach Sherlock Holmes stories fairly frequently, so I always talk a lot in class about Conan Doyle's belief in them.