Near Death Experience

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

During the summer of 2015, at the beginning of August, I was walking around downtown while on a break from work. As I was about to pass the newly opened donut shop, a man and woman walked by; the man had one of his arms around the woman's shoulders, and he did not look like a bum. As he walked by, he said to me, "You are going to die." I never saw him again, nor did I ever experience a stranger saying something like this to me again. Towards the end of the month, I got sick. I took time off work and stayed in bed. But as things were getting worse, we finally decided to go to the hospital. I was admitted into the emergency room, and the staff took a blood sample and were horrified. I had the blood profile of someone who had suffered a massive heart attack. I was moved to the ICU the following morning, and my condition began to deteriorate. It was atypical pneumonia, and the doctors pumped me full of antibiotics. Every movement of my body would skyrocket my pulse not to mention be extremely agonizing, so I just laid there for a few days and focused on breathing. After about a week, I was released. When I visited my family doctor to follow up, he told me, "You were as close to death as someone your age can naturally get." I was 25 at the time. This is was the first "coincidence" that I experienced but it wasn't the last by a large margin.
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Date submitted:Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:08:51 +0000Coincidence ID:10928