Thought I'd get a near death experience thread going. Doesn't have to be crazy to share.
I had mine when I was about seven. I was living with my mom at a big house that the owner was letting rooms out in, and they had a pool without a fence around it. You probably already guessed by now, but I couldn't swim yet. I was in the back yard playing with the boy who lived down the hall when the frisbee we were playing with landed in the pool. I thought I could reach it, and the other kid encouraged me, so I knelt down and reached out as far as I could for the frisbee. It didn't happen immediately, I was reaching for a bit before the landlord's big dog came by and bumped into me. I fell in, struggled a bit, and ultimately went under. I remember looking up at the surface, seeing my dog, a black lab, swimming circles over me, and then just going to sleep. My life didn't flash, I didn't have a realization that I was going to die, no lights in tunnels, no voices, no being dragged through deep water or any of that. It was really just like "I'm tired now" and I went to sleep.
Somewhere in all this, someone told my mom I was in the pool. She ran out, jumped in, and dragged me out. My next conscious memory is her pumping on my chest and me throwing up and coughing up water (kinda felt like both anyway). We never went to the hospital, in hindsight I was damn lucky not to have died of dry drowning later. In fact, I've been a paramedic for 14 years, and I've seen my share of drownings in home pools, and it only reinforces for me how lucky I got. It's such a narrow window of survivability, and my mom threaded it. Pools are no joke, don't leave your kids unsupervised around pools, and never ever trust an unfenced pool.
This is a smaller note, but it happened to one of my patients, not me. I was treating a man having a massive STEMI, and when we were just thirty seconds from parking the ambulance, he coded on us. We'd seen it coming, though, and already had the defibrillator pads on him, so I had the firefighter start compressions while I charged up the monitor. Once it was charged, I cleared him and fired the shock, and we actually got Hollywood resuscitation, like his eyes popped open, he gasped, started looking around, the whole nine yards. Only time in my whole 14 years I ever saw that. But the guy looked terrified, way more than he had been before. I'm talking a real, fundamental lizard-brain terror in his eyes; it's possible you've never seen that look, but if you know, you know. I've always wondered if his experience was like mine, had he just gone to sleep and then been jolted awake when the monitor hit him like a freight train? Or did he experience something else?