“Funny” Tales of Narrow Escapes from the Grim Reaper – Real Life Yarns 

Let me start by saying that there is no funny story of escaping death. There is nothing funny about having a close brush with death. But after a while, we might laugh with friends about the experience. That is why I have enclosed “funny” in quotation marks in the title of this article so that it represents how these tales make you feel when you read them. Because you might burst a snort or two. 

Have you ever encountered a funny situation that almost cost you your life? These stories put the “comedy” into the saying, “There are a thousand ways to die.” 

Loye

Peer pressure almost took my life in 2016. I took myself to this wild party after breaking up with my girlfriend. While I was there, drugs were just flying all over the place. My friend then handed me a small bottle and told me that it was the fastest way to move on. I had never had drugs before so I declined. That was how he and his babe started calling me a sissy and a whiny jew boy. I got so pumped up and just collected the bottle and emptied the whole content into my mouth. The expression on their faces told me all I needed to know. That was a “fuck-up” move. Less than two minutes later, I felt my heart explode inside my chest and passed out. I woke up in the hospital the next day and found my girlfriend praying next to me. That incident got us back together. Maybe it was worth it. 

Sameera

My close brush with death happened in 2018. I travelled to Illorin to visit my boyfriend and, since we hadn’t seen each other for a while, we went straight to “action”. It was so intense that when he wanted to lift me off the bed, I slipped off him, fell hard, and hit my head on the edge of the bedboard. I woke up 3 days later with a shaved head. My boyfriend said that I bled so much that my hair had to be shaved off to save my life. It was so bad that I even went into a coma. I kept having severe headaches and temporary memory loss until I was discharged. I still get the headaches from time to time.

Obiora

When I was 5 years old, I went to a birthday party where we were given balloons to play with. Instead of blowing air into the balloons, I put one of them into my mouth and kept inhaling and exhaling through the same mouth. While I was inhaling, the balloon got stuck in my throat and blocked my air pipe. The last thing I saw was my mum rushing to me as I was choking. Upon getting to the hospital, I was pronounced dead, and my parents were asked to deposit my body in the mortuary. They couldn’t believe it but had no choice. The mortuary was a distance from the hospital, so they had to make a little trip there. When they got to the mortuary and were about to take my body inside, I sneezed! Yes, I escaped death! My mum still tells this story as a testimony today. She sha gave me a serious beating a week after my “resurrection”.

Joanne

I was very dramatic and eccentric in my early teenage years. Maybe it was because I was the only child then. At the slightest provocation, I would pack my bags and leave the house. At first, my parents tried to pacify me but, after a while, they left me to my madness. On one fine day, when I was 12, my parents scolded me for something I did. In my usual way, I overreacted and interpreted it that they did not love me. They already knew I was a crazy child, so they ignored me. In a bid to get their attention, I decided to take a drug overdose to appear suicidal. I had poured tablets of different drugs into my hand and was about to take them when my mom walked into the room. For a split second, she froze. The next thing, I felt was her slipper on my forehead. She beat the living daylight out of me that day to the point that I ended up in the hospital. That woman almost killed me that day. She said that she had to chase the evil spirits manipulating me to take my life, knowing that I was her only child. 

Iniobong

My close brush with death happened in 2014 when I was about to leave secondary school. I and my friends brought our bicycles to school for a cycling showdown after classes. As stupid as we were, we took to the busy roads to try out some stunts we saw online. The other guys were really good with the stunts and made me feel inferior. I had a toxic competitive spirit then, so I decided to up my game by trying a very hard stunt. I don’t know what happened, but all I remembered was that I flew off my bike, brutally brushed my lips on the tar, and fell in the way of an oncoming vehicle. I saw its tires approaching fast and saw my life flash before me. But in the last second, a good samaritan pulled me out of the way, just before I fainted. When I woke up in the hospital, I found out that all my friends had run away. I wrote my WAEC exams with crutches and a completely bandaged mouth. I couldn’t speak for a month.