In my early teens I used to swim at the neighbours as they had a huge rope swing into the creek.

One day as I was leaving at sunset. I saw their young kid (8-9?) fuck up a swing and hit the rocks on his way in. Crunch, splash, nothing.

I stood there next to his parents as the ripples faded and the kid didn’t reappear. I waited for them to do something but they laughed and drank more wine. So I ran back down to the creek, dived in and swam down into the large deep dark waterhole. Took me a few tries but I found him about 12 feet down under a rock overhang.

Hauled him up, dragged him up onto the shore, started chest compressions as he wasn’t conscious or breathing and he ejected a whole bunch of water, shuddered and started coughing and trying to breathe.

At this point his parents had wandered down with their wine glasses in hand to tell him “you’re alright” while the kid cried. So I got up and left.

That was pretty much the end of my faith in humanity.

When I was 12 my grandpa took me hunting in the remote Idaho backcountry. To get there you had to ride a horse for four or five days or could land at a ranger’s strip, and that was still a long flight. We met two brothers and a buddy of theirs on their way out of camp early the first morning, decided we’d take a different trail. Maybe ten minutes later we hear a shot, and then screaming. My grandpa rushed over and we found that one brother had not made sure of his target and blown a hole in his brother’s leg. The wounded man was already in shock and the other two were beyond panic.

My grandpa told them to step away, sent the friend back to camp to radio for help. He had me help him cut the guy’s pant leg off, then instructed me on how to elevate and hold the tourniquet while he inspected the wound. It was bad but had missed the artery, but I’d also never seen a man with his leg blown open or that much human blood before. My grandpa (WW2 vet) was cool a cucumber and that helped me stay calm. Got him bandaged as best we could and grandpa decided we should move him, get back to the strip, and that he’d fly him to the nearest town with a hospital and landing strip. I crammed in the back and held the tourniquet. We ended up only flying for about half an hour before landing at a different ranger’s strip because LifeFlight came up to take over.

A couple of weeks later the brothers came to my grandpa’s house to say thank you and that the victim was on his way to recovering. So not a solo life save, but a joint effort. Taught me how to remain calm and functional in traumatic situations. I’ve been in a few others over the years and while I don’t know if the people who lived did so specifically because of my actions, I think my presence helped.

Well the other day I was eating a sandwich and texting/posting while driving. I noticed my car was beginning to drift into the oncoming lane as I mistakenly did both at the same time. Noticing my vehicle on a steady sloping angle towards their only maneuvering space on the small mountain road, other drivers seemed alarmed and unsure what action to take. Fortunately, I am very fast at eating and posting, so I was able to return my attention to the road and one hand to the wheel, slouching for good measure. Saving the other drivers’ lives. ❤️‍🩹 There is a brutal lesson in th

I punched that meteor while I was in orbit. Believe me, it was a good deal larger before hitting Chelyabinsk.

The first time was when I was about 7 my little sister started choking on a fruit pastel so I did some back slaps and she spit it out.

I eventually went into health care so quite a few since.

Not particularly dramatic and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually saved a life but living in Seattle I’d make care packs for homeless people. They’d have high density snacks but also things like emergency blankets, wool socks, a variety of things. Between that and buying meals for people who looked like they had two feet in the grave maybe I’ve saved somebody, I’ll never know. I’ve called the ambulance for people a couple times but similarly it’s hard to tell if they were saved once taken away

When I was in undergrad some of my friends and I were eating a late dinner in the dining hall when someone came in to say that someone had fallen in the river. It was the middle of winter at the time, so when we rushed out we saw that a man had fallen through the ice, perhaps while trying to cross, and was clinging to the edge of the hole while half submerged. He was pretty far out and we didn’t know how stable the ice was, so we tied our scarves together and bound them to a thick stick. I had to try a few times but eventually succeeded in throwing the weighted end to him and dragging him to the bank. Unfortunately the dude was really unpleasant and said something horribly racist to a black woman who was standing with us, apropos of nothing. We left immediately after ensuring that he was no longer in mortal peril, as it looked like news vehicles were starting to show up and we didn’t want any part of that.

My son used to eat too fast without chewing properly.
He’d just swallow lumps of food sometimes, even though we’d actively work on slowing down.

He was a solid mass of a kid from his down syndrome, (he has the physique of a silverback)

He went wide eyed at dinner one night and wasn’t breathing, I had to get him out of the chair and spun around for a heimlich maneuver. Because he was choking he was going all limp, and I’d just finished cancer treatment so I was fatigued and weak AF, so it took everything I had to lift him and do the heimlich. He coughed out the food on the first or second try. Thankfully, because I was done after that exertion.

About two years old child choking. Mother was running around him in circles.

Grabbed the child and placed him on my knee face down. Struck him twice between sholder plates. Was able to hook the object from his troat with my finger.

It was a large piece of hard candy.

Mother grabbed him and ran away still in panic.

My 18 month old son was having respiratory and stomach symptoms that seemed worse than a standard cold to me, but his doctors said not to worry, all kids have a bad cold sometimes. Even after apples came out exactly as they went in, points and all, and the top of his head had become sunken.

I insisted on taking him to hospital despite being told I was overreacting, and they admitted him immediately without even asking our name. His blood was thick like pudding, and it took a while before they could even do tests, because they couldn’t take blood.

It was rotavirus, and he was in intensive care for 2 weeks.
It was one of the few times I’d decided I wasn’t listening to people telling me to be quiet, and I’m so glad I did. That was like 30 years ago.

I noticed that a girl at a party had alcohol poisoning and got her to the hospital

I was a bike courier for years. One day I went into a building and someone was telling security that there was homeless guy passed out to the escalator. I went up the escalator and there were a bunch of business types standing around this guy (they were in the phone to 911). He was struggling to breathe and when I rolled him into recovery position he coughed up his tongue. So yeah, that was nice. I don’t know for sure, if he would have died.

My brother and I were going down a water slide. He was 3 or 4, I was about 7. He came out of the slide and landed upside down in his floaty. I flipped him back over. Simple in the moment, terrifying if I think about it for too long.

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

My distant aunt and uncle got murdered in a horrible robbery. They had a daughter…my cousin. We hanged out as kids but lost touch until this event. A couple of weeks after the funeral I decided to call her to see how she was holding up. We chatted for a long time and she thanked me for checking on her. Months later she told me she was a few seconds away from suicide when I called called her that time… And our random conversation changed her approach to life.