I regularly write about people who follow their intuition and survive life-threatening situations because of it. It's an important lesson in trusting our own gut feelings, and it continues to resonate with folks. Even more of y'all shared how intuition saved your own life, and your loved ones' lives, too:
1. "I told the ER doctor as he handed me discharge papers, 'If I walk out those doors, I will die.' I was desperate, as it was my fourth discharge from the ER, and the ninth doctor who told me the level 10 pain in my head that was shooting down my neck was a migraine. 'This isn't a migraine! Please, I'm dying,' I begged. I told everyone. I was finally admitted but ignored for five days as I lay in the most extreme pain of my life. I couldn't even move my eyes from side to side, yet was given nothing but a Tylenol, before I was finally given an MRI. The doctor held my hands as she delivered the news: massive stroke, pulmonary embolism. I was about to die, and it was a 'miracle' I wasn't seizing. I ripped my hands away and yelled, 'I know! Now, can I please have a freakin' painkiller?!'"
2. "My friend and I were driving to her future college when we were in high school. It was a two-lane highway most of the way. As we were driving back down, we passed a semi and almost got into a head-on collision. We both took a minute to breathe and recover until our panic turned into hysterical laughter. We continued down, and there was a lake that I didn’t know existed, and I was so drawn to it. I told her I had a feeling we needed to stop there on our way back. So we did. It was a basic body of water. We stopped for like 15 minutes and enjoyed the sunshine and summer breeze. Fifteen minutes up the road, the highway patrol was in the process of totally shutting down the highway. There'd been a horrific accident. Someone had tried to pass a semi. We would have been in the crash, or right behind it, if we hadn’t stopped."
3. "About 15 years ago, I was on holiday break from school, so my mom and I decided to meet my sister at her work for lunch. After eating at a nearby restaurant, we decided to walk back toward where she worked for some shopping. There were two routes from where we were to her store: the short route and the longer route. I told my mom and sister that we needed to go the longer way. My sister, already ahead and right by a derelict building, walked back toward me from the shorter path to make fun of me and point out that my route was longer. Literally, the second she was a centimeter away from the building, the roof slates and old iron gutters came crashing off the building onto the pavement and road. We would all have been under that if I hadn’t gotten the urge to go the longer way that day."
4. "My brother and I were supposed to take a train to a neighboring small town to visit our granduncle's family on a Saturday years ago. I was about to book the tickets for us for Saturday on the train's website, but for some reason, I felt compelled to click on Friday instead. I followed that feeling. Saturday morning in our granduncle's home, we saw the news on TV — the train we were originally planning to take had crashed into an oncoming train from the opposite direction. Many people died, and so many others were injured. I was shocked, horrified, and couldn't even speak as my brother and I exchanged looks in the living room. My brother and I feel very lucky to be alive today, and we try to listen to our intuition even more."
5. "We have a small creek that flows beside and behind our house. It's at the bottom of about a 7-foot-deep ravine. It gets backed up when it rains because of all the trees around, so I carved a couple of steps in the dirt to get up and down easier. After a particularly violent thunderstorm, I could hear the water and knew there was a debris blockage. I grabbed a rake and climbed down to remove whatever was backing up the water. The moment I finished, I got this image of myself climbing out of the ditch quickly, not even bothering to use the 'stairs.' It was weird, because I always used them. I shrugged off the feeling after a bit, and as I took one step toward the steps, I felt something touch my hair, and then extreme pain across my right shoulder blade. A dead tree branch over 11 feet long had fallen and broken across my back. It barely missed my skull."
6. "I saved my grandma. My dad passed away earlier this year, so I flew from Florida to Arizona and drove to Mexico for his funeral. I arrived back in Florida on the 17th. On the 19th, she was acting very weird. She wasn't on Messenger, which she always was, and was not answering my calls, which she never did. I was scared, though everyone said she was just depressed over her son and was okay. But I knew better. I called the police for a wellness check, asked her landlord to open up her door, and called her friend who lived close by to check on her. Everyone said, 'She looks awful and she's in horrible shape.' I called an ambulance, and they took her in that same day. The 19th. When she got to the hospital, she was given 10 bags of pure potassium — she had ZERO in her blood or body. The doctors said that I saved her life and that she was a miracle patient, since they'd initially given her a 1% chance of making it through the night."
7. "I woke up puking with severe abdominal pain. At first I thought it was a hangover, and was treating it as such. But something kept nagging at me that I should call the doctor. I called, and an assistant suggested that it was just an upset stomach. That just didn't sit well with me, so I asked my husband to take me to the hospital, a place I try to avoid at all costs, right away. My appendix ruptured as they were wheeling me into the operating room to get it out."
8. "When I was 10 years old, my mom was waiting for me so we could walk down to the shop for her soda and cigarettes. For some reason, I kept stalling. We were on the front porch and she was getting upset at me, but I just didn't want her to go. At that moment, a car smashed through the front yard and skidded down the path in front of our house. We would have been right on that path had we gone when she planned."
9. "I was 41 weeks pregnant with my second child, and there were no signs of contractions. I went to the hospital for a checkup because of regular bleeding, and the doctor kept telling me the baby was fine, there was nothing wrong, and I'd have to wait a week to come back and induce labor. I felt panic and told the doctor I was scared of losing my baby. I didn’t sleep well anymore because of that fear, and it only increased with every day that passed. It felt as if my daughter was trapped inside of me instead of me carrying her. Something told me I could not wait any longer. The doctor, reluctantly, made an appointment to induce labor the next day. My baby was born with her umbilical cord tightly wound around her neck. Luckily, she was quickly released from it and hadn’t suffered a critical lack of oxygen during labor. I woke up with a blood transfusion in my arm and needed several bags of blood."
10. "I went to pick up my son from school to take him to a therapy appointment. I stopped to talk to the receptionist, and something told me our chat was important and that I needed to stand there and talk to her. So I did. When I regained consciousness, medics were loading me on a stretcher into an ambulance. I had a full tonic-clonic seizure, passed out, and hit my head on the ground. I am not epileptic, had never had a seizure before, and haven’t had one since. If I hadn’t stood there talking for those 10 minutes and had left when I planned, I would have had that seizure behind the wheel going 80 mph on the interstate to the appointment, with my son in the car."
11. "My mom went to Paris alone for a work trip when I was 12. She was walking down the street when she suddenly felt a strong compulsion to stop and look at the window of a shop. She was late for a meeting, so she tried to shake it off and keep walking, but a voice in her insisted that she stop and look at the window. She paused only briefly. Then a flowerpot fell from the eighth-story balcony and grazed her forehead. If she hadn’t paused slightly and walked ahead, it would have hit her straight on the head. If she had listened to her first instinct and stopped, the flowerpot would have missed her completely. She's got a nasty scar on her forehead but is still alive."
12. "When I was seven months pregnant, I had a weird stomach pain that I couldn't identify, as well as just a feeling of dread. I did all the normal things one does to try to relieve the stomach pain, but I still felt like something was off. I went to the drugstore to buy Tums and randomly decided to check my blood pressure. It was high, but I figured the machine was off. I went home and casually told my husband I was going to go get checked out because I thought I could be in labor. The pain was that unusual. Turns out I had HELLP syndrome, which is a form of preeclampsia. The pain in my stomach was my liver shutting down. Four days in the ICU and a baby later, I was healed."
13. "I never call out of work. It’s a weird point of pride for me. But one day, I just had a really weird feeling. I decided to call in sick and stayed home with my boyfriend. I just had to. About an hour after I would have left for work, my boyfriend experienced a grand mal seizure. He’d never had one before, and stopped breathing. I was able to get him help right away. If he’d been alone, I’m not sure what would've happened."
14. "I supposedly saved my boyfriend's life. We were getting dinner ready for the kids. He was behind me, and I was in front near the sink facing the wall. I got a weird feeling, so I dropped what I was doing and followed this urge to give him the Heimlich without even looking at him first. In the back of my head, I thought, He’s going to be so mad at me. That is until a huge chunk of meat came flying out of his mouth. The kids didn’t notice or see, since they were at the table, and we went back to what we were doing. After dinner, he told me that he was getting tunnel vision and was about to pass out when I came along. He was so embarrassed about making a scene and was struggling to surreptitiously dislodge the meat completely blocking his airway."
15. "My family was eating at this restaurant in a strip mall about five minutes from home, when we all abruptly felt we should leave in the middle of the meal. We paid very quickly and left, thinking how weird that feeling was. About halfway home, we realized that my dad left his wallet, so we went back. When we got back to the restaurant, there was a car crashed into the window. Four minutes after we'd left, a car drove into the restaurant, right into the window booth we'd been sitting in. Luckily, no one else had been seated there yet."
16. "There was potential for icy road conditions the next day. I discussed with my husband which would be the safest direction to go to work the following day. He told me not to get in the express/toll lane because there are barriers on each side that could be really dangerous with ice. Once I got on the road, I didn’t see any ice at all. So I drove toward the entrance of the toll road. Then I got this strange feeling. I recalled the conversation I had with my husband the night before and stayed on the main road. Turns out that over the next hill, there was ice on the road that caused a 150-car pileup on the toll road, where eight people died. Other than being stuck in traffic for three hours, I was completely fine. I’m so thankful for that conversation with my husband and trusting my gut."
17. "About 12 years ago, my ex-boyfriend came with me to my kids' pediatrician visit at the clinic. We were there for a few hours. As we were walking to the car, my ex said all of a sudden that his chest felt heavy, as if an elephant was sitting on it. He asked me to take him home so he could lie down. I refused. Instead, I followed my instinct to drive him to the emergency room 10 minutes away. When I returned to the ER an hour later after dropping the kids off with a friend, I learned that he had immediately been taken into surgery. He’d had a massive heart attack that only 3 out of 10 people survive."
18. "I walked to my car alone and was about to open the door when I heard a clatter off to the side. A man who looked frail and in his 60s had dropped some things. I'd seen him earlier on the way to my car. I was about to turn around and go help him, but I suddenly heard this voice inside me say, 'Don't turn around. Ignore him. Get into your car.' I listened to the voice. When I sat in my car and looked out the window, he suddenly picked up the stuff easily and quickly. He was no longer stooped and frail-looking. I instantly remembered the stories about Ted Bundy, locked my doors, and drove away as quickly as I could."
What's your own story of intuition saving you from a dangerous situation? Share it in the comments.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.