When you're just going through life and minding your business, it can be easy to forget how fleeting life is. We can't worry about every danger or else we'd live in fear and nothing would get done, but that doesn't mean we aren't one misstep, wrong turn, or surprise diagnosis away from mortal peril. These people faced one such life-threatening situation and managed to come out the other side. Thanks to Ask Reddit, they shared their stories. 

One former military C-17 cargo plane worker recounted a mission in Iraq. "We flew a mission out of Baghdad and our plane got hit by an SA-14 at about 1200 feet," he wrote. "I just happened to be sitting behind the pilot in the Left ACM seat and I got to stare at a giant blow torch erupting out of the top of our number two engine." Incredibly, the plane was able to make an emergency landing. He acknowledged that had the missile struck the wing itself instead of the engine, the plane would have likely gone down.

But while military members acknowledge the risks of their jobs, the same cannot be said for regular civilians. "I had a screening for something else and my doctor found very early-stage cancer at age 34," one person wrote. The cancer apparently is typically only found in people over 60 and could have developed into something fatal within 10 years. Had they not gone in for that random specific test, it might never have been discovered. The doctor "never gave me the results of the test I came in for." Read about those, and other dramatic times people narrowly cheated death.