Have your neighbors ever come to your rescue?

Around ten months ago our hot water heater exploded. The people in the apartment right across from us gave us a copy of their key so we could use their shower until we got hot water again. Not life saving but really nice.

Thankfully, no, because we haven’t needed it. But I have called 911 and told other neighbors to evacuate when I saw a raging house fire a couple of years ago. It was terrifying, and the man who lived in the burning house ended up in the hospital because he saved everyone else who lived with him. I never found out if he made it or not.

Wow.

Yep.

Back when we had our house in the boonies, our septic tank exploded (my lovely mother in law sabotaged the septic pump so nothing kicked to the drain field. It was lovely).

The resulting puddle in the front yard made my car sink into the ground about six inches. Six inches of septic-sodden Florida sugar-sand mud.

Then a Knight in Shining Armor – or, rather, a hillbilly with a tow truck – saw me struggling and came by and pulled my car out of the muck. Wouldn’t even let me pay him. Good man. I bought my Crown Vic off of him about a year later.

I am so glad that old witch is GONE @Seek! Yay for the hillbilly!

I went to the store and when I returned I saw firetrucks parked in front of my house. No lights on or commotion though and as I got out of my car two fireman approached me and said are you Mr. Cruiser? I said yes….they then informed me that there had been a bit of an accident in the house and my son was taken to the hospital and they wanted to warn me of the bit of a mess in the house. I open the door and it looked like a scene out of “In Cold Blood” blood everywhere. They told me my son had slipped and slid head-on into a clay flower planter. HOLY SHIT! I was told that my neighbors heard my wifes screams of help rushed in to help her by taking the phone from her hands as she attempted to call 911 and apply pressure to my sons gushing head wound and the husband found my other son terrified hiding under the table and talked him down from this horror show before him….needless to say I could not drive fast enough to the hospital. Those fine neighbors were angles in disguise.

We were traveling in the winter, and our next door neighbors were putting our mail inside for us while the house was empty.

The guy noticed the heat went out and it was 0 degrees F.

For those who haven’t lived in cold climates, when the water in your pipes freezes, they burst and flood the building when they defrost.

When we got home and asked how things went, the guy said, “Your mail is on the dining room table, and I had to replace a part on your boiler, it was $20.”

Amazing he knew exactly which $20 part needed replacing. He saved us thousands.

Wow! How old was he @Cruiser? Good story! I mean, awful story! So what did he cut? His femoral artery or something?

Nice @Call_Me_Jay.

We once saw some kids stealing some tires out of our neighbor’s garage. Neighbors weren’t home. Rick jumped in the car and tracked them down, got their tag and called the police.

@Dutchess_III He was 6…the gash was huge (32 stitches) and we opted to have a plastic surgeon do the repairs though it took 6 hours longer there is zero visible scars 10 years later.

Wow….was it his forehead?

@Dutchess_III Yes right across the hairline on the front corner of his head. He was terrified of all the blood and hell so were we. To have a child ask you if they were going to die is the most intense moment of your life

@Call_Me_Jay I had a similar experience this winter where my neighbor (the watchman) called my next door neighbor at our summer home to see if they could reach me and tell me that there was no steam coming out of the stack for 2 days now (10F outside at best). I had no choice but to haul ass up to the cabin. I get there and everything was a toasty 52 F just like I had it set when I left, but our good meaning neighbor failed to take into consideration I had a heat pump furnace that puts out little to no steam. So that weekend I installed a Honeywell WIFI thermostat that tells me 24/7 what the temps are and best part is I can change them 100 miles away.

Not in an emergency situation or anything, but they were very supportive when I was a sick teenager.

Conversely, when I was around 12 I was house-sitting / cat-sitting for a neighbor when their house got broken into. We were able to get police to the scene in time to catch the intruders.

Never.
Do you remember the time 911 called me and asked me to sit with the neighbor girl that I had never met because her mother was sick? When I got there, the girl answers the door and says, “Mom’s dead, and she’s been dead for a really long time!”

Or my neighbor that would come flying out the door to race me to shoveling his sidewalk of snow?

I was raised without neighbors. I’ll do what I can, but I ask for nothing on average.
Neighbors don’t cross my mind? If that makes sense.

“Neighbors” is a city-people idear.

Neighbors can be a country-people idear too, @ibstubro. Just because they live a mile or 2 or 10 away doesn’t mean they aren’t neighbors. And what the hell were you talking about?

@Cruiser and Dutchess

During my teaching years there were so many incidents of kids colliding with each other on the playground (more like an alleyway between two buildings in a city school ) and when kids get a forehead cut it always bleeds profusely like they hit an artery or something.

The first time it really freaked me out too, but after awhile you realize that it looks worse than it probably is and they’re not going to die from blood loss :)

(Although 32 stitches is unusual and a major big deal. Good for you for opting for plastic surgeon.)

But forehead bleeding aside, I learned that in the case of two kids of unequal height colliding to also check on the kid whose front teeth collided with the bleeding kids forehead.

In one memorable case, this kids upper front teeth were already showing signs of being loose (and these were the permanent ones).

In a case like that you only have 24 hrs. or less to get something done , or those teeth will be lost. So I called the parents and told them to get him to the ER but to insist that he be checked out by a dentist (not a resident).

They called in the head of the Pediatric Dentistry dept. and it was hours before they got home because those 4 front teeth had to be braced immediately.

And several days later the kid comes back with an impressive phalanx of metal in his mouth which was there for about a year. But so we’re his teeth.

Motto of the story: sometimes it’s what can’t be seen immediately that’s as big a problem as all the blood. Kids can get themselves into the darnedest messes. It’s a wonder some of them survive childhood :)

My elderly neighbor walked our three year old son home when he found him riding his tricycle past his house. Apparently Jacob was trying to run away while we were having a cookout in the backyard.

I had an intense side ache one day and was home alone with both the kids. Little man was asleep and big boy was playing on the pc. I thought I might collapse or lose consciousness so I knocked on the neighbour across the hall door. She was a doctor it turned out. I didn’t know it at the time and neither did she, that I was passing the first of several gall stones. The pain subsided and she left. I thanked her for her time. She never touched or examined me. I just told her if I collapse please call an ambulance. It was a strange way to get to know a neighbour.

My son had stitches pretty regularly from the time he was 2 on, usually on his chin. The first time was pretty traumatic for everyone. By the 3rd time, when he was 4, it was just another day. We were at the ER. He was so tiny, just lost on that big old gurney. The doc came in to examine him. My tiny son said to him, very fiercely, with the cute lisp he had back then, “I don’t want sthithes. I want stherry sthrips.” He meant it too, boy! Doc looks at me, I shrugged and Doc says, “Well, OK. We’ll see if it works.”
It did. After that I bought my own stherry sthrips and iodine. Washed and bleached an old baby crib sheet, cut it into strips and packed it all in to an old baby-wipes plastic box and labeled it. We had the box, “Clean rags for bleeding wounds” around for years and years.

The last time he was about 10. He was out, playing in the snow with his best bud. I was home, and Jonathan, his best bud’s father, walked in the house with Chris in tow. Chris was COVERED in blood. Jonathan was pale. He was pretty freaked out.
I just sighed and said, “What did you do this time??” Jonathan looked at me in shock.
He had been snowboarding for the first time. Hit a rock, he went down, the snowboard went up…and came back down on his head.
I got to work. Cleaned it up enough to asses the damage, which I could quickly see could not be fixed with stherry sthrips.
Jonathan kept saying, to me, “Are you OK? Are you OK?”
I just glanced up and said, “I’m fine. Hang on.”
I rinsed out the wash cloth he’d had Chris press on his head, put it in a baggie, and brought it back to Jonathan, because it was a wash cloth from their house. He looked at the bag, looked at me and mutely shook his head. HE was not okay!
I said we needed to go to the ER. He said, “You want me to drive you?”
I said, “No, it’s fine. I just have to get towels to cover the seat.”
“You sure you’re OK??”
“Yeah, I’m fine! Thank you for bringing him home.”
He couldn’t believe how calm I was, like he had a sliver in his finger or something.

Got to the ER. Doc clipped the hair around the wound, cleaned it up even more so you could clearly see the damage…and the skull! The nurse almost passed out!
He showed it to me and I said, “Yup. Stitches.”
Well, that was stupid on my part. Chris hates stitches. He started screaming. The nurse, already sickened by the wound, freaked out even more at the screaming. The Doc kicked her out and put me in charge of her job, handing stuff to him.

Yeah. Head wounds=a LOT of blood. And gaping wounds don’t faze me.

No but one time a few years ago during a bad thunderstorm and lightening storm, one of them came over to see if we were ok, when I lived in a house.