Plot Twists and Unbelievable Turns: Real-Life Stories That Will Amaze You

CR Staff - JU - May 18, 2023

Unexpected Twists Of Life

Married my high school sweetheart. It was a storybook love story, we supported each other. In our early 20s we moved across the country with no plan at all, no jobs no place to live, and it worked out. We eventually both got a master’s degree, she became a licensed therapist, and I got my MBA and got a good job at a hospital. We bought a house, things were going great. She had a lump on her ovary, but no problem it was benign. Treatment was dependent on our plans to have kids. We had talked about having kids but we were never in a hurry. We were in our early 30’s at this point. We decided we would eventually like to have kids so they surgically removed the bump and put her on hormone therapy. So here is the plot twist… turns out she is bipolar and the hormones kind of set her off. She gets completely psychotic and delusional and ends up hospitalized and out of touch with reality for about 6 months. I am with her the whole way, she eventually gets clear and is on medication that controls it. She is symptom-free for a year, her psych doc chalks the event up to hormone therapy and takes her off the meds, but she is still fine. We get pregnant, we have the baby. One day she is nursing the baby and she tells me “there are cameras in the lights.” She has her 2nd episode. I can’t describe how horrible these episodes are. She is paranoid and delusional and she thinks she is completely fine. She is treatment-resistant and unwilling to go to the hospital. It’s another hard 6 months before she finally comes out of it. Now she knows she is bipolar and takes meds every day. Her biggest fear is that she will get sick in front of our daughter. She gets another job, I get a raise and an opportunity for a promotion if we move. She was fine for 2 years. One day she is feeling off so she goes to her doc. This is the start of the 3rd episode. We don’t make it through this one. She gets violent, quits her job (even though she is currently on disability), and drains the checking account. The 3rd time she hits me it is in front of the kid. She is so treatment-resistant, I just need to protect myself and the kid, so I left her. We were together for 20 years. We were supposed to grow old together. Now I’m a single dad and after almost a year she is finally coming out of it. So the next chapter of my life is starting with a custody battle.

itspersonal2020

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The Accidental IT Career

Aged 19, about to drop out of University with no real direction in life a friend asks if I’d mind setting up an IRC server for him as he doesn’t know how. He said hey, if you do this I’ll put in a good word with my boss and maybe he’ll hire you later. Took me all of 30 minutes. His boss did indeed hire me a few months later, that’s my first real IT job. Met my wife on the same server about a year later and then a year after that I moved to the USA to marry her and started a new life. It’ll be 22 years this year.

zerbey

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Seven Years Later

I met a guy on a cruise ship when I was 13. Long story short, we spent a few days talking and hanging out and I basically fell head over heels. On the last night, we never got a chance to say goodbye or exchange numbers, and I only knew his first name. It should’ve been nothing more than a forgotten childhood fling, but for some reason, I could never quite forget about him. I guess you could say he was my first love, in a naive sort of way. I went on to have a few long-term relationships but I always found myself “missing” this guy I’d met so many years ago, and I left those future relationships feeling a kind of emptiness I can’t explain. By a weird string of unlikely events that would take paragraphs to explain, I reconnected with this mystery cruise guy from my childhood 7 years later, at 20 years old.

It took a few weeks for him to confirm with his family whether his cruise had been the exact same week as mine, but we confirmed they were the same length of time, both traveled to the same places and happened around approximately the same time frame. Most significantly though, the guy I reconnected with randomly told me a very specific story about something that happened at a band concert in 6th grade, and as he told it I realized it was the EXACT same story the guy on the cruise had told me. He even told it the same way.

We were still waiting for confirmation but honestly, at this point, I was convinced this was the guy I met years ago. All the details kept lining up perfectly and things just felt right somehow. We got really close over those next few weeks, talking for hours and hours on end and just really hitting it off. Then he hears back from his sister, and he finds out his cruise was a completely different year than mine, and there’s no logical way we could’ve met before.

We’re still dating a year and a half later, though. Guess he was the one I was searching for after all.

reddituser

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A Blast from the Past

We are living in Florida at the time and my Dad goes to the eye doctor because he is seeing double. In all other respects, he’s healthy. He explains his symptoms to the doctor. This was the early 2000s. The doctor picks up a medical book on eye problems. He finds the kind of symptoms my Dad is describing. The doctor shows him the book. In the book, there is a whole medical page explaining what he is experiencing and a picture of a kid from the 1960s. My Dad looks at the picture and says “Doc, that’s me!” The doctor says “Yes, those are the symptoms you are showing.” My Dad says “no really that’s me in the picture!”

It turns out my Dad had this eye problem when he was a kid and it was so rare that they took his picture in 1960s Ohio and slapped him in a book of rare eye problems. He doesn’t remember much about taking the picture but he did manage to get a copy of it to take home.

flounceymagoo

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Love at First Conversation

Meeting my husband totally changed my life. Before I met him, I kinda just submitted to the idea that I was gonna be the 40-year-old lady who worked at dari mart, was always on the verge of poverty and lived with 20 cats in an apartment not fit for human habitation. I don’t see what he saw in me at the time, I hadn’t showered in a week, was wearing clothes full of holes, was smoking cheap cigs like a chimney, and hadn’t brushed my teeth in like three days. (Mind you, my husband comes from extreme wealth, so it’s even more surprising that he thought I was worth talking to, much less worth hitting on) But we hit it off the moment we started talking, and for the first time in my life, I felt a little bit of hope for myself. I mean, this amazing guy was hitting on me, maybe I wasn’t so awful. Fast forward three years, we are now married, I have won the battle with my depression and anxiety, we live a humble but healthy life, he is about to start a rather lucrative career that he is excited about, and we are about to get a dog, and generally have a normal and happy life. Never in a million years thought I would be this happy. He spoils me like crazy and gives me hope during my rarer dark moments. I know for a fact that he saved my life.

reddituser

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Took A Surprising Turn

Several years ago I went down to the New River Gorge with my wife (then fiancée) and a group of friends to camp and rock climb over memorial day weekend. Over the course of the trip, five of us decided that on the last day, instead of doing another climbing location, we were going white water rafting. We booked with a guide company and showed up in the morning ready to go. We hopped on the bus to the launch site and when we got there we were told that we were going to have an addition to our group of five. The guy who was introduced to us said he got too drunk the night before and missed the first trip of the day that he and his friends had booked, but he lucked out since there was one open spot on the next trip! Great! We load up and start the trip, just shooting the sh*t with our new rafting friend.

Over the course of the ride down, this guy seemed to know his way around a raft and seemed weirdly familiar with the river. At one point, our guide was pointing out a class 2 or 3 rapids section that he said was safe to swim through – this guy immediately jumps out of the raft, climbs up a rock in the middle of the river, and does a perfect 360 flip into the rapids!

Near the end of the trip, our guide hits us with the plot twist: we’re his first-ever group, this was his test, and our suspicious knowledge addition was his supervisor! We were all blown away! We spend the rest of the trip just piecing together the missed clues in the best bamboozle of our lives. Needless to say, the trainee guide passed his test and got a great first review (and a nice tip), and we all got a great story.

Sage2050

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Fatherhood in 55 Minutes

One day my girlfriend was having severe abdominal pain. So bad that she asked me to call an ambulance.

We get to the hospital, they run some tests.

The doctor comes out and says “Okay, we’re ready to wheel her into the delivery room.”

Me: “Hang on, what’s this about a delivery room?”

Doc: “Your girlfriend is 10cm dilated and ready to have the baby.”

Me: “What baby?“

Doc: “Oh boy, have I got some news for you.”

55 minutes later I was a father.

freelancer1010

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