During a training exercise today, my Krav instructor and I played around with a new club disarm move that nearly sent a two foot stick through my throat. Surprisingly, my first response: “Am I still breathing?”

His answer was, I think, affirmative, but at that point the adrenaline was running my body and large sections of my brain. So he might have said something more like, “Are you OK?”

Basically, it was my turn to swing a fighting stick at his head, holding it like a bat, with a two hand grip. Matching my velocity, he trapped my hands and then locked my wrist while stepping around me. Add a little nudge of the shoulder, it could have sent me downwards in an embarrassing heap, along the same trajectory as the motion of the bat.

As I crumpled, the wrist lock softened my grip on the stick. While the instructor could have stripped the “bat” then–we had done so a dozen times before–he missed the weapon grab.

So the cylinder went tumbling, answerable only to the whims of gravity. By some quirk of physics, one tip of the fighting stick found the ground at the same time as my body–most of it still in freefall–found the opposite end. My momentum drove the stick at a steep angle into the soil. Since the dense wood refused to bend, it slid across my chest as I rolled off in the opposite direction.

The net result: a nifty scrape and bruise a foot long and an inch wide, three inches below my collarbone and about five beneath my throat.

Shazam. Near impalement. And just before Halloween, too.