What is the most scared you've ever been?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

We had been under a tornado warning in Amarillo. Watches and warnings are not too unusual there but when we got the warning my husband and I grabbed the kids and took them to our private business that had a basement. We waited in the basement there until the warning was called off. My husband drove the van with the kids and I followed in my smaller car to go home. About 10 blocks from home, I hit some flooding on the road that I couldn’t see until I was in it. My little car started floating. I jumped out and waded to the van. We drove home and put the kids to bed. We have 5 kids, whose ages at the time were 6 months, 2 years, twins age 7, and oldest daughter age 13 years. We got all the younger kids to bed and asked our oldest to babysit while we went down the road to push my car out of the road. We figured we’d be back in about 15 minutes.

We got to my car and pushed it out of the road and heard tornado sirens going off. We rushed into the 7-11 store by my car and they said a tornado just hit our subdivision. Then the rain started pouring down. We could not drive the 10 blocks to our house because the road was now completely flooded and other cars were floating. We tried to go a different way which took us over 45 minutes to get home. We drove in from the backside of our subdivision. There were already police blockades and they weren’t letting anyone in. We frantically explained that our 5 kids were alone so they gave us a pass to go in.

The house behind us was flattened and the whole area was a mess. We ran in and found all of our kids hiding in the laundry room. My daughter had heard the tornado and grabbed the baby, told the twins to get the toddler, and they ran into the laundry room. Everyone was fine but scared. The kids were afraid that the tornado had gotten us.

Later we heard from the neighbors that they watched the tornado come right down almost on top of our house and then dipped down and got the house across the alley from us. (No one was home there.) Many homes were destroyed but no one was killed or even seriously injured. I gained a healthy respect for tornadoes that day. I had seen numerous tornadoes while growing up in West Texas and later in the panhandle of Texas. I even watched twin tornadoes from my front yard as a teenager. I never really feared them until that day.

Bev Hamilton

Hey, my first post!

82

His AOL name has since been disabled, or what I think was his AOL name anyways.

Right after it happened, several of my good friends really pushed for me to press charges. I had convinced myself that it was my fault, because I agreed to meet him in the first place. I didn’t want to subject myself to the complications of pressing charges, and the emotional hell I was sure would follow. I spent weeks tearing myself apart over it, and finally decided I just couldn’t do it. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life…

I’m so weary of meeting people I don’t know now…I don’t meet anyone looking for just sex, and I only meet anyone else after I’ve talked to them online for a long, long time, or they’re part of a wellknown group of people. For example, I would meet a doper if they had been on the boards for awhile, and regularly went to deopefests, etc. I wouldn’t meet someone with 3 posts to their name, who had just stumbled onto the website. It may be a wasted effort, but it makes me feel a whole lot better to know they’re prolly not complete psychos.

83

This happened one summer when I was about 9 years old. Our family was having a birthday party for my aunt. This happens every summer and these are big parties, about half of the people who own cottages on this lake are in someway related to her. One of my cousins had put an outboard motor on his dock. It’s a big dock, there were probably about 30 really drunk people on it, and he decides he wants to drive it across the lake back to his place. I was on the front part with my brother, who was about 7 at the time. I fell in the water wearing all my clothes (actually I suspect my brother pushed me). I was a fairly decent swimmer, but the clothes were really pulling me down, and I couldn’t get out of the way of the dock, and it ran me over. So I was under the dock, under water, unable to breath, and I knew I had to get out of the way or I was going to get chewed up by the motor. I was sure I was goint to drown, but I managed to push my way out from under it, and watched it carry on. No one noticed I was gone…except my brother but he didn’t say anything to anyone. So I had to swim back to shore, which took forever (or so it seemed at the time), and had to walk back to the cottage where the rest of the party was.
I never told me family about that.

84

I’ve heard about that. I believe you. Egad.

85

Toss-up:

  1. When I was a child (age 8 & younger) I had to have a good many orthopaedic surgeries. The doctors sedated me before the surgeries, but didn’t knock me out completely before they put the mask on my face. It was big & black - the anesthesia was thick & sickly sweet & inescapable. Horrible for anyone, especially a small child.

  2. Another surgery one: When I was 13 going on 14, I needed to have a very severe back surgery - I was under for roughly eight hours. When I awoke in the recovery room I didn’t have my eyeglasses, so I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t speak a word, was in intense pain, & could barely lift my fingers - it was the worst time in recovery that I could remember.

A recovery room nurse came over to say hello to me, tell me that I was done, etc. I tried to ask her to hold my hand, but no sound came out of my mouth… She walked away, & I remember being absolutely terrified & just wanting someone to hold my hand, unable to communicate.

Whenever I think of either of the above, I get teary & even a bit panicky.

86

When I was 10 our Holstein bull tried to kill me.

When I was 19 a Wyoming sleet storm conspired with a semi and both tried to kill me.

When I was 22 Hurricane Andrew tried to kill me.

87

During a severe ice storm, my dad and I took a walk around our neighborhood. Trees were cracking and breaking and pulling down power lines all over the place. Just as we were under the one power line that we had to go past to get home, the tree above it started to make cracking and groaning sounds. We just grabbed each other and ran. I didn’t even think until we were a good twenty feet away. And then it was, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!”

We went home right after that.

88

** Six years old and happy to be at my Grandparents farm for an extended summer vacation. So much to do and see on a dairy farm! My Dad decides to move the hay wagon across the field with the International Harvester tractor. I ask my Dad if I can ride in the hay wagon (empty at the time). He say’s okay , picks me up and tells me to stand up and hold the restraining bar. I believing myself to be much smarter (grasping the concept that being smart and being wise would take another 25 years.) sat down and held on to the bar. We start out and 25 yards later we hit a large bump and I go flying into the air. God knows how I manage to grab on to the tow bar (warning: cliché ahead) and hold on for dear life. I was dragged about 10 yards screaming and noticing my feet were inches from the front wheels. My Dad turned around finally and stop the tractor in a skid. I figured at this point I was going to get a spanking. He didn’t–he just held me and asked if I was okay; he was really quiet. I said I was and he just got off the tractor and walked me back to the farmhouse.

I asked him 35 years later about it. He said it was the most aging experience up to that point in his life. The absolute helplessness and the guilt knowing that he should have known better scared him far worse than me. Had I been injured or died, he would have had to live with it.

  • Bicycling down hill at 40 mph with newly installed toe clips, looking down trying to get my feet in and looking up to see a concrete embankment on a bridge and a 30 foot drop into a pile of broken concrete, swerving just enough to avoid hitting the abutment.

  • Riding a bicycle with hand brakes for the first time and almost slamming head on into a school bus because I normally used the foot activated coaster brakes instead.

89

I was delivering some papers or something to this guy while I was working as a production assistant for a TV show. The guy lived in a treehouse and I was given instructions to go into the backyard and deliver them.

I tiptoed into the yard not even sure I had the right house and don’t see no treehouse but I do notice a LARGE ROTTWEILER locked in on my gaze. What I remember most–besides the insta-terror–is my face going slackjawed, like, paralyzed, the edges of my mouth suddenly turning downward. Suddenly, it’s coming at me and there is positively no cover. Instead of run or make a defensive pose, all I could do was unconsciously raised my arms over my head, I guess so he couldn’t bite my hands or something. And so it takes off and starts to jump…

Silly me, they forgot to mention at the office that when you raise your arms above your head the dude’s dog interprets that as wanting to play. He was friendly. Thanks, guys, for the heads-up.

90

Greatest psychological fear came when I got stoned for the first time at the tender young age of 31. My softball teammates,many of them total potheads, had been egging me on like, forever to try it. Well, one night I give in to their jibes and the last thing I said before going to Never-neverland was, “I better be careful; I heard smoking pot can make you gay.”

So, I get some instruction and take about four hits, each a bit deeper than the previous. I can hold my breath abnormally long, so by the fourth hit, I’m doing my best Michael Hutchence imitation.

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Some people just aren’t affected by it,” says Brian, our centerfielder. BTW, the guy with the pot is a small-time drug dealer who gets stoned so often he could probably smoke out a Reggae band, so he only smokes prime stuff.

Didja know that when you get stoned it doesn’t hit you for a few seconds, say 30? It’s true. You could look it up.

The best description I can make is to imagine your head as a small cottage and then you open up a previously unnoticed back door and you discover there’s a mansion attached. Un-f’-ing-believable.

So, my mind is suddenly in the fast lane, coming up with (what I think are) incredible philisophical tidbits of inspiration, none of which I can remember for long enough to say it all in a complete sentence, and then I look over at Brian who’s positively loving the moment, and he’s looking at me in a way that suggests, well, he enjoyed those group hugs after winning big games more than most.

And I get scared. Uh, a little.

Did you know that you can sometimes get paranoid when you smoke pot? No, really, you can.

Suddenly, I get this tingly feeling “down there” which is really just momentary nervousness, but I’m thinking suddenly… OH, NO, I’M… THIS CANNOT BE! I bolted from the room in near hysterics praying to God to please take me out of this drug-induced Kodak moment.

No such luck. I spent the next 3 hours walking the Valley thinking with great intensity, “Am I or aren’t I? Maybe I am.” Did you know that you can get really analytical when you’re stoned?

My belief is that we’re all a little of everything, a microcosm of the Macrocosm and that everything that exists exists within us. But I really wasn’t ready for such metaphysical hoo-ha on that night.

I would like to say I’m extremely thankful to have avoided real scary moments like some of you have endured and that I will keep a very close eye at all times on our little Seth or Emily who’s due in September (our first).

91

Crossing a Teamsters picket line by myself in a Chevy Beretta

Almost ten years ago, the Teamsters who delivered new cars to the dealership where I was working went on a strike which lasted a lot longer than either side anticipated and was beginning to impact the dealerships financially.

The local dealer principals decided that bunches of employees would ride to the hub in passenger vans, cross the picket line and then individually deliver the cars allocated to the dealership, crossing the picket line again, but the second time alone.

It was pretty scary until I was first in line, the gate opened and there was nothing but scary looking Teamsters between me and where I needed to go. I crawled forward, they surrounded the car, I prayed to God to be saved from any personal injury and kept crawling until the car was past them at which point I nailed the gas and left quite a smoking black patch of tire rubber on the pavement, much to the dismay of the poor guy who had to go next.

When I got back to the dealership I felt pretty unsettled and confused about the whole ordeal and refused the forty pieces of silver they offered me as additional compensation. Not sure that changed anything, though.

92

A few come to mind.

The first was this past December, driving home from a friend’s house on I-495 in MA through heavy, heavy rain and high winds. I have never been so terrified while behind the wheel. I could barely see, and staying in my own lane was a challenge. The buffeting got really bad when a semi changed into my lane ahead of me. I had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel for all 20 or so minutes I was on that highway. I am now far more worried about driving in a windy rainstorm than in snow.

Another driving incident happened when I was learning to drive. I was driving, with my mother in the passenger seat and my brother sitting behind us. We were stopped at an intersection, first in line, when a semi turned right onto our street, headed RIGHT at us. He didn’t even do it slowly; he practically floored it as he came around the turn. We thought we were going to be smashed, and there was nothing we could do. The truck swung into his own lane at what felt like about five feet from hitting us, but was probably more like 15 or so. That was extremely scary.

My most recent emergency room experience was also extremely scary. I was admitted to the ER at about 11:30 PM on November 30, 2001 with severe right flank pain and nausea.
Our immediate fear was appedicitis or something similar. I didn’t care. I was in pain and scared, because I did not know what was wrong with me! I think that when you get right down to it, the scariest thing about a medical emergency is not knowing what the problem is.

Anyway, to bring this story to a close, several X-Rays, a blood test, a CAT scan and a Motrin pill large enough to choke a horse later, they had determined that they were pretty sure that they weren’t exactly sure what was wrong with me (and believe me, that is NOT a reassuring thing to hear), but they thought it was most likely a serious infection of my right kidney. But, they needed to transfer me to Boston so an expert could verify that I did, indeed, have a kidney infection. That was scary.

This led to some other scary experiences. These included some fun tests that determined that my right kidney was at about 20% of function because of a fairly common problem known as UPJ obstruction. The back pain that I had felt for about three years in the region was a result of this problem, not because of the soccer injury I associated it with. What it amounted to was that I had had not just one or two but probably over a dozen more minor infections, which I had shrugged off as back pain. Considering that the cumulative effect of the blockage and these infections had been to reduce my kidney function by 80%, my doctors were impressed by my constitution. So was I!

Scary as my tests results were (and I was actually pretty calm about it, for some reason) the surgery was worse. I did pretty well on my pre-op tests and information briefings, despite being a bit nervous, but really started to lose it a bit once we got into the pre-op area and I was being prepped. I was informed that I would have to remain conscious while they inserted this epidural thing into my spine, and THAT freaked me out. Luckily, I was on a sedative and really in la-la land by the time they did that; I have no memory of the experience.

But the absolute scariest part of the whole experience was waking up in recovery. I have no visual memory of it; I think I kept my eyes closed, I was in so much pain. So it was dark. I was sore. There was confusion all around me, and I was cold. So very, very cold. I just wanted it to end. If that meant death, so be it. THAT was scarier, in retrospect, than anything I’d been through prior to that.

And then I was wheeled into my room. Or post-op, I’m not sure which. And then I heard my mother’s voice, and she might have been holding my hand, but I’m not sure. But that’s when I knew it was alright. I was still cold, I still couldn’t see (because my eyes were mostly closed), I was still very, very sore, but Mom was there, and Dad, and it was going to be alright.

That’s the good part. That feeling of relief.

Um, yikes. That’s all.

93

Wow, what great stories. Some are a little distressing to read, but uplifting at the same time – because we’re all still here to tell our tales!

Most scared I’ve ever been was when I was in my early teens. My mother’s cancer had come out of remission. To a kid, few things are as scary as hearing your parents cry and scream at the unfairness. To know that there are some things that even they cannot face without collapsing into helpless self-pity and fear is a truly frightning thing.

The time when I realised that she actually might die was another intensely scary time. I still vividly remember that snatches of time from those years.

Regarding bodily fear, I don’t have anything approaching the stories above. The one car accident I was in happened too quickly for me to be scared; and during my one run-in with gun-toting drug dealers (long story short: my friends and I foolishly accepted a lift home, which turned out to be a longer trip that that), I was too drunk to be scared. :rolleyes:

I did, however, come home once to find the house being burgled. It took me a little while to figure out why the VCR was unplugged and lying on the lounge room floor, but I soon noticed the broken ensuite window. I took a knife from the kitchen and crept from room to room – positively buzzing with fear and adrenaline – but they must have heard my keys in the lock and run.

94

AOL might be able to track his identity, if you still remember his name.

If you meet someone, you should meet them in a well lit, public area like a mall.

You might want to look into self defense classes or classes on minor weaponry. They might provide you with a mildly better sense of safety.

Back to the original topic, its too embarassing to say because i used to suffer from a mental illness and the nature of the situation is too embarassing & esoteric to describe over the internet. I don’t think i’ve ever told someone about it in its entirety. Suffice it to say, it was the worst experience i’ve ever had. So much emotional pain you pass out, only to wake up again and do it over again.

95

I’ve had more than my share of terrifying moments. The worst of them all was dying by electrocution. Obviously, I was revived, but my heart stopped, and I was dead, at least for a little while. Not so unusual, if it weren’t for the fact that I had been dead twice before. Ah well. I figure I have 6 lives left.

The scariest conscious moment I have ever had was after I had been slipped something at a party as a teenager. I don’t know what it was, save that it was hallucinogenic, and since I had never been on anything like that before, I was absolutely terrified of what was happening to me. It was the worst experience, and I have never touched drugs because of it.

96

Being surrounded by a large roving gang in the downtown of a certain third-world country. My accent saved me. Spoke to them with respect. Bought my way out.