My Mom always threatened to jump out of cars. We’d be going 70 and she’d try to fling the door open and jump out. She drove her car on purpose into my step-dad’s office building once. Hit reverse, then drove into it again. She almost ran me over once when I tried to stop her from leaving the driveway…said she was leaving to kill herself so I tried to intervene and she seemed willing to plow right through me with her truck. She was on a road trip with my grandmother a couple of years ago, and started carrying on about how she was going to grab the wheel and crash the car. And when I had to learn driver’s training from HER… Shit. What is it with crazy bitches and cars?
I guess it’s scary, but after a while, scary becomes normal, and unpredictability becomes predictable. Maybe you get what I’m saying as the behaviors you describe of your ex are so consistent with my mother’s absolute insane paranoia. Almost getting hit by her truck was scary for me, not because of getting hit, but because I believed I had failed to prevent her from killing herself. That death or serious bodily injury as a result of her behavior was a realistic possibility was just a fact of life. I had a handful of experiences, like the gun thing, where I was truly afraid. But these other things were just surreal sort of “What’s next?” vignettes. The cumulative effects were certainly traumatizing but as individual events it was just business as usual.
I habe been thinking about this thread for days trying to decide which one was the scariest. In no particular order they are:
Once as a kid my friend and me were on a state fair roller coaster type ride and our seatbelts would not engage. The ride was starting and we were frantically trying to get it to work and at the last moment before the ride took off we did get it buckled.
While fishing with my father when I was probably five we were moving from one side of the pond to the other through woods. In those days I refused to wear shoes. During this trek I glanced down and saw that I was standing on a snake that was looking up at me. His mouth was wide open and was white inside. I jumped and screamed. Daddy asked what happened and I told him I stepped on a snake. He saw it slithering away and said “damn, that was a cottonmouth” which are very venomous.
Another time fishing with Dad from a boat a snake fell out of a tree into the boat. I am terrified of snakes and can’t even watch them on TV.
Recently I had a blowout on a bridge with very heavy traffic. There was an emergency lane but I was terrified until the sheriff’s deputy I called showed up. Then the tow truck.
When I was about four my mother backed up to the stove wearing an acetate robe. It was very cold. Icy even. Her robe went up in flames. Her hair was on fire and the robe just melted into her skin. I ran and hid and remember my very pregnant sister climbing onto a chair to get a quilt. My father wrapped Mama in the quilt and took her to the hospital where she stayed for 30 days. My sister had her baby and once she went home she took me with her since Mama was not home to tend to me.
Oh yeah. Really scary, no idea how to handle them because there isn’t any training for that kind of situation. Nothing you do in life prepares you for it. You’re on your own and ain’t nobody going to believe any of it after the fact. But unlike Harry Potter, that person isn’t Voldemort, so you really are alone.
Hitting a deer while driving, at 65 MPH, on an interstate in Wisconsin. The car was heavily damaged, but somehow, I was completely uninjured. But, that was a moment where it absolutely felt like time slowed down, and I was rattled for hours afterwards.
man, my scariest moment seems so…dumb compared to most of yours.
I was out motorcycle riding with some friends one day, on the country roads in the next county over. I wasn’t super familiar with the area and decided to catch a little air off some railroad tracks that crossed the road we were on and were raised about 4 or 5 feet above the our road. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps the railroad was on an elevated road bed and there was a drop off of at least equal height on the other side. I remember looking down at the woman driving the car the other way as she looked up at me with a scared look on her face. I was sure I was going to wreck and be horribly disfigured.
Being a passenger on a motorcycle on a two lane road, and seeing an oncoming car passing another coming right at us. Thank god there was a bit of a shoulder to the road, and it wasn’t covered in sand, and thank god my husband (then boyfriend) had the presence of mind to glue his eyes to that small bit of road and follow it like driving down a tightrope. The car’s mirror was 6" from our elbows as it went by.
Scared for a longer time because of/for someone else:
Two years ago next month my husband took an airplane propeller blow to the head. (There’s a thread here somewhere about it). I was scared for him, scared for me. I didn’t know if I was going to end up a widow or with a severely brain damaged person to care for. He’s the one with real income, so that was an issue too. He’s absolutely fine now, thank Fates, but JFC that was a long, long year.
When I was in college working full-time and taking 18 credits it caught up to me and driving home at midnight I almost fell asleep at the wheel. Honestly if I had to go one more exit I would have pulled off and napped. So I get home and immediately crawl into bed. About 5 minutes later I sit up in bed (yes like in the movies) and thought I was still on the freeway and had fallen asleep. I looked around the bedroom and thought I was still on the road driving and hallucinating that I was in bed.
A lot of the physical danger I’ve been in there was no time to be scared in the moment or the moment was so quick it didn’t make sense to be scared after it was over. Other physical reactions from adrenaline come into play but not fear.
Every time I had a rocket or mortar lobbed at me it was over before I could be scared. The couple of times I would have been justified in shooting someone I just reacted and luckily we both reacted correctly. It was over quick. Other physical confrontations I’ve been in the moment and had other things on my mind. Fright comes into play on the way to a potentially dangerous situation not during.
I find that real fear walks hand in hand with helplessness. Having the time to think about how there is nothing you can do. Like laying in a hospital bed as my heart is rebelling against me or sitting in a tent waiting to be eaten by lions.
There was an entire school year when my ex-wife was going to school and I was working my ass off that I barely got any sleep. I would get home at 3am then get up and get the kids to school then go back to work. Day after day. And I had a 45 mile commute each way.
One night I pulled up to the kids school and walked up to the front door. I didn’t wake up until I started to pull on the door and realized it was 3 in the morning. I have no idea how long I had been driving asleep.
I think the falling asleep at the wheel are scariest in hindsight because like being drunk our decisions make sense at the time. Not close to my scariest experience was when we packed the moving truck, moved 100 miles, unloaded the truck, went BACK the 100 miles to drop off the truck then drove to the new house. My wife drove her car when we dropped off the truck and watching her get out was like watching a sleepwalker. I get behind the wheel and she immediately falls asleep. I’m driving north and as we’re leaving Denver city limits I have the thought that I am really REALLY tired. The next thing I remember is getting on the offramp 20 miles later. But it was only afterwards that it turns into a OMFG moment.
So number 3 scariest moment was the hallucinating in bed story. Number 2 (I started a thread on this) was another dead tired driving at midnight story. Driving down from Sequim on US101 the trees are right up against the road. And I knew the trees were trying to grab me. I could see them reaching down as I passed by trying to get me. The scariest part was that I knew in the back of my mind the trees weren’t doing that so the still sane part of my mind knew I was in the process of going insane. It is scary when you know you are losing you mind* and can’t stop it.
I’m absolutely petrified of heights! And I hiked Half Dome, too. I hiked up from the trailhead at Happy Isles, on the Mist Trail. Atop Half Dome, I couldn’t go anywhere near the edge. People were sitting on the Diving Board (I think it’s called) and it gave me the willies just looking at them. I couldn’t.
At the end of June 2012, my son (27 yo) went to the ER with severe stomach pains thinking his appendix had burst. He had a CT scan and they found a large mass in his abdomen. He was then scheduled for a biopsy the next morning. We then had to wait for the results which would take days longer because it was the 4th of July holiday. After waiting for almost a week, he had an appointment to get the results of the biopsy (we were all still hoping and praying it was just a fatty tumor, etc). My husband, my son’s fiancee and I all went to the clinic with him. He didn’t want anyone to come into the room with him and the doctor. So when they called his name he ran in by himself leaving the rest of us sitting there. All of what I’ve told you so far was horribly scary. But the moment that scared me the most was this: We waited for probably 20 minutes, then a nurse came into the waiting area. She called my name. She said, “he wants you to be with him.” My heart stopped at that moment and I knew…
I’ve had a couple of incidents where I nearly died, but they weren’t all that scary - I was too busy and they were over too quickly for the scare to set in.
The most scared I have ever been, I think, or at least the scare I remember the most actually turned out to be my wife and I working ourselves up over nothing …
It was when my wife and I were in the hospital for testing of our unborn child - we were a bit on the old side to have a baby, so we were already on edge (plus if this pregnancy didn’t work out, we may not have another chance).
The tech actually doing the tests turned to us and said something like “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you these results - a physician must do that”. The look on his face was downcast.
Of course, that immediately set us to worrying. We assumed what the tech meant was that the test results were so horrible that a physician was necessary. Was our child going to die? Was the baby horribly deformed? Were we facing having no child at all, or a lifetime of care? The uncertainty of it was killing us both.
We sat waiting for a physician for hours - by the end of those hours, we had worked each other up to a pitch of fear hard to describe!
When the doc showed up? Tests were … totally normal. All the tech meant was that he wasn’t authorized to discuss test results with patients. His downcast look? Who knows - maybe he was having a bad day or something.
Most scary moment for me was swimming in the ocean when I started having trouble breathing and coming to the realization that I may not have the strength to get back to the shore. I stopped swimming and just dog paddled enough to stay afloat and tried to slow make may way in to shore. I eventually did, and climbed to the beach like a man finding an island after a shipwreck. I got just to the dry part of the sand, and laid there totally exhausted. I seriously thought I was going to die.
The 2nd scariest, which doesn’t even compare to the above one; was when I was 18. I was driving a 4WD pickup loaded with 55 gallon drums of oil across the Pack Saddle Bridge in Oklahoma. The bridge was notoriously long and narrow. There was a gentlemen’s agreement that if you began crossing the bridge and saw another vehicle at the other end, you would stop and let them cross the bridge first. That didn’t happen this day; and I was about 1/4 of the way across it and a bobtail fuel truck starts crossing from the other end. I’m going 50 MPH or so and hugging the right hand as close as I can; and we just barrel towards each other. I’m white knuckling it through thinking there’s no way we’re both going to fit. When we passed each other we were so close that my side view mirror got bashed into my door and bashed out the drivers side window spraying glass all over me (and scaring the ever lovin’ shit out me in the process).
Topping a hill, doing 70 mph and discovering my lane was completely clogged with cars that weren’t moving. They were in a line trying to exit I430 and get onto I630. It involved a twisty access road.
No way could I have stopped. My only hope was changing to the middle lane. No time to look. I figured a side collision was more survivable than hitting that line of cars head on.
Thankfully the lane change didn’t trigger an accident.
That ended my interest in living in the burbs and commuting. I was already fed up with the traffic and 35 min drive. Nearly dying on I430 was the final straw.
Bought a inner city house 10 mins from work. I occasionally hear gun shots and the neighborhood is a bit dangerous. But I430 will kill you quicker.
They recently completed a major 4 year highway project that made getting from I430 to I630 safer and less congested.
When my daughter was 4 she briefly wandered away from us at a very busy lakefront park. It took sixty seconds to find her. I was unimaginably frightened.
I have had scares that threatened me physically, like driving out of the mountains during an ice storm, but the moments that stick out in my mind as the scariest involve watching other people struggle and not being able to help.
On 2 separate occasions, I have had to call 911 for people overdosing. One was self harming, the other just over did the partying. But both times, between making the call and when help finally arrived, I had that scared helpless feeling that I am watching someone die right in front of me and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. Still affects me to this day.
The self-harmer survived, the party-er I don’t know since he was a stranger and I did not follow up.
When my son was born, there had been a few complications during labour and when they finally yanked him out, he wasn’t breathing.
They took him out to a different room and it felt like they were gone for hours (probably 5 minutes), my wife kept asking where he was and I didn’t know, I was just sure at that point that the doctor would come in sans baby and look mournful…baby was fine, though he did have a weird kind of sticky burn mark on his shoulder that has never gone away and no-one can explain.
Either that or my first full blown Mania…honestly thought I was going to have a heart attack/brain aneurism/go fully mad.