What´s the scariest expirience you´ve ever had?

I’ve had a kidney stone. Once, and I hope I nevernevernever have another.

The onset went from a twinge to a mild discomfort to feeling like a deranged orangutan was hammering a railroad spike into my lower back in about 5 minutes. I was convinced I was dying. And I was terrified by the entire feeling of helplessness over the whole thing.

When I was 18 I spent an evening in a smoky bar with friends. The next night I had a severe asthma attack (I had juvenile asthma but hadn’t had a problem in 6 years until that day). It was bad to the point that I literally could not breathe. I was rushed to the ER, and don’t remember anything past getting inside. Woke up/came to several hours later in a hospital bed with an IV and lots of toys connected to me.

That was 6 years ago. I still go into panic attacks if I can’t breathe for any reason (being playfully held underwater, etc). 2 years after that night, I beat the crap out of an ex in my sleep. He had his arms around me and unintentionally tightened up against my windpipe. I woke up crying, flailing and beating against him to get away.

I’ve been riding horses for 16 years and taken some nasty falls, had horses flip over on top of me, kick me, etc, but nothing compares to the sheer terror of not being able to get air.

The Moment: September 30, 2008, approximately 6:10 AM PDT (Hint: The sun ain’t quite up yet so it’s still kinda DARK!)

The Location: 2 miles south of Interstate 80, four miles north of the thriving metropolis of Beowawe, Nevada on SR 306. (This is a two lane secondary road - one lane for each direction of travel, with no emergency lanes or shoulder. You know the kind: 2" between the white line and the edge of the pavement. Oh, yeah, and for future reference, please note that a critical fashion accessory has been added to this location: very purty double solid lines have been painted on the road surface to clearly indicate a ‘No Passing Zone’. They’re yellow and everything a discerning driver needs to make a statement.)

The Circumstances: Traveling southbound at the posted speed limit of 70 miles per hour in a 2006 Kenworth pulling a 48 foot tank trailer. Coming over the small hill just in front of me is a pair of headlights in the northbound lane traveling at about 70 mph. And just to the right of those headlights (from my perspective), what to my wondering eyes should appear? Why (it was not Santa Claus and eight tiny reindeer - that I woulda believed!), it’s a second set of headlights in the southbound (my) lane attempting to pass the northbound vehicle. Less than 270 feet* of clear roadway separate my rig and the northbound vehicle in my lane.

The Experience: Leaving the pavement at 70 mph, traveling down a four foot embankment, through 868 feet* of sagebrush in soft dirt, in a 31,820 pound tanker, that was not designed with extensive off-road recreation in mind.

This is something you’ll not want to do twice. Or, for that matter, even the first time. Trust me. It doesn’t even begin to meet the any of the criteria of entertainment.

The Purpose? I think it was in order to avoid a head-on collision. Or to save the lives of the other drivers (and, perhaps, passengers?**). Even if one of them was trying out for a Darwin Award, he ain’t gonna get it under the wheels of my rig!

Result:

[ul]
[li]Re-assured myself that the seatbelt functions properly.[/li][li]No damage to my rig.*[/li][li]No damage to other vehicles or property. I even missed the right-of-way fence, but only by 18"![/li][li]2.75 hours of my workday lost waiting for a tow-truck. The area is a little, ah, shall we say, remote?[/li][li]$368.28 bill from the towing company. [/li][li]$622.37 to replace the seatbelt. (Not damaged, just a recommended precaution after an event such as this.)[/ul][/li]
I think I’m gonna take it easy for the next few weeks.*****

Lucy

*No, this is not an exaggeration. And yeah, before you ask, at my employer’s request I had to go back and measure it … And draw diagrams. And fill out paperwork. Hate paper work. And diagrams.

**Don’t know. I was kinda busy at the time. Besides, I couldn’t see. There was a little bit dust in the air. And, like I said above, it was “kinda DARK!”

***No damage to my … self. Well, maybe a few bumps. And a bruise. Or two. And a strained muscle. Or three. But nothing serious. Honest Injun.

****I managed to keep the wheel side of the rig in contact with the earth. Okay, There were three marker lights out. But nothing serious.

***** It is entirely possible that I’ve pretty well used up the balance of my luck allotment for this year. :smiley:

When I was in middle school, I went over to a neighbor’s house, with a friend, to ask the kid there if he wanted to play a game of flashlight tag. He chased me around his basement with a lit barbecue lighter, while my friend laughed his ass off. I thought, and still think, that this jackass would have actually burned me if he caught me. F–king psycho.

This was one of the very worst experiences of my life - even worse than the time I almost drowned in my uncle’s pool. That was accidental - this was intentional, and malicious.

Probably???

Out in the country with my two older cousins. I’m eightish, my boy cousin a little older and girl cousin was 11 or 12. I already didn’t enjoy going out with them much as they always seemed to want to get us into as much trouble as possible. Somehow we broke rule number one of being a free range kid – we attracted the attention of some big boys. They immediately took against the visitor, me, for being a “townie” though I loudly protested that I wasn’t. Then they said I had to go into their “den” with them. I wouldn’t go and I was so scared of whatever I thought they were going to do with me. I didn’t actually know but I was just convinced it would be very very bad. In the end my boy cousin volunteered to go in there instead. I remember feeling very wretched waiting for him to come back.

There’s a few others but having a panic attack on a switchback coachride down to the harbour in Santorini was pretty bad. Although the driver was going at a fair clip it probably wasn’t very dangerous but I just lost it. being pushed away by my soon to be ex husband when I tried to turn to him for comfort put the tin hat on that experience.

The scariest experience I’ve had in the last 24 hours was that I was working Armed Security (alone) in an urban restaurant this morning. At 3am, six guys came in and approached four guys sitting in a booth. I came by to flush them back to the front because they were sprawling across other booths and we were pretty busy. I got three of them to come with me, got to the front and turned around to go back and get the other three when a fight broke out.

Ten young males, all drunk and high, fighting. One 46 year old Security officer with no weapons other than a gun, which I can’t use.

Figuring I didn’t want to be in the middle of this, but I had to do something, I started a “peel one off, get him out the door, go back for the next one” approach. In short order, the fight had petered out as the group had beat the snot out of each other.

Fortunately, no one took a swing at me, I didn’t hit any of them, no bystanders or staff were injured and no major damage was done. No weapons were involved. The cops showed up late (of course - their precinct is a mere two blocks away), rounded up and questioned 8 of them, but made no arrests.

Some of the servers present tried to deny that they were scared during the incident. I don’t deny that I was. I didn’t like the idea of potentially fighting a bunch of drunk kids all on my own.

I have an even worse experience in the mornings – when my alarm goes off, I reflexively tense up my muscles. Some mornings, my legs tense so hard that I pull my leg muscles and am left to limp around for a few hours. It’s really painful, and the worst part is that I’m half asleep in too much pain to move, sobbing like a baby.

Damn, that’s annoying.

As for the most scary moment, when I was about ten, I slipped coming down a steep mountain path and went sliding down the slope uncontrollably – I was on my feet, but helpless to stop myself. In the end, I managed to jam my hiking stick in front of me right before I would have gone headlong onto a rock pile, but it was a really freaky moment.

I have a couple, I guess.

Getting T-boned while riding my bike by a car while I foolishly tried to cross a highway. Rolled over the car roof, landed behind it on my hands and knees. Almost got hit by the car behind the one that hit me.

Having to investigate a partial detonation of a cratering charge, not knowing if, despite waiting the perscribed time, it still might finish going off.

Falling down a dirt and shale cliff face, probably well over 50 feet high, desperately trying to create enough friction so it wouldn’t hurt so bad when I finally hit bottom. I did, and had my hands and forearms cut to hell on the shale. Otherwise just some bumps and bruises.

Visiting my mother the day after her emergency cancer surgery and not being able to recognize her lying in her bed, hooked to all that machinery. I think that was the scariest.

When my daughter was 2, she had a severe asthma attack. By the time we got her to the hospital, she was “blue and unresponsive”. She spent a week in the hospital. She’s 18 and fine now.

I walked into the middle of an armed robbert at a Blockbuster lo these many years ago - posted it on the Dope because I couldn’t sleep. Gun in my face and everything. The thing is, I wasn’t scared when it was happening - it seemed like a movie or something that was happening to somebody else. Come 4 AM, it was scary as shit. I almost stabbed my dog with my dressmakers’ shears when he started making noise in a room he wasn’t supposed to be in. :slight_smile:

What was scary, in retrospect, was that walking in in the middle like that really could have gotten me shot for real, by nervous robbers.

The worst was in early childhood, far as as I can remember. I was suffering from Scarlet Fever with an apparently near-brain-frying temperture ( which might explain the trajectory of my life since then :stuck_out_tongue: ). I must have been improving and then relapsed or something, because my parents settled me in for the night then went to bed. But I got worse fast - I was in tremendous pain and started full on hallucinating that giant wasps larger than my head were attacking and stinging me ( hence the pain ). I completely freaked out and somehow stumbled down the hall to my parents room, the huge wasps trailing after me and continuing to attack, where I collapsed and vomited in front of their door.

Young as I was back then I can clearly recall being absolutely out of my mind terrified. One of my more vivid early childhood memories, oddly so considering my delerious, fevered state.

Lots of things peg 9.5 on a 1-10 scale and I hope I never experience an actual 10. Here’s what sticks out in my head:

The farm house, where my paternal grandparents then lived, had a long history of life an death. A cousin died, crushed to death by an old iron tractor tire. He had been using it as a jungle gym and it tipped over on top of him. Two of my grandfather’s sisters poisoned themselves after eating wild carrots. One of his brothers died of a heart ailment next to the fireplace. Rumor has it that bodies are buried in the east pasture. When I was 10ish I came down with an exceptionally wicked case of strep throat, and I had also recently read a comic book based on the Winchester Hosue. The combination of hallucination-inducing temperatures, family history, and beings seeking a working staircase contributed to a hellish, feverish afternoon where all of these family ghosts came to visit me.


I was raised on a family dairy farm and our cows roamed pastureland during clement weather. When a cow dropped a calf she invariably gave birth across the creek and in the most remote spot from the barn, and it was my job to fetch the calf when that happened. Sometimes we had a bull; other times we used AI. When I was 12ish we had a bull, and it didn’t like me at all - in fact, it had twice tried to chase me down. But I was 12 and a girl and therefore stupid, so my father ignored me when I told him that the Holstein bull tried to run me down. That morning I put a rope around the calf’s neck, led it to the fence, and the next thing I knew that goddamn bull had me pinned up against the barbed wire. I have no clue why I’m alive right now; the only thing I can figure is that I climbed that fence at the speed of light.


Anything that’s happened to me since is cake.

Scud running in a twin engine glider at night.

The day we heard about 9-11, in high school, was probably the worst. After the principal came on over the P.A., all crackly static with her voice breaking, I remember going quiet and numb all over and sitting watching my hands shake while the entire school went silent.

There was also the near-collision with a car on my bike, and a babysitting incident I refuse to talk about, but that moment might have been the worst.

This one is weird in that it didn’t get scary for like, six months.

It was during my first deployment to Iraq. We were flying into a FOB, a bit lower than usual. It had been an extremely routine evening. At this point I was more worried about what I was going to eat for breakfast than anything else. It really doesn’t take that many brain bites to scan for threats.

Anywho, flying in, everything normal, then the next thing I know I hear my FE scream like a little girl: CLIMB! CLIMB! CLIMB!

I’m not making fun of him for sounding like that, just telling how it was. Immediately I felt the helo pitch up dam near 30 degrees. I look down and see electrical wire about ten feet from the wheels. It almost looked as if I could reach out and touch them. For those of you who don’t know, wires will swat a helo out of the sky without a second thought. You’d be poured into a body bag, if anything remained of the wreckage. After that was over I thought to myself, “Huh, that coulda sucked. Man, I want french toast today.”

Fast forward about six months, I’m preparing to go back. Because of the way the rotations worked I knew it was my last trip because I’d separate before my potential third. And then it hit me: I almost died. I should be dead. I should have never reached my 20th birthday. For those of you who have never had your mortality thrown in your face like that, it’s unnerving to say the least. I’m still supposed to believe I will never die, not question whether or not I’ve lived a worthwhile life up till that point. And it really didn’t help that I had just found that mydeathspace.com website where I saw other military members who got killed in Iraq’s webpages. That didn’t help in the least bit.

The first time I encountered my husband having a night terror.

There is something about the guy you depend on for being cool-headed in scary situations (one time our brakes went out on the freeway and he easily and coolly brought it off and into a gas station like he was just riding a bike) sitting bolt upright in bed, screaming like he’s being dismembered. Of course he just rolled over and went to sleep, but I was clawing the ceiling the rest of the night.

The worst one was when I got home one day as I parked my car one of the neighbor kids ran up to my car and said “your son has been run over by a car” I has to ask her to repete because I could not compute what she was trying to tell me.

This story is a little longer, sorry.

When I was a 2nd class Midshipman. We were having problems with the firing controls of the aft engineroom boiler. I traced it down to a broken sensing line on the boiler fire box. On that boiler the sky pipe from the safeties was broken, and if the safety were to open it would have vented 440 PSI and 750 degree steam from a 6 inch line right to the back of the boiler where the sensing line was.

The Chief, 1st and 3rd engineers were behind the boiler looking at the problem along with the 1st class midshipman. I guess they must have moved the line or something because all at once the fuel oil pressure jumped up from 60 psi to about 130. The pressure begain to climb in a manner of seconds we were about to blow safeties. I screamed “KEN” grabed gloves and jumped on to the firing table getting ready to cut fires even though we were on a full ahead bell. Ken came around the boiler saw what was about to happen and got them out of there. the oil pressure dropped and we put the boiler on hand operation and fixed the problem. I thought we were have three dead people behind that boiler.

Funny thing after we got that boiler on hand operation I was so rattled that I could not talk. It took less time to let other guess what I was trying to tell them than to calm down and collect my witts and talk norrmal. I was the only one who saw that we came within 1 psi of lifting safeties, so other could not understand why I was so rattled.

That was in 1969, but still fills like last week.

Last year in Thailand had some scary moments.

Got left behind by a dive boat for an hour.

Then when I got back to shore, there was a tsunami warning.

Then the ferry back to the mainland was heavily overloaded and in a heavy swell started listing about 20 degrees to starboard. A journey of an hour took two and a half hours.

The next day I was treated to engine failure on takeoff at Bangkok Airport - just at decision speed, the pilot hit everything he possibly had to stop: flaps, air brakes, wheel brakes, reverse thrust (forgive me if I have the terminology wrong). I was thrown forward in my seat, straining against the seat belt. I looked to the stewardess to gauge her reaction, and she was screaming. I remember calmly thinking “so this is what it’s like to die”.

But the thing that really scared me, and introduced me to pure terror for the first time, was an amusement ride that lifts you up 8 storeys and drops you. Something reptilian inside me woke up that day and screamed “YOU ARE DYING!” at the top of its lungs. Never experienced anything like it before or since, but it still gives me shivers thinking about it.

I’ve spent a good part of my life,in a good many places, in a variety of situations being scared so I cant honestly single one out.

It could be that if I hadn’t of been scared at the time I wouldn’t be alive now.

But you never feel so alive as when you think that you could be dead any moment.