I saw a thread on Snopes about this, and it was something I’d been meaning to ask, so eh. When was the most terrifying moment of your life, and why?
I can only think of a couple (thank goodness):
First driving test. I wept and wept. Of course, I failed. I was SO happy to get out of that car.
One night alone in my room I was absolutely convinced someone else was in with me, breathing. I sat up in bed, thinking that I must have imagined it. I heard the breathing sound again. I was so scared I wanted to vomit, and suddenly understood why people do that in movies when they see a dead body.
Yes, mine are pretty crap and not very serious. Got any better ones?
Most scared? hmm… Having been laid off and out of work for 11 months was the most scared I’ve been. Having 2 kids, wife, house, etc… and no idea when I’d get a job scared the crap out of me. It’s still affecting me in numerous ways even though I am employed now.
I’ve been in scary situations (hit by a car, chemical plant fire, demo work) before, but nothing had the profoundly disturbing effect that being laid off did.
Going down the hall on a stretcher to the OR for 4 coronary bypasses. I was fine until then, but that long ride while staring up at the lights really got to me. And this was after the Demerol!
Walking across a bridge that spanned a gully in my backyard, and discovered that stick I was about to step on was actually a snake.
I backpedaled like mad. Fortunately it was only a king snake, a harmless-to-humans breed that eats other snakes, but I didn’t want to stick around long enough to make sure.
I’ve never been so scared in my life than when my husband went thru a big tdepression not that long ago. I was 100 times scarier to me than any car accidents or things like that. I wouldn’t wish that feeling to my worse enemy.
Two times come immediately to mind, and they both involve my kids! The first time, we were at Busch Gardens Tampa, and I was in The Land Of Dragons (play area for toddlers) with my youngest daughter, who was two at the time. For about 15 minutes, we couldn’t find her, and I was terrified that she had somehow gotten out of the area (there was only one entrance/exit from that area to prevent that kind of thing from happening), and was wandering around the park, which is huge. The other was when my 16-year-old ran away. For about 4 hours, we didn’t know where she was, and I was utterly terrified. Thinking that my children may be coming into harm’s way makes everything scary that came before look like small potatoes, including the time my urologist thought I might have a cancerous tumor on my right kidney (it was a false alarm).
The one year old was playing in his sandbox and I went inside to answer the phone. A minute, maybe two, later and kiddo was no longer in the yard and the gate was hanging wide open. As far as I knew he couldn’t work the latch so I had this immediate vision of some pervo snatching him. I was instantly hysterical, running around trying to see him, not wanting to go in the wrong direction and miss him somehow. A neighbor ended up having him–he’d seen him walking down the sidewalk and brought him up on his porch. Longest three minutes of my life. I cried like a baby when I saw he was safe.
In labor with kiddo #2, at the pushing stage. Suddenly, I realized that the doctor and nurses had gotten really quiet and were bustling around, punching buttons on the monitors and whispering. Then the doc says, very serious, “We’ve lost the heartbeat.” Next thing I know they’re running me down the hall to an OR for an emergency C-section. I just kept thinking about how much I had regretted getting pregnant, and how my punishment for not being grateful was going to be to lose this baby right when I realized how much I actually wanted him. All turned out OK–the docs pulled out a scrappy little guy with a very short cord wrapped twice around his neck. He was blue, but revived quickly and is now a perfectly healthy four-month-old.
Twice, I’ve been really scared a few times.
Once, when I had a temporary job painting old-fasioned overhead suspension bridges owned by the county on back country roads. Everything was done with buckets, brushes, and ladders. I was high atop the bridge, straddling an I-beam and scooching backwards as I painted. As often happens in that part of the country, a sudden thunderstorm brewed up. So, here I am, the highest object in the area, sitting on steel in rain, gusty wind, and lightning. It took a while to get over to a ladder and climb down. I was shaking when I finally got my feet back on the deck.
It’s been my experience that fear only has a hand in things when you have time to think about the situation. Most everybody seems pretty courageous when there must be immediate action w/o time for much thought.
I have already posted on the Snopes thread. The most terrifying time in my life was waiting for my father or his body to be found after we heard from a co-worker of his and his therapist that he had called implying that he was going t ofinally kill himself after 7 years of major depression.
Three months shy of my tenth birthday, I had major spine surgery. I remember being wheeled into the operating room and seeing the equipment they were going to use – for some reason, they didn’t sedate me first. Scary stuff.
During the Northridge earthquake in 1994. I was SO scared I couldn’t make a sound. I was waiting for the ceiling to fall and kill me just so I wouldn’t be so damn scared.
One time when my dad came to pick my brothers and me up for his biweekly visitation, my stepfather tried to pick a fight with him. My dad wouldn’t bite, as he didn’t want to freak us out any more than necessary. We got in my dad’s car and he proceeded to leave. My stepfather jumped in his pickup and tried to run my dad off the road. Apparently, it didn’t matter that we were in the car as well. Luckily nobody got hurt, but both sides had considerable damage to their cars.
I lost my son for a few minutes at a family reunion at my parent’s house. It was one of those situations where there are so many adults around, you assume someone is watching him, when in fact no one is. My parents live on a lake–I feared the worst. We found him on the beach at my neighbor’s house, picking up rocks.
I was whitewater rafting on the Gauley in WV and a boat ahead of us flipped over. Nobody could reach one of the older guys and he went through a rough part of the river which our guide said he’d never seen anyone go through as a ‘swimmer.’ We went after him and when we got him into our boat, I thought he was dying. We all did. I was terrified. Plus there was nowhere to go, no way to get help. I just wanted off the damn boat but we had to keep rowing (for quite a ways) before we could be picked up. I didn’t want to go through any more rough water but we had a lot ahead of us. Incidentally, the guy perked up and got his color back and ended up fine.
I once broke my wrist in a snowboarding accident. I was 14 or so. The dumb part was that I’d sat around at the top of the lift with a couple other people until after the lift closed and everyone got off the mountain. (This is the same way that Kennedy kid died a few years ago, IIRC.) They were all ahead of me, and I was sitting halfway down a mountainside with a busted wrist.
I got up and rode really cautiously to the bottom, then went to the ski clinic and got it X-rayed and put in a cast, and I was fine. But it was pretty scary sitting up there, watching it get dark, knowing that I’d broken a bone, and if I didn’t strap myself back in and get to the bottom of the slope, I might be up there for god knows how long. I was on a pretty isolated part of the mountain.
Besides, it could have been way worse. I narrowly avoided landing squarely on my head.. :eek:
He shot himself and died. This was about two years ago. The horrible thing though was he just left the house that morning like he was going to work but instead drove a couple hours up to some woods , calling the therapist and co-worker on his way up there. Also, we let the police know that day what the circumstances were but they did not find his body until 4 days after he had actually done the deed. The reason they finally found it was because someone tried to siphon (sp?) gas out of his car which had been by the side of the road for those for days then they kind of searched from there I guess and came upon the body in the woods.
I nearly got stuck in a dark cave once when I was about 16 or 17. Two other friends and I decided to explore a cave. As we went farther back the walls got closer and closer until we were reduced to ducking and then crawling. Eventually we had to go single file through the narrowing tunnel. Being somewhat clausterphobic, I decided to head back while my two more adventurous friends continued on. All I had was a pocket disposable flashlight. About halfway back to the exit my flashlight suddenly failed and I was stuck in complete darkness. I knew I was going the right direction and the ground was fairly flat, but not being able to see anything while in an enclosed and unfamiliar environment really freaked me out. I was too far from my other friends for them to have heard me as I yelled for them. I frantically beat on the side of the flashlight hoping to revive it (I didn’t think the batteries had gone dead since it was glowing bright enough before failing). I managed to bring it back to life just long enough for me to get back to the exit.
I have two most scary instances but both have to be told to explain the full horror.
I had a stroke over two years ago. I had a really bad headache while I slept and when I woke up, my body didn’t work. My parents found me on the bathroom floor. I was so out of it and in such pain that I wasn’t really aware of what was happening. After the emergency room MRI, the doctor broke the news to me and my family that I had a stroke. Then, he asked me to move my leg. I looked at my leg, tried, and nothing happened. Being trapped in a non-functioning body and not knowing if you’ll ever recover is horrible and scary.
After nine months, I had a procedure to correct the defect in my heart that allowed me to have a stroke. The plan was once my heart hole was plugged, I can go off the horrible blood thinners and just take aspirin the rest of my life. The afternoon after my procedure, I started having migraines and lost partial vision in one eye. The doctors thought I was having another stroke. The despair and fear I felt that day almost broke me. No matter what choices I made, I was destined to suffer. No matter that I survived a massive stroke, I’ll have to through that horror again. Luckily, it turned out not to be a stroke. The heart hole is connected to aura migraines so once it got plugged, it gave one last migraine.