Ooh, thanks for all your stories.
I realise now putting TMI up top wasn’t quite right – I meant some of the stories could be harrowing, I didn’t mean they might be adult content. (On the other hand…)
I’ve got my own moment, and my fathers which is told to me when we had a conversation about this very subject after his first massive heart attack (you can guess what the second did). It confirms the “If you have got kids…” separation this thread has thrown up.
Mine. Mountaineering. Not roped up, and not scary until it was over and I had survived without a scratch. Then I couldn’t move for about 5 minutes which seemed like five hours.
It was in the Italian Appennines, Monte La Meta, in a worsening weather - wind getting up. I am leading but we have reached ground which you can walk on, and a gust comes out of nowhere as I near the ridgeline and literally lifts me into the air and over the ridge. Must have travelled maybe five or six feet upwards and perhaps fifteen or twenty feet laterally and landing plumb on my two feet. No worse than jumping off a wall. I look down and see that this side of the ridge was much much steeper than the one I had been on, and the ledge I had landed on was, oh, perhaps two feet wide. Queue one doper turning into a blob a shaking jelly…
My mate on the other side of the ridge had a bad moment too; watching me dissappear over the horizon towards a certain death. I am not a Christian but ever since then I have had this strange feeling that somebody/thing was looking out for me that day. If so - thank you!
And my fathers story, the day when aged eight I was doing up my jacket zip on the pavement when a lorry gets far too close and clips me across the head with a cage of it’s wing mirror. Sends one small kid flying and my father running faster than he had ever had before to find out I was alive. He then had to endure the journey to hospital where I was stitched up again. Another inch or so nearer and I would have been stiffed apparently.
When I was working for Hazardous waste disposal company we worked at the Maximum Security State Pen and I had two profoundly stupid and terrifying moments.
Episode I - We were preparing the site with barricades and hanging Poly for the containment and I was standing by myself when these two huge cons come walking by with a guard escort. They look over and ask what we are doing and I told him. He said “Asbestos? Doesn’t that shit give you cancer? I am going to sue you for exposing me. I have a witness. You will hear from my lawyer.” I snapped back “I hope you have a better lawyer than last time.” Good thing for me that two other guards showed up just as he looked like he was going to rush me.
Episode II - Same Prison, Maximum security wing, end of a long night. We are getting ready to walk out. For some reason our escort slowed and I did not notice. Now I had never paid any attention to the fact that our escort always opened the Exterior door for us. This was a leading cause of my error. When I opened the door and stepped out I was immediately hit with two buge blinding spotlights and a booming voice said “Halt! Stay right where you are or you will be fired upon!” Holy Shit! I froze midstep and on instinct alone started to turn back into the building. Our escort started yelling “Don’t move! Don’t move!” When I realized I was actually disobeying a direct order from a prison tower guard with a rifle, I managed to stop in the doorway.
I have never been that scared in my life except maybe when my wife first told me we were going to be parents.
Lilly, Queen of the Universe, and I were eating dinner when she started to choke on her food. I tried the Heimlich manuever, I tried patting her back, I had her upside down and shaking her, nothing would dislodge the food. She turned that bluish-purple color and I was just freaking out. Do I stop and call 911, do I keep trying, LILLY GOD DAMN IT DON’T DO THIS TO ME, please please please please please breathe please please please breathe, BREATHE NOW, and then …plop…it fell out of her mouth and she did this WHHOOOOOSSSHHHHHing inhale and started to cry. I fell on the floor bawling like no tomorrow, then threw up from the nervous tension.
NOTHING can ever prepare you for that kind of scared. Nothing.
When Whatsit Jr. was one month old, he was hospitalized and put on a ventilator due to severe RSV that led to antibiotic-resistant pneumonia. He was in the NICU at Children’s Hospital. Their protocol for visitors is that whenever you show up, you check in at the registration desk outside the doors of the NICU and the nurse checks to make sure all is well, then lets you in. We’d been doing this for four or five days, and we always showed up and got waved right through.
Then one morning, we were home at 4 AM (the hospital didn’t have any place for us to sleep so we had to go home to sleep) when we got a call from Whatsit Jr.'s doctor telling us that they were going to have to put him back on the ventilator because taking him off the day before had failed; his O2 count was falling again and he was struggling to breathe. So we got up and headed to the hospital, as there’s no sleeping after news like that. When we got there, the reception nurse told us we couldn’t go in. That was maybe the scariest moment, because I didn’t know why we couldn’t go in. I feared the worst.
Then Whatsit Jr.'s doctor came out and in an extremely rushed manner, told us that Whatsit Jr. had developed a pneumothorax as a result of the pressure from the ventilator and that they needed to perform surgery to relieve the pressure and insert a chest tube right away, and we could go in and see him but only for a very short moment because they had to do the surgery RIGHT NOW. I went in to look at him, burst into tears, and had to leave immediately anyway. MrWhatsit did a little better and said some comforting words before leaving.
Then we spent the worst 45 minutes of my life in the waiting area outside the NICU. I thought, for some reason, that it would be a quick 15-minute procedure and I didn’t know why it was taking so long. (Turns out 45 minutes was the expected length of time.)
End result: Whatsit Jr. survived the procedure just fine and today the scar is barely visible. He’s a happy, healthy, rambunctious two-year-old who likes to attack the cat and climb his toybox. But even remembering that morning is enough to make me want to throw up. It was gut-wrenching.
I’ve had a gun pointed directly at me in the course of a grocery store robbery; I’ve been in a major roll-over car accident; I’ve lived through a 7.0 earthquake. Nothing compares to that morning at Children’s Hospital, and frankly I hope nothing ever does.
I can’t believe mine’s the first 9/11 one here.
My husband works downtown Manhattan (corner of Canal and Varick, very close to where the WTC was). On that morning, I was driving to a meeting, I was almost out of gas and I kept repeating in my head “God, get me to a gas station. God, get me to a gas station”.
Then I heard something had gone wrong with a plane downtown so I amended it to “God, take care of those people and get me to a gas station.” When the second plane hit and this was obviously no longer a “mistake” or an “accident”, my first thought was of my husband.
I couldn’t remember exactly where his office was, or how close to the WTC (some of the clearest pictures came from the top of his building, BTW). My mantra became “God, fuck the gas, get my husband the hell out of there!” I tried calling his office, no answer. I tried the cell phone, it gave weird beeping noise. I tried again, it rang once and gave out. After about 10 minutes of sheer terror, our best friend from Boston called my cell. It seems my husband got one IM out to our friend and said he was alright, would our friend call me, my in-laws and my parents.
So I’m sitting on the highway and my only choices are to believe someone 300 miles away or to have another, uncomprehensible answer to my question “how is my husband?” I went to my meeting, got home to my parent’s house and cried for an hour when my husband finally walked in the door at 2:00.
I’m trying to think of a witty, or insightful way to end this, but I just can’t. That was simply the scariest day of my life.