The moment that I realized that my four day old son's twitching was just one of many seizures.


[Edited on March 23, 2010 at 10:14 PM. Reason : ,]

3/23/2010 9:51:44 PM

1) I was snorkeling around a small coral/limestone island off the north shore of Bimini. As I was admiring all of the fish and the different shapes of the coral, I thought I saw a car/truck tire at the bottom of this hole through the coral and stone. I was trying to figure out how the hell a tire would have gotten through the rocks and coral when I see the head of a giant eel pop out of the rocks, mouth open wide with its teeth just aching to bite me.... If I didn't have fins on, I probably would have become part of that eel's dinner. I have never swam so fast in my life.

2) Looking back at the road after trying to keep my drink from spilling just in time to say "fuck" as I rear-ended a truck. I was going fast enough to completely total my car, but only suffered a minor concussion. The guy in the truck I hit was completely fine, just emotionally shaken.

5/14/2010 11:50:21 PM

when the Sheriff's K9 unit came up to our property, right after we got done burying all them trashbags full of dead hooker parts.

they was just lookin for some fella escaped from the hospital up the road a ways, but damn if it weren't tight there for a moment.

6/8/2010 6:15:33 PM

Riding some of the buses we had to take on the way to Machu, China. Steep drop off a few centimeters from the edge of the tires, huge potholes...yeah I was thinking "oh boy, here we go"

same trip: extremely nasty 24 hours stomach/everything virus.. would have rather died. ugh.

6/9/2010 10:24:34 AM

some of you people are crazy.

6/23/2010 9:57:34 PM

I was doing some geologic mapping near Stuart, VA. First of all, it was basically my job to trespass on people's property to measure rock foliations and what not. If you don't know, Stuart, VA is surrounded by VERY rural, moon-shining country. That part wasn't so bad. I was on the top of a mountain one day, and a damn thunderstorm ran up on me unexpectedly. There was no delay between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. I had to throw my rock hammers away from me, and I crouched on my backpack... not sure if it made any real difference but I pretended. I did not get struck by lighting at that time.

6/23/2010 10:01:16 PM

-Coming to the realization I'm a terrible swimmer around the age of 13...while in the middle of a pool at Myrtle Beach
-Coming upon a curve at 90mph and spinning out of control
-Almost colliding head first with a deer running through the woods (she was running, I was just chillin)
-The step father coming home unexpectedly while I was over at an ex-GF's house
-Getting pulled out past where I could touch bottom by a rip current when I was 20 (7 years later and still a terrible swimmer )
-Getting a gun shoved in my chest
-Riding with a drunk Canadian who taught me the true meaning of "passing cars like they were standing still". Dude took it up to 150 multiple times (I think km/hr but I was too drunk to care about anything except the fact I was gonna die) while weaving through traffic in Kansas City.

[Edited on June 23, 2010 at 10:40 PM. Reason : .]

6/23/2010 10:39:56 PM

OP: Why did you exclude the terrifying moment where you were crying like a bitch after getting took out?

6/24/2010 6:06:46 PM

1. Stepping on a hornets nest and having them fly behind me to attack my mom. She was in a the hospital for a week.

2. Slamming my mom's best friend's hand into a car door and breaking two of her fingers.

3. Car hood exploding into flames with my baby brother strapped into a car seat in the back.

4. Flipping my car 5 times on Creedmoor and landing upside down. Not a scratch though.

5. Getting hit at 50 MPH on Six Forks by a car on my bike.

6. Hitting a biker with my car. (Though I actually only tapped him and messed up his rear wheel. He calls the cops....they write him a ticket because he was riding down the street the wrong direction.)

6/26/2010 8:10:13 AM

^ lol at the last part. they gave a local trouble maker around here a DWI when he got hit by a car on his bike.

6/26/2010 1:49:51 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUu4ZCx3xnE&NR=1

7/27/2010 12:32:36 AM

Quote :

"6. Hitting a biker with my car. (Though I actually only tapped him and messed up his rear wheel. He calls the cops....they write him a ticket because he was riding down the street the wrong direction.)"

haha this sort of happened to me one time as well. was pulling out of a parking lot on Enterprise St (the one at the corner of Enterprise and Clark) and a guy was coming up the street on a bike. i guess he thought i cut him off, but i CLEARLY had room to turn right ahead of him. being someone that rides a bike myself, i guess he was just a bike asshole. so he rides past, and spits on my car and is yelling at me for "cutting him off". so i follow him to the corner, turn right on clark behind him and he is continuing to yell. i turn left on oberlin and am at this point continuing on my route which was to turn into cameron village and he decides to follow me into CV. so i turn into McDonalds, and as im making the turn he comes FLYING through the parking lot and I guess mistimed the turn I was making and flew right into the right front quarter panel of my car, slid across my hood and his front wheel of his bike was all kinds of fucked up.

i stopped, jumped out to make sure he didn't kill himself, and then i was like DUDE WHAT THE FUCK. he insisted on calling the cops and when RPD showed up, the cop was a guy i went to high school with. he separated us and got stories, came back, told the kid on the bike he shouldn't be on the road on a bike (like, bikefail) and let me go. i found out that the kid tried to file a claim on my insurance company for his bike, and they laughed at him.

[Edited on July 27, 2010 at 10:03 AM. Reason : .]

7/27/2010 10:01:22 AM

^ whoa it's scary when people go mental like that.

7/27/2010 10:18:34 PM

sounds like a self-righteous prick... i bet he recycles religiously and is probably vegan or acts like he only buys local

7/28/2010 9:15:41 AM

When i was 16 in New Mexico I was causing some trouble with the wrong people and wound up with a shotgun pinning my head to the ground. He fired it first, too, the barrel was hot and burned my head. He held me there until the cops came.

Spinning off track in the rain at 95mph on VIR's uphill esses into the tirewall was a little scary, but mostly fun.

7/28/2010 9:53:44 AM

flying back to houston from tulsa yesterday... not so much terrifying as it was a series of shitty/dangerous situations that were scary

1-- as we were making our landing into houston, there is a massive thunderstorm hovering over the airport (and really nowhere else). we get 200ft from the ground & pull up all of a sudden because there is no visibility

2-- attempt #2 is no better so we start to climb back up & get diverted to an airport 1.5 hours away

3-- as we're making our landing there, there is a plane that pulls onto the runway in front of us and we have to abort, again

3.5-- by the way, we are running out of fuel & all these landing aborts and climbs back up are killing our supply... we HAVE to land to refuel esp since we circled around houston for awhile until they told us to go to the other airport

4-- we finally head back to houston & as we're landing there is a high pitched noise. we hit the ground & stop. the steering had gone out & we were stuck on the runway. had to be towed off

i fly a lot & that was still the shittiest mash up of things that have happened to me. the only redeeming thing was that we had no turbulence

7/28/2010 10:56:39 AM

hah that sucks

the worst ive ever had was flying all the way to Portland, ME one time, SEEING the airport/runway, being told it was too iced over to land, and having to divert to Logan (20 min flight) and then drive up to Portland in an ice storm because I had a pretty crucial meeting with Sen. Collins the following morning.

7/28/2010 11:06:33 AM

this was also after the plane we were waiting for in tulsa had brake problems and we were delayed about 3 hours

it was just hilarious by the time the steering went out.

7/28/2010 11:09:08 AM

Super Bowl Sunday in 2008, was one of 4 passengers on a flight to Chicago during a snow storm. Got stuck flying in a holding pattern for 2 hours above O'Hare because the runway had iced over. Turbulence was bad, and I felt the plane DROP a couple hundred feet more than once. The entire cabin was dead silent, too.

8/1/2010 12:38:11 PM

Seeing a panicked look instantly come across a womans face when she realized she had just pulled out in front of me on my motorcycle. I was probably about 15 feet from t-boning side of her car, and fractions of a second from hitting it, but i remember her look of terror.

Related, but different: Laying on the ground only able to move one extremity. Left leg pointed entirely the wrong way, and my broken left arm/wrist stuck underneath my body. I couldn't move well enough to get my arm out from under my back, so i just laid there crushing my broken arm into the pavement.

8/2/2010 10:14:19 AM

Quote :

"When i was 16 in New Mexico I was causing some trouble with the wrong people and wound up with a shotgun pinning my head to the ground. He fired it first, too, the barrel was hot and burned my head. He held me there until the cops came."

Just have to say....holy fuck.

8/2/2010 10:26:38 AM

great thread. like someone said, some of you people are crazy.

8/2/2010 4:27:30 PM

my entire childhood was terrifying.

8/3/2010 4:47:49 PM

1. Hurricane Hugo....I was 4, and still remember the whistling of the wind. Of course, seeing and hearing a transformer blow up didn't help.

2. The day before my 7th or 8th birthday, I got clipped by a car that ran a red light in NYC. My dad grabbed me at the last second, and they only hit my foot (knocked off and ran over my shoe, so I got new shoes for my birthday lol).

3. Ice storm in 1995, a tree limb fell on a power line, another tree falls on the house next door.

4. Tree gets hit by lightning at our house, while my dad is about 20 feet away.

5. I cut my hand opening a box. The blade slipped, and got me in between the thumb and index finger. My whole hand and forearm was covered in blood. We wrapped 3 towels around it, then went to the hospital. When they unwrapped my hand, blood was going through the 3rd towel.

8/3/2010 7:25:56 PM

1) When I was 9, I got smacked frombehind by a car in Ocean City, NJ while riding my bicycle on a residential street. It turns out the woman who was driving was doing 45 in a 20 mph zone. I walked away with a sprained ankle and a crumpled bike. Scared my parents almost to death.

2) I was riding a friend's horse when I was 14, that bronco-bucked and launched me about 10 feet onto a jump, which I of course faceplanted on. Totally cracked my helmet too.

9/2/2010 7:51:29 PM

1. the day my mom was diagnosed with leukemia

2. the day i woke up to find out my dad had a stroke (while my mom was hospitalized with leukemia) - driving to the hospital and not having my dad recognize me or my brother and having my mom in a different hospital 30 miles away. doctors telling us my dad might be in a nursing home the rest of his life.

3. meeting with a team of 12 doctors by myself for them to basically tell me my mom was going to need to be taken off life support (the morning of, i had picked up my dad from the hospital because he had been released after his strokes (like 2-3 weeks had gone by since #2))

4. when i found out # 3, my uncle picked my dad up and brought him to the hospital where my mom was and while we were trying to figure out what to do and calling other relatives and stuff, he started having another stroke and had to be admitted to that hospital's ER and they couldn't figure out what was wrong (this one was like the most terrifying. it was a whirlwind and probably the worst day of my life. i wasn't sure i was going to make it).

pre these incidents, stuff like slipping while rock climbing in the mountains, or being in a white-out in the alpine of whistler, or hitting a deer late at night would have been my most terrifying. but now those things don't even compare to 1-4. the sinking feeling/pit drop in the stomach feeling that i got w/ 1-4 i hope to avoid experiencing for a long time.

9/2/2010 10:24:41 PM

Quote :

"my entire childhood was terrifying."

This. I did a lot of stupid things.

9/6/2010 2:02:16 AM

before I got my current job in 2004.....the time I was unemployed....

9/7/2010 3:35:45 PM

I rear-ended a little saturn sedan at 50+ mph. Looking up from the air-bag, the back of the saturn looked like a twisted hunk of metal. I could hear a baby screeching. I had a fleeting thought that I had just killed a young family and the rest of my life is prison.

But they were totally fine

9/8/2010 11:05:18 AM

It wasn't a 'my life is over' in the literal sense, but it was in the figurative sense:

- Being in Boston for work not getting ahold of my wife for almost 2 days and calling to filing a missing person's report to instead be called by the coroner's office

11/9/2010 11:27:37 AM

Basically, the last 18 months. Lone bright spots include the birth of my son and the subsequent milestones he reaches. The rest is a complete clusterfuck.

11/9/2010 11:48:39 AM

last Saturday, the night before the Panthers-Saints game in Charlotte, i was driving to my cousin's house in Winston Salem. around midnight, on I40 just before exit 226, there was a deer standing in the middle of the road. it looked like a full sized doe and it looked confused as hell. i was sort of coming around a bend and going about 80 to 85 mph.

i still don't know how i emerged without a scratch. i know a cut right harder than i should've, did nearly a 360, cut hard the other way and saw myself sliding towards the railing on the right (opposite the median). at some point i lost track of how i actually steered, i just know everything slowed the fuck down drastically. i remember thinking to myself, "if i hit this railing, atleast i'm not going too fast, i can get towed, and i can still make the game tomorrow... aw hell naw i got this, steer, steer, steer!!!"

i felt in shock for about 20 minutes, but i also felt like sort of a badass.

there were 4 lanes for me to swerve within, and noone behind me for nearly a mile - that is what kept me from any sort of collision, save for any credit i can give to my 99 Accord coupe. at the end of the massive spinout there was a lot of burning rubber, my glasses had fogged up, and everything had been flung out of place in the car. i was facing traffic that was oncoming over half a mile away. i turned around and kept driving.

i don't know if it makes sense, but it was almost as if i didn't have time to be scared. Friday night i was driving somewhere on the beltline and some shadows in my peripheral sacred the ever living shit out of me. the fear that i didn't feel for the first 6 days finally caught up to me. last night i was driving around jumpy as hell too.

11/15/2010 5:15:30 PM

When I was a little girl I was walking the dog and as we were passing the parking lot at Wawa, a man drove up to me in his truck and asked for directions. I couldn't understand where he wanted to go, and as I got closer to the door (I was just tall enough to be able to look in) I noticed he had something in his hand. He grabbed me and started to pull me through his window. It was then that I saw what was in his hand and realized it must be a penis (first time I've ever seen one). He couldn't get me into his truck, I was screaming and lurching my body all over the place and my dog was barking really loud. I remember hitting back on the ground and crying and screaming. I don't know how I got home but I remember being at the police station with my dad and having to describe everything. It was also the first time I felt extremely ashamed.

12/1/2010 4:02:26 PM

^Holy shit

I can only recall one time when I was terrified. I was little, maybe 5 years old, when we went to RDU to pick up my grandma. I saw my sister and other grandma walking away, turned around and didn't see anyone else in my family, and started walking quickly to catch up to my sister. I walked for what seemed like a long distance and didn't see them anymore, so I turned around to try and find the spot I started at. Again, I didn't see anyone I knew so I figured I'd keep walking that direction. I guess at that point I started to panic. I finally came up on my parents, sister, and both grandmas. Turns out my sister and grandma went to the bathroom, which I walked past, and I simply didn't go as far as i thought I did to reach the starting point.

A time I was super worried was when I worked for the NC forest service as an intern. We had to walk about 3/4 of a mile into a low poccosin to get to a measurement plot. It was a sunny 95 degree day with high humidity. Everyone except for me ran out of water going to the plot. I ran out shortly after we started our trip back to the truck. I was dehydrated enough that I thought I was going to pass out and we got so desperate we dug up some soil and tried squeezing water out of it. We made it back ok.

I generally don't get scared...I think I have a dysfunctional brain. Many things don't affect me emotionally to a high enough degree. I've been entrapped by fire (it wasn't raging but it could have burned me) and have fallen into burning stump holes and wasn't worried. I've even accidentally lit the entire side of my leg on fire while lighting off a backfire and calmly smothered it out. I wish I was more easily excitable
I've felt an adrenalin rush only once that I can recall and that was when I was "rescuing" a volunteer fireman who was swarmed by bees during a wildfire in Texas. Even then I saw what was happening, calmly blew out my drip torch, buttoned my shirt up all the way and flipped the collar up. Right after this is the point at which he falls to the ground and starts crying for help and the adrenaline starts. That rush was cool.

[Edited on December 4, 2010 at 1:44 AM. Reason : I might be the king of understatements.]

12/4/2010 1:32:40 AM