A couple of frightening moments from my life:

1. Getting that call from my mom telling me that my dad has a heart attack and went into cardiac arrest, and they were stabilizing him. I waited in NJ until I got word that he was stable. The flight from NJ to FL was the most agonizing 4+ hours of my life. (My dad had stents put in and a ICB to regulate his heart)

2. A couple of years after #1, my dad needed bypass surgery. Sitting in the recovery room with my dad all doped up, with lack of sleep - he was literally out of his mind with paranoia and jumbled thoughts -- I never saw him like that. Fortunately, when the drugs wore off, and he got some much needed rest, he recovered by to his normal self.

3. Hearing a message from Mrs. Z-man when I got back to my desk at work that went something like this, "Zoltan - you need to call me right away. I have been in a car accident - they are coming to get me out right now." Finding out later that she called me while she was still upside down in her flipped car freaked me out just a bit more... Someone did hit her on her way home from work, and caused her new Beelte to flip completely over. Only one panel on her car (the rear panel under the rear window) remained intact. But there was not a single scratch on her body. When we went to retrieve our personal belongings from her car, upon seeing the condition of her car, I cried.

4. While in college, a bunch of us when up north (Upstate NY) for a ski weekend. We were staying at a nice place on Lake Speculator - not far from Gore Mountain. It was a very mild time while we were up there, and the ski conditions were not ideal. So one day we decided to go for a hike instead. We started to take a 'short-cut' across the frozen lake, despite all the cracking of the ice we were hearing. And then little 120lb Becky put her foot through the ice -- but we kept going on. Then I heard a crack beneath me and in a second, I was in the water - up to my armpits - fortunately, as I was falling, I put out my arms to the sides, which prevented me from going completely under. As I was struggling to get out, the ice kept breaking around me. And then I heard my good friend Paul say this to someone who was attempting to grab me, "No - don't help him." Now he was right, because the person who was trying to grab me could have easily fallen through the weak ice as well. But when you're the guy that has fallen through the ice, those aren't comforting words to hear... Eventually, I was able to 'roll' out of the hole and onto the ice. Our hotel was about 3 miles away -- so I elected to run back in order to keep my heart rate and body temp. up. Made it back and took a lukewarm shower to warm up.

5. 9-11-2001. I knew that my wife was far away from ground zero, but I just had to reach her to know she's ok. Finally got through to her via phone after the first tower fell. I remember telling her that one of the towers was gone. She could not fathom what I was talking about. (She's a school teacher, and they were trying to keep information at a minimum since many of the children had parents who worked in NYC -- we live and work in the shadow of Manhattan). They let us go early that day - and I drove over to her school to see if I could help them in any way. (They didn't need any help). I went home and sat glued to the TV watching the news for hours. I knew that day that the world had changed - and my biggest fear was not knowing what will happen next.

I was about 300' and doing 100 knots in a UHIH (Huey) when I saw the belly of an A-10 in the window...no time to react. I talked to the pilot later and he had us "co-located" and was going for altitude in case he had to bail. He was going home from the range and was doing about 250knots. My copilot and I thought we were done.

A complete fabrication: 100kts in a Huey;)

Maybe it was down hill? with a 90 knot tailwind?

1st, I was out side in my front yard when a 90# female boxer went bat-shi+ crazy and was trying to corner one of my neighbors who was 5' tall and 60 yearsold. I managed to get in between the snarling dog and her. I had a little 3" pocket knife for help but I was sure that I was going to end up in the hospitol. My 12 year old son ran up to help! I had to yell at him to get away. It took 10 minutes of facing this dog down before it's owner got a leash on it.

2. I was racing karts and hand a camelback bite valve in my mouth come off the hose and had to swallow it as I was heading into a turn with no run off in race traffic.

Didn't even think about it at the time, but afterwards...A year or so ago, my wife and I and another couple were in the French Quarter for a wedding. A very big guy was yelling at people as they passed, asking for money and just being an a-hole. We kept going, but as we approached the door to the place, I heard a lady scream, like in fright. I turn around, and big dude is walking next to two old (80's) ladies, on their way to the wedding, screaming in their faces, with an arm around them.

I think I said something to my wife to the effect of "uh-oh", turned around and started towards them. I briefly considered that he may just pull a gun and shoot me, but by then it was too late. As I approached, I fought with myself over whether I should just attack him, play it cool, etc. I blocked his path as the two ladies walked by. Told him to leave them alone. We stared at each other for a few seconds, then he stuck his hand out, said "we're cool." I slapped him five, fully expecting him to try to grab me or hit me, and he turned around and walked off. Cops showed 2 minutes later. Took 4 of them to get him cuffed and in the car, he was going berserk.

Turns out, he had started a little mini-rampage about 6 blocks away, followed a group to the wedding from a hotel, yelling and screaming and went into the wedding and slapped the wedding coordinator who asked him to leave.

After I got inside, the adrenaline dump hit me full on.

Oh, and my buddy who we were walking with? He stayed with the ladies by the door. Thanks for the backup pal.

Well done looking after the elderly ladies. I had a buddy like that called Tim Bird. He prefered to be one of the girls instead of doing the honorable thing.

There certainly seems to be a few aeroplane stories - maybe that is trying to tell us something hehe. A friend who flys 747s or something like that was flying into Sydney and getting close to the airport. Ahead of him, two miles ahead, was an Emirates plane also planning to land. Suddenly the 747 just started to drop out of the sky. My buddy said he caught it OK but he said you need to control how you stop the freefall as it's tough on the wings. At this stage over residential Sydney the planes are not that high up so it must have been scary. He said just by chance he had got into the slipstream of air coming off the Emirates plane although he was two miles behind it. LOL, I feel sorry for the passengers.

When I was a young chap at a party it started to turn a bit nasty and I said to my buddy that we are going to have to get out of here soon. When there was a bit of a diversion we took off and were chased down the road by five big ethnic guys who (I know this from past experiance :eek: ) would near beat us to death on the side of the road. So we were running pretty fast. I got to the car, opened the door, and pulled a gun on them. The five guys skidded to a halt and looked like they were going to poo themselves on the spot. I had the gun pointed at the first guys forehead with my finger on the trigger. LOL, they started walking slowly backwards then ran for their lives.

Haha, apparently Tim Bird and Derek are cut from the same cloth. I let our other friends know the situation, just in case, they'll know what (not) to expect. Back when I was young and dumb, I rarely hesitated to fight, but now I'm older and have too much to lose fighting some crazy dude on the street.

I don't fly, but always wanted to. When my oldest daughter was about 14 months old, we took a trip to Martha's Vineyard. Flew to Providence, RI, then hopped on a little twin engine, 8 seat plane. I sat behind the pilot, which was cool b/c I got to watch everything she did. But weather was horrible. We were delayed for a while while the MV airport was closed. Eventually we took off, in a mixture of rain and fog. We left the ground, and it was almost immediately white-out outside. Couldn't see ****. I started thinking "This is how JFK jr died. WTF are wed going on here with our baby?" We got re-routed mid-flight when the MV airport closed again, then re-routed back to it when it re-opened again. As we started the descent, I'm watching the altimeter, still can't see ****. At about 500', it went from white-out to clear, and there was the runway lit up, right in front of us. (It was night too). That was a relief.

I saw The Exorcist in the same state of mind on a bigscreen.

Rafted the Selway River using an inflatable toy canoe. I wasn't scared though, as I was in college and we had plenty of beer.

Was riding shotgun in an old VW Beetle when the driver lost control on the way up to Schwietzer to ski. At the end of the skid the front wheels were hanging over a ledge and the rear wheels were bouncing slowly against the ground. We were teetering. Looking down (pretty easy, as the edge of the cliff was approximately at my rear door jamb), about 30 ft down were pecker-pokes that had been sawed off at a height of about six or eight feet each. We didn't die.

I got married.

Coming back from a concert on a busy highway, I woke up to the sound of Tom screaming my name, then saw the headlights we were about to hit. I was driving.

Diving in Belize. My first-ever dive was immediately to 85 feet. Don't worry, I'm a good swimmer and I had a fake PADI certification. Held a six-foot shark in my arms and petted her tummy. Saw a barracuda.

At one moment in my life, I was standing on a remote roadside at night alone with a woman I did not know, who had a 9mm in her hand and she said "I'm getting some of the strangest feelings......."

Sometimes, after the bars closed, Hal and I would drive a pickup from St. Maries, ID to Coeur d'Alene ID. We could make it in 25 minutes.

Streaked past a group of policemen watching a college melee, and into the melee. They didn't follow me.

Drifted many times into the oncoming lane on a motorcycle because I misjudged the curve. So far, there has never been a car coming.

Went hunting, just the two of us, with a guy whose girlfriend I had just stolen.

this may be the best yet.

In 1980 or so I worked for an environmental consulting firm that had a DoD contract to do exhaust stack emissions. I was sent to an experimental nerve gas destruction facility in Utah to source test the incinerator. What they did was take these old nerve gas shells, drop them in liquid nitrogen and then pull them out, hit them with a mechanical cleaver, split them in half and drop this "slusshie" of nerve gas remotely into the incinerator. We were supposed to get in Class A pressurized suits and drive about a mile out to the unit and test the exhaust. In the extensive safety training, they gave us an Atropine injection on a lanyard and said "When you think you've been exposed , take this Atropine injection and jam it into your thigh"....I said "What's this "when" Scheit"? They fired it up, and it belched out black smoke, and backfired a couple of times, and they wanted us to drive out there to grab air samples. My buddy and I looked at each other and said "eff you" and left.

+1

Actually our HUEY II"S will do closer to 120k.....but you'll shake your fillings out.

Well, during the Iranian hostage crisis near the end of the Jimmy Carter administration I was on a US Navy cruiser just off the coast of Iran, within sight of land (theirs) as an early warning ship in case they decided to start trying to close the straights or sink the carrier that was with us. We wore our gas masks and inflatable life jackets all the time we were awake and had several old M2s mounted on each side in case they sent out some Zodiacs! Glad when that was over......

Lol! Lemme guess...with the top off, right?

Hmmmm back in 92 I bought a Yamaha Fzr 1000 [10sec out of the box bike]and was doing about 130 and turned my head forcing the shield to raise up on my helmet and basically almost ripping me off the bike.

I guess I've been lucky. I don't have or at least can't remember any stories like some of you.

I've been in a car with a drunk buddy who was driving that I think came pretty close to killing us, but nothing happened. That would have been a lot more scary if i hadn't had a buzz on.

I went 150 in my old 911 targa. It got the adrenalin pumping, but wasn't scary.

I got robbed at gunpoint while working at an autoparts store, but that wasn't really that scary either.

I had to wear a Phosgene badge once (that was a little scary).

Totaled a car, slid off of the side of the road on 2 wheels sideways, and hit a tree with the top of the passenger's side A-pillar. It all happened too fast to be scary. No one was hurt.

Known a few crazy chicks.

Actually, I had what I think was Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo once. That was actually really scary because I never get dizzy. Got dizzy and sick once after building a model of a '65 Impala. Apparently the ventilation wasn't as good as I'd thought. That was a little scary.

i have lain next to a burning motorcycle trying to wiggle my toes.

i have faced down my neighbor's abusive methed up skinhead boyfriend.

still remember the strange dread at 17 when i first asked out a girl.

some great stories!!

i was maybe 18. my friend and i were driving in the mall parking lot when we see our good friends blue camaro drive by. my friend yells out.."hey effer!".

screech!! the car stops in front of me..and out steps a huge cholo dude. opps, similar car, much different owner. full prison tats..and he is pissed. i was in an early bronco. my friend says to back up..but i stood my ground. the guy starts yelling at me. i let him yell. my friend said we mistook him for someone else..he keeps yelling. i thought he was going to kill us. the entire time i was scared bad..but i had unhooked my fire extinguisher and was ready to blast him in the face. at the time, it felt like a GREAT plan. i figure, full facial of ABC powder, step out and clock him with it..

the guy calmed down and left. my buddy thought i was the coolest person ever. i almost peed.

:) Been there too.

As I'm leaving work my wife calls me: "Are you at the front door?"
Me: "No, I'm just leaving work."
Her: "Somebody's pounding on the front door, jiggling the handle. They went onto the porch and started pulling on the slider. I think they're trying to break in!"

I was about 7 miles away, during rush hour, on surface streets. I could picture my handgun upstairs, unloaded, and too big for her to operate. I got there fast.

And?

Desert Storm in '90 -'91.

Well, that call was pretty scary.

By the time I got there nobody was around. We figured it was a drunk at the wrong house or some punk kids.

Anti-climactic, I know. But that was a good thing. She has her own handgun now and they're always ready to go.

honest answer?

scariest? 4th grade. mandatory G D effen square dance class! (grew up in texas). we had to ask a girl to be our partner for the duration. mustering up the stones to ask diana ciceri to be my dance partner. i almost peed. she was the hottest girl..and i got her to be my partner by being first to ask.

she said yes, and we rocked that school gym with a doo cee do of epic style. man i was scared.

In '69 a buddy in the geology dept. asked me to go down to Punta Banda south of Ensenada to help him with a research project. He needed to gather some gas samples for analysis from the floor of a bay on the south side using Nanson bottles. The gas bubbled up through places in the sand from cracks down below at a depth of about 70 ft. I had an old regulator I'd used for years & always had it serviced at the beginning of the season. This was early & I hadn't had it serviced. We went out on a boat and over the side and started down. At about 10 feet, my regulator siezed up & wouldn't let any air through. I sucked hard & it released and the air came through. I should have stopped right then but I didn't. When we were down at about 70 ft. and had gathered a few samples my regulator siezed up again. I tried sucking hard but couldn't get any air out of it. I tapped my buddy and signaled I had lost my air & was going up & for him to follow. I tried to do a blow & go to the top going no faster than my his bubbles, but couldn't quite make it & had to buddy breathe the rest of the way. I'm really glad I didn't panic when that happened. I didn't get scared until later when I thought about how stupid I was & what could have happened.

LOL. Great stories.

Vash, as per usual, I hold you in the highest regard.

Dont know what Hueys (UHIH) you guys were on. We got 120 knots on a reg basis(Viet Nam) LOL
But for real 80 knots was SOP
Scared -
Green streaks coming at us !
More scared- Green streaks makeing noises as they pass through .............
Most scared -Hot LZ with **** going off every where !
Funny scared - finding extra a whole at post flight that you did not even seee or hear!

two things come to mind, both offshore sail boat racing.

30 miles off the coast of Maine, in June. early morning and a squall comes at us going 60+ knots. 30 ft Tartan, spinniker class. Captain, navigator, bowman (me) and main sail trim for crew. Got the fore sail down at the last minute but was late on the main. Wind took the stay bags out of the sail and had us heeled over 25 degrees. At that point I was on leeward winch and it was under a foot of water.

Capt had the devil in his eyes, that convinced me we were prolly gonna be ok. I did a mental check list and determined my family would be ok. Made peace with my Lord and was ready.

Worst part was we brought a newby guest along who panicked, freeked out like a school girl! Capt told me "put him below and close the hatch!". The terror in that man's eyes is something I will always remember. I did have to "put" him below. After it cleared we come upon a sister boat. J&J 40 as I recall. Mast was hanging over the starboard side, Capt was worried the spreaders would hole the hull and he was one agitated sob. All his electrics were out. We put him on a course for land. He was making 3 knots under diesel power. Took us 18 hours to sail our broken vessel back to Marble Head. Couldn't point the boat for crap as the Main was a shredded rag. Mr. Newby never uttered a single word the whole way back.

Second time we were way out, in the shipping lane. Becalmed, say 2 AM, and darker than a boogie man's ass.. Tug comes up on us, hooting, three triangle lights over the wheel house. Seemed weird that the Navigator didn't understand what the tug was making noise about. Spooked me, so I finally popped up, "hey check the manual for international signs, dammit!"

Tug was pulling a barge on a inch or more thick steel hawser. We managed to get between tug and barge, which was far enough off we could not see it. Tug Capt was trying hard to avoid the idiots in the rag boat.

That put me off my feed bag with these guys and I limited my racing with them to offshore, close in events after that. They would have never found any more than some junk floating on the surface...

Then there was the time I slid a 12 ton loader down a muddy slope......... but all that resulted in was a change of skids....

Explosions Rock Texas Chemical Plant, Killing 3 - NYTimes.com

Had this explosion happened 8 minutes later I would have been directly under the blast sight. The above article didn't state just how big the blast was. Explosion experts from all over the world were flown in to determine just how big it was. Final conclusion 25,000lbs of tnt. Pretty big. It rattled windows in a town 45 miles away. It blew hundreds of windows out of houses 6-8 miles away. Moved walls in houses etc. Most of the cars in the parking lot were crushed like tin cans. The debris that got so many cut up people was transite. All the pump houses were made of the half inch thick corrugated asbestos cement mix material. It shatters and sends heavy pieces flying everywhere.

I was in a control room that was 2 stories high. It was protected by the building right next to it which absorbed the brunt of the blast. A huge vapor cloud of mostly butane several hundred feet in diameter was lit off by reserve boilers which were being started that day due to maintenance issues with the main boilers. We actually thought it was one of those old boilers which had blown up. When the blast went off the walls caved in then were sucked out again when the actual area the blast happened in sucked all the air back into the void left by the explosion. Kind of a double whammy.

The main area that had the 2-300 foot flames was surrounded by huge fire monitor stations. Being a member of the emergency fire crew because it was a weekend we went to try to aim streams on the raging flames but had no firewater pressure. The system backed by 5 million gallons of storage water had its main header in a supposed explosion proof bldg directly under the blast which was destroyed. So the 150lbs of pressure we had at the monitors was gone. Like a little kid pissing on a burning house.

When I went to the area I would have been in 8 minutes later I found a guy that i could not recognize. His eye was blown out hanging on his face. His ear torn off, his leg twisted and bent at 90 degrees the wrong way. He was alive but barely. 10 feet away under debris was one of my co worker friends his head half taken off by flying debris. I was a lucky guy that day.

Winner!

Changing a flat tire around midnight in the Bronx.

When our son was 5 months old, he get a serious respiratory invection "RSV". Came on very fast and hard. The doctor gave him a 50/50 chance of living through the night.

Of all the things that have frightened me, the dodgy places and situations I've been in, none have terrified as did that night.

angela

Been thinking about this since yesterday morning. I've done so many stupid things that it's not funny. But scared is not how I felt. At least don't remember it that way. Been over in a racing kart a couple of times but when I realized nothing was hurt but the kart, I didn't feel scared.

However, I do remember doing a little cafe racing on a Gilera 125 I had in the late 60's. I used to like to head over to Palos Verdes peninsula (look it up on Google) and do some twisties after midnight. I was kind of a night owl then. Always alone.

I came around a left hand sweeper way too fast and drifted out to the armco barrier that separated me from the cliff and the ocean below. Believe me, some folks have died there, some just walking and slipping. I got into the marbles at the side and just as I was about to lay it down I hit a few of those big posts with the tires.

Somehow miraculously I didn't high side over the rail and I didn't lay all the way over. I just kinda bounced out onto better pavement and finished the turn.

I took the clip ons off that bike the next day and made it a dirt bike. Midnight racing alone is dumb enough and had I gone over the side, it might have been days before I was found down there on the rocks in the surf.

I rode back to Long Beach I'm sure white faced and shaking. I guess that's why when I flipped the kart in a race it was no big deal. No cliffs at the race track.

when my daughter was just 3-4, we were going somewhere and I needed to move a car out of the way first. I asked my girlfriend to watch my daughter as I backed out the car but she must have turned her head for a couple seconds because no sooner than I had moved a few feet I heard a tiny scream. looked over towards my girlfriend and my daughter was not there with her. slammed the car into park, jumped out and ran around back to see my precious baby trapped under the rear of my car. what to do? couldn't take the time to lift it up to get her out and if I drove forward it might rip her to shreds. luckily for both of us it was a corvette, had the slanted spare cover under the back and she was a tiny skinny little thing. the water meter cover was missing and by chance her little skinny legs had slipped down into the meter box just enough to keep them from getting crushed. had I been backing any faster or had not heard her screams, she would have been crushed and shredded under the low car. I drove forward, ran back, scooped her up and hauled ass to the hospital while my girlfriend, a nurse, checked her out. halfway to the ER my baby said she was okay, nothing was hurting her and since she didn't even have any scrapes or scratches we just went on to the movies. it was a heartstopper for sure. I couldn't not have lived with myself had she been seriously hurt or killed

Great perspective...it ain't always about us. Thank you. That is indeed the fear.

I remember the sonogram on my son...they thought he had spinal bifida.

The next, more detailed look was a week later. The cool thing is my wife and I weren't scared. We were resolute. Come what may this was our son and we'd move the hill to make it work.

Kids.

The scaredest I have ever been was on December 16, 2006, when my wife and I went to the hospital to have genetics counseling. She was in her mid thirties and pregnant with twins, we had found out the week before. She was sixteen weeks along. Her doctor gave us some pamphlets on the counseling and told us it was for downs syndrome and other genetic abnormalities. We had talked about it and did not want to take the risk with an amniocentesis procedure. Anyway on that day we went thinking we were ready, had done our homework. After an hour or so of ultra sounds they put us in a little room with no windows and three chairs, a young doc comes in and tries to explain TTTS and that we have 4 options. Do nothing, treat with amnio reduction, find more information on laser surgery, or terminate the pregnancy.
He gave us about 45 minutes to decide.

Played at being Casey Jones with a belly full of Tequila on H blvd in SB at 100 MPH in a 911...

Fell off a horse when he slipped to his knees and slid through a jump - I saw his knees sliding toward me as I rolled up out of a mud puddle. Thankfully he stopped and I kept going.

A few mo's ago around midnight on a Fri I had to take some guy who's previously untreated liver tumor ruptured and bled to the OR. There was a moment when the assistant was sucking out blood and I'm just compressing the tumor to slow the bleeding that I really thought I wouldn't be able to stop it and he'd bleed out right there with my hands in him. Not fun, but we finally got it controlled. That was a lonely few minutes.

I just sent my youngest son Ryan [2LT - Infantry] off to Afghanistan - to be a INF Rifle PLT LDR in Lowgar Province - RC east - it's his first unit assignment - he just graduated from Benning IBOLC and Airborne - as a father - I have some degree of be anxiety - He'll be OK - good head - common sense - good skills