Scariest Moment In Your Life? (And if applicable, how did it resolve itself?)

In 2003, my mom had a stroke and was in the hospital.

I spent a night in her condo in order to get up the next day to transition her to an assisted living facility.

That night, abut 2 a.m., a storm producing a tornado came through and glanced past the condo site.

The noise of the storm woke me up and was as loud as any I'd ever heard, then it got LOUDER.

I had just shut the door of a room leading to the bathroom in the interior of the place when all the windows on one side of the house - on the other side of the door - blew in.

If there was a scarier moment - and I've been in a couple wrecks and had a gun pointed at me - I can't think of it right now.

 

How is a Camaro a fake muscle car? What is a fake muscle car? A Camaro is one of the only muscle cars they still even make (Mustang/Challenger).

 

I was driving from RI back to PA at about 10 a.m. so I could make my Friday night football game, in the high speed lane on 95 S in Conn. when the car on my right started veering over to get in my lane.
I drove a Hyundai Accent, so they didn't hear me beep and they never saw me; I was in their blind spot. I swerved a little to the left to avoid a collision and tried to slow down, but my tired hit loose turf and I lost control of the car and hit the left guardrail, bounced off it, went across two lanes, hit the right guardrail, went back across the other two lanes and slammed into the guardrail where my car stopped.
My car was totaled. I had no injuries. I was wearing a seat belt. I didn't hit my head on anything.
More of a miracle was I somehow avoided the traffic that wasn't that far behind me.
I remember going from the right guardrail to the left bracing to be hit by another car, thinking "this is it. I'm dead."
Somebody pulled over to see if I was OK. I said yeah. He said he was calling the cops and took off.
Twenty minutes later I was on the side of the road with a state trooper, waiting for my cousin to come pick me up when he told me they got the guy who cut me off. I think the guy who called took off in such a hurry to catch up to the other car.
So with no car and making 10 bucks an hour, I had no idea what I was going to do for a car.
I was telling my aunt - who was dying of esophagal cancer - about my experience. She looked at me and said "Well, your cousin needs a new car, so I guess we'll just speed up the process. You can have her old one."
So I got a new car.
One month later, my aunt passed.
I will never forget the experience, because it terrified me. To this day, I still get a little shaky when I'm in the left lane.
But what I will really remember was my aunt, facing death, opening her heart and to help her nephew out.

 

Went through open heart surgery to repair a valve last February. I've never been more terrified.

 

On a Saturday afternoon in January of 2001, I was off to Guymon, Okla. (which is scary enough in itself) to cover a high school basketball game. There was the possibility of a snowstorm, so the radio guy offered me to ride with him, but nothing was on the radar when we left. The trip took about 90 minutes, and around the 60-minute mark, the snow started falling hard and fast. The school's AD tried to call the radio guy's cell phone a few minutes before to let us know the game was cancelled, but he was on the phone with his wife at the time and hadn't set up his voicemail. Plus, back then, cell phone reception out there was spotty at best.

We get Guymon, and the snow was really falling at this point. Then we find out the game was cancelled. We probably should have found a hotel, but decided to drive back. Most of the way, we were going no more than 30 mph. About 30 miles from home, going no faster than 30 mpg, the car began to fishtail and then spin. Conditions were nearly white-out.

I remember the radio guy shouting something incoherent.

All I did was sit and close my eyes. For a couple seconds, I thought a semi was going to come barreling down the highway and kill us both, or the car would flip and we'd die in some field. Of course, by the time we reached our home city, the snow was hardly noticeable.

That was the only time I've feared my life was about to end.

 

Holy shit does the snow get bad in the panhandles. Some years ago my wife and I were planning to be at a surprise party in New Mexico for my grandparents' 50th anniversary. For some reason we decided to venture off the interstate and drive 54 from Wichita through Tucumcari and pick up I-40 there for the rest of the trip.
I had heard there could be a possibility of snow but was so wrapped up in work that I didn't know how bad it was expected to get. This was late March, and I thought surely it wouldn't be that bad.

Even so, we left 12 hours early hoping to not have to deal with it. We get through Liberal, Kan. and head to Guymon and it starts to rain. We get to Guymon and it's still raining and the temperature is still in the mid 40s so I'm thinking we'll be fine. Right outside Guymon the temperature starts dropping fast. About halfway to Texhoma it starts snowing. Within 5 minutes it's whiteout conditions with 40-50 mph sustained winds and snow. We nearly go off the road a couple times and semis are cruising by like there's no weather at all. I white knuckled in my little chevy malibu the final 10 miles to Texhoma and luckily the one hotel there has space and we stop for the night.

Turns out the highway was closed a few minutes after we stopped. Had we gone on, best case scenario we would have been stranded on 54 outside Dalhart and had to have been rescued. We were damn lucky we stopped. I almost tried to go through but my wife convinced me otherwise, she can be a pain while in the car in even the best conditions.

We were stuck in that hotel for two days because even though the snow stopped the next morning, the wind persisted at a steady 50 mph and the roads were a sheet of ice with blowing snow. The day of the anniversary we set out on the road, even though it's still ice and cold, because the wind had died down. We get to Stratford and the road is closed with a state trooper guarding it. After an hour waiting, the trooper leaves and we take that as an indication the road was open. We were wrong, but us and a few other vehicles go ahead anyway.

We get outside Delhart and there are dozens of vehicles stopped and abandoned, with drifts even covering semis. The road is impassible as they had just started digging out cars, so we had to follow a "path" on the side of the road made by an SUV in front of us. By the time we get two miles outside Dalhart, there is no snow on the ground and the sun is shining.

We were late but caught the end of the surprise party. I don't know if that instance was my scariest moment, but it sure wasn't fun.

 

August 10, 2010, I was on a crew pre-positioned at a FOB in Zhari District, Afghanistan, to provide MEDEVAC coverage to special operations units conducting a targeted strike just to our south in the Panjwai District, in Sangsar (Mullah Omar's home village). We got the call, which we expected, and as we flew toward the patient, I could hear gunfire over the radio -- like that radio scene in We Were Soldiers.

We took quite a bit of fire over the next few minutes. We wound up with a about 15 holes in the aircraft, including one in the windshield on the other side.

When we landed, the enemy began walking mortars closer and closer to the aircraft. A few seconds later, our medic yelled "RPG!!" and then I the largest explosion of my life. The rocket had detonated less than 10 meters from the aircraft and peppered the left side. We began prparing for departure and my commander asked me which direction we were taking out of the LZ.

He pointed to the north and I told him we were taking fire from that direction. He mentioned the south -- we were taking fire from there, too. All directions, in fact. I could see the muzzle flashes from the tree line.

Luckily, those fuckers can't shoot.

 

I have two occasions that scared the crap out of me and remain vivid in my mind and memory.

As with many others, one occurred while I was driving. It was the first substantial rainfall of the year, and I was en route to my brother's house to look after his kids for a day.

I must have hit an oil-slicked spot while entering the flow of traffic on the freeway from the onramp, because, all of a sudden, just as I was picking up speed, my car went into full-spin mode, and did two 360's across all four lanes of the highway before, miraculously, coming to a stop -- facing the right way again, in the left shoulder, six inches away from the concrete divider.

I immediately and profusely thanked God, believing and disbelieving the whole thing all at the same time, before I took a couple deep breaths, and then, well...just drove off again, entering traffic, this time, from the other side of the highway.

It was surreal while the car was going around. I still remember distinctly what it was like to be suddenly facing the oncoming traffic. I still don't know how I got out of that one -- going across all four lanes of one of the busiest highways in the country without hitting anything.

The other contender for the scariest moment of my life occurred at a little after 4 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994. At the time, I lived four miles from what was to be the epicenter of the 6.8-magnitude Northridge (CA) earthquake.

I was in a dead sleep before being awakened by what I still remember thinking, seriously, must have been a bomb dropping on my condo.

This was no little, rolling quake, for my bed would not stop bucking -- up, down, and up and down -- in the pitch-dark of the early morning hour. Though disoriented by sleep, the noise, and the situation, in general, I somehow kept my wits and must have figured out what was going on, because I got out of and off the bed, and ran straight for the front door -- yelling as I went, of course, for my house to "Stop it!...Stop it!"

It didn't, and the ground continued to heave.

In those unthinking but somehow remarkably clear-headed seconds, I didn't stop to try and turn on any lights, I didn't stop to grab anything. I just ran for the door, and still can remember thinking, when I got to it, that, "God, I hope I can get it unlocked and opened up."

I did, and I rode out the worst of the rest of the quake on my doorsill, watching and listening as my neighbors largely did the same.

Here's something just to give you an idea of how much that quake must have scared me, even though I dealt with it well at the time:

I kept a flashlight and pair of shoes sitting next to and just inside my front door for the next 14 years, until I moved out of that condo.

 

You win.

 

Yeah, t_b_f is pretty much guaranteed to win any similar threads.

 

He gets his own league by himself, so the rest of us can compete for another trophy.

 

Mine occurred right at this time of year, when I was a sophomore in high school. I was working for a guy who owned six Hickory Farms storefronts and operated several temporary mall kiosks. Very busy time of year, obviously. We worked in some mini-warehouses, manually packing the gift boxes.

This was a Friday night around 10 pm and we had a U-Haul backed up to our refrigerated trailer. We also had both our warehouse doors wide open and this was in a very secluded area, behind a shopping center. We were loading up to make runs to our stores first thing in the AM.

Someone must have called the polilce, because in the midst of moving boxes, we have the brightest lights shined on our faces and we are told to freeze and drop what's in our hands. The lights were so bright, we couldn't see them at all, and they were from all directions.

The next thing is what un-scared me ... one of the cops walked right past me and said, "Hello, John's boy" ... referring to my dad, who worked for the sheriff's department. That was the first moment when I knew that it was actually cops who had moved in on us in this secluded area without us noticing or hearing them.

The owner's son was in the trailer, and he came out and explained what was going on. We were able to finish without worry, but for a few minutes, I didn't know if we were being robbed or what.