The scariest moment of your life?

i realised that the world wasn’t full of nice people like my mum and dad :(

When I saw my 13 year old daughter lying in the road after she’d been run over by an SUV , the few seconds before I realized that she was alive were the longest six years of my life… She’s fine now, 21 yrs old, and still has her foot and a really cool scar…

Received a suicidal voicemail from a friend.

I was attacked by a rabid coyote.

…or when I was followed for 12 miles by a psychotic hillbilly from hell who lived in a burnt-out house with doll heads on spikes in his front yard.

my little sister had her first seizure – well not the first but the first detected one.

When my Grandfather died, I thought I’d just go to sleep and will myself to die too.

The night that we didn’t know where my son was and we couldn’t find him. It took us about a half hour or so of looking before we finally found him. He had been next door at a new neighbors house. We didn’t even know they had kids.

This one.

When I realized I wasn’t going to live forever…that moment has allowed me to embrace each and every moment of every day of the rest of my life. ;)

Three times that were equally bad.

1. The time between getting a phone call that my husband had been in a car accident and finding out he’d be OK. All the way to the ER, and then when I saw him covered in blood, I was in a panic. Besides the cuts, he had a broken vertebrae. Other than a couple of scars (the one under his hair is starting to become visible as he gets older haha!) he fully recovered.

2. “Losing” my daughter at the farmer’s market. I sent her off to buy eggs at the stand next to the one where we were waiting in line. Then, I couldn’t find her. A minute of fear and panic before I spotted her on the other side of the market. She’d seen eggs somewhere else and went to buy those.

3. “Losing” my son at a huge state fair. He was 5, and saw a little girl from preschool who wanted to marry him. He was hiding behind me while I said hi to her mom, and when I turned around he was gone. It took me several minutes to find him in a very big crowd. The way that feels is terrible. When I found him, he was standing not all that far from where we’d originally been, looking like he was about to burst into tears. When I asked him why he walked away, he said, “I had to get away from Lexi because I don’t want to marry her!” I didn’t know whether to beat him or hug him to death. As a compromise, we just immediately left the fair.

Mine: My Mom was in the hospital dying of cancer. She was so ill that she couldn’t move her legs. They were swollen. She couldn’t move her body without being turned, she had pneumonia, various infections in her body, she was skin and bones except for a tumor the size of a football that made her stomach feel like stone. Then there was the malignant Ascites. Malignant Ascites is an accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity.

Generally, patients suffering from malignant ascites have a poor prognosis implying a median survival time of 1–4 months, depending greatly on the underlying type of tumour and its stage.

Six litres of fluid where pressing on her lungs. She could barely breathe even though she was on full oxygen. We were waiting on one doctor to come and drain the fluid. We had to wait for 4 days. Four days of watching fight for breathe. The 3rd night, she took a turn for the worse and we thought that she wouldn’t make it through the night. There are four kids in my family and I am the youngest. We had to take turns and sit in with her (in her hospital room) through the night. When it was your turn, the others went to rest.

My turn: I walked in and saw her there all hooked up to the oxygen. The mask covering a good portion of her face. She hadn’t slept in days, as she was working like crazy to breathe. You could see the muscles in her chest working so that she could breathe. She was exhausted. I held her hand for awhile and I was scared. After awhile, I decided to let her rest and stood at the end of the bed. At one point, I caught myself rocking back and forth (from side to side), it was as though I was trying to comfort myself.

I try not to think about it. It was scariest time of my life.

Gettning shot at. I am a pretty confident guy, but it is still pretty scary.

When I moved to New Orleans just out of school, newly married, no job, no place to live. I’m sure there are other more physically scary things, but I must have blocked them out of my memory!

When I was 19 and working in a downtown Washington, DC, hotel. After the night shift, I went down into the underground parking garage to find two men rummaging through the car parked next to mine. They seemed startled and started talking to me. Since it was valet parking only and knew these guys didn’t work there, I did an about-face and calmly walked out of there giving some excuse about forgetting something. Once the police arrived and did a search, they escorted me to the car. Like several others, it had a hole punched in the driver’s door next to the lock

It was Spring 2004, I was at the L’ouvre alone in some historical section banging my head into the glass box because I was feeling suicidal waves of constant panic attacks (that I’ve never had before) a couple of days after I dropped Paxil cold turkey.

The scariest moment of my life was when I told my wife I was gay, not knowing if she’d kick me out and never let me see the kids again.

After much pain on all sides, things are good now. I get along better with my ex, and the kids love me.

Hard to say. There have been a few small moments, nothing too severe. One was that time I was in a car with my friend on the freeway and we almost slammed into the back of the truck in front of us (traffic had stopped abruptly and my friend was looking at a magazine).

Then there was that time just this year that I almost choked on food. Very freaky. It just happened for a second; felt like I couldn’t breathe. I have a small mouth and I think I literally bit off more than I could chew. I was so shocked by the feeling that I dropped the plate I was holding and it fell on the ground and shattered. I was still shaky and nervous up to 20 minutes after it actually happened.

Experiencing my lungs suddenly seizing up plusery (fluid on the lungs) and not being able to take a breath. And then waking up in an IC ward in an oxygen tent, looking up into the face of a very concerned looking Rabbi. Several medical situations since have scared me almost as much, but none of them more.

GA, @hawaii_jake, and kudos for your bravery.

Thanks, @Austinlad. It’s not as scary as some of the stories on here, but I was certainly shaking at the time.

being strangled by my drunk ex-boyfriend

Oh, my goodness.

When I found out my best friend killed himself.

Yeah, old news to some people on here now. But it’s not to me.

When I seen my cousin die right in front of me.

When I was 9 I was crossing the street, looked up and saw a car like 2 feet from me and got hit by a car.

Last November. My world died when Meg was killed. Going on living without her was the scariest thing. The easy thing would have been to die.

Kudos to everyone for answering. Not an easy question. The scariest for me was telling my dad that I didn’t want him anymore.

I had to watch someone I love walk away from my life. I have never felt so alone in my entire life. There have been other things in my life that I am sure many people would consider to be far worse but somehow the pain and fear was nothing compared to that one moment.

This might not be the scariest but it’s the most recent so it’s what sticks out at the moment.

This past January my dad almost lost two fingers and a thumb in an accident with the snow blower. He came running into the house and shouted for help. My mother didn’t hear him but I did so I went downstairs and found him with his bloody, mangled hand under the faucet in the sink. I woke my mother and she wrapped his hand in a towel and took him to the hospital. I was left standing there in the middle of the kitchen, looking around at all the blood that he’d left in the sink and all over the floor on his way to the sink. There was also a pretty thick trail of it from the driveway, across the lawn, and over the front porch. Judging by that, I was almost certain he was going to end up bleeding to death before they made it to the hospital.

When my son was one year old. He suffered what was later confirmed to be a febrile convulsion. An involuntary spasm/fit brought on by a high temperature or fever. At the time of course we knew nothing of this & well, let’s just say it was extremely distressing & thankfully has never been repeated.

My S/O had a bad mammogram and had to get a biopsy done and they scheduled it for two weeks later.. Turned out ok, but that’s the first time I experienced real fear. Mid fourties and I never experienced that icy feel in the stomach until that.