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  • Went to wake up my daughter like every morning, bed is empty, covers thrown to the side. Check around the house, nothing.

    Everybody else is asleep, house is silent. Check the back, the swings, the rear deck, nothing.

    Check bedroom again.

    She was rolled up tight in her blanket, against the wall, from head to toe, making it look like the bed was empty.

    Weak Knees Moment

    • I remember doing similar as a kid on the regular, I'd wake up to the sound of my mom calling my name because she had go l checked on me in the middle of the night, only instead of in my own bed I'd be under my sister's bed, behind the couch, on another sister's dresser, etc. I had a lot of sleep issues as a kid.

  • When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you're aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn't zero. If you're doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn't just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.

    So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw...nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I'm still hopped up on pain killers, but I'm quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.

    Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn't somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.

    Ultimately, I didn't have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.

  • Waking up to Trump's day-one anti trans EO calling me an "anti American Ideology" and waging war on trans people. My partner and I made the decision then and there to escape.

    Close second is choking on a piece of baked potato while home alone as a kid

    Not affecting me, came back from a trip to find my friend nearly comatose on my couch. She had been watching the apartment. Her blood sugar was over 1000.

  • 8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.

    The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.

    The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.

    The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you're supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.

    Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.

    We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.

    But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.

  • When I was younger, maybe 8-10, I was at the beach with my family. I had always been a strong swimmer, we went to this beach fairly often, there were plenty of people around, and always had lifeguards on duty. It wasn't stormy or bad weather at all.

    I was swimming on my own when I got stuck in the undertow of the waves. I remember getting pulled back about 6 feet underwater before I was able to surface again. By that point, I was hit by the next wave, knocking me over and back into the undertow. This repeated for what felt like an hour but was probably only around 5 minutes, maybe 10. I was anxiously looking for lifeguards and trying to signal for help anytime I was on the surface, but no one ever noticed me.

    My grandmother had taught me what to do if I ever got stuck in the waves, though, and instead of trying to fight the current I just started riding it and swimming parallel to the shore. I eventually got back to the beach and walked back to my family, and I remember it being so much longer to get back that seemed reasonable.

    I was sure I was going to drown, getting sucked out and down under the ocean.

  • Either when my first baby fell out of bed followed by a big clonk, or when I tried to get someone out of a car in flames.

    My eldest is fine, that guy didn't make it and I will never forget the smell.

    • What's a clonk?

      Also, kudos for at least trying to get the person out. Shame it ended the way it did, but you at least did what you could.

      • The sound of a baby or toddler's head against a wooden surface that would make me shudder.

        Honestly, I didn't know what to do. We saw this car with big puffs of thick dark smoke coming out of it by the road, we stopped and I went for the extinguisher in my trunk, tried to operate it (I was clueless). But when I reached the other car, in seconds just burst into flames on the inside and saw the driver burning so I went to open the handle and it was like trying to lift a frying pan out of an open fire (got a nasty burn for a while).

        I felt powerless, useless, I could see the scene by just closing my eyes for months, remembering the sound of it and definitely the worst part was the smell. I often wonder what I should have done differently that could have helped that person (breaking the glass with the extinguisher, carrying and using a window breaking tool, forgetting about the extinguisher at all and just bolting straight to the car to take him out of it..)

        The scenario will repeat at nauseam in my head every time I drive and see a stopped car or look at an extinguisher or someone mentions a fire or an accident.

        Note: this happened a long ago with an old car, maybe cars nowadays aren't as flammable.

  • Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.

    I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it's from my oldest cousin. "Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU." That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that's eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her "What do you want for dinner, babe?" And she said "Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!" and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.

    The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.

    Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot's licenses in the US don't expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern...it was windier than I'd ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I'd never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking "I'm going to die tonight. I've always wondered how, now I know." I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself "Uh oh, someone's getting a ticket down there." And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.

  • What's weird is how everyone reacts differently. Someone talked about spinning out in a car; once, my girlfriend was driving, in the winter, and we tried to pass someone on the freeway, going near freeway speeds. The roads were icy, and we spun around multiple times, and ended up coming to a stop on the other side of the freeway facing oncoming traffic. Throughout the entire episode, I remember only thinking, "Ok, this is happening." I wasn't afraid, my heart rate was normal, I was completely calm. I think I may have put my hand on the dashboard, as if that'd do anything. I think, for me, it was the utter inability to do anything about the situation that made me calm. I've lost control on ice while I've been driving, and that's nerve-wracking. But that one time was the worst, and yet I had no fear. It's really strange, isn't it?

    So, my answer is being up on the town hall tower in Rothenburg, Germany.

    I know I'm acrophobic, but not pathologically, but I figured I'd be a little scared and that would be it, and I wanted to do it. So we climb about 800 floors of stairs and crawl through this little submarine-like hatch onto a mayor walkway around the tower literally wide enough for one person, as long as they're not too fat. The railing is a metal bar about waist-high, and I am not joking, you didn't have enough room to turn around. So you shuffle around the entire spire - there's just a column behind you - until you make the circuit and can climb back in the man-hole. It was not great; I was already anxious, except that after I got out, people just kept coming out of the hole. It was literally impossible to go back - you had to make the circuit, and there were people on both sides of you. You shuffled as fast as everyone else was, which was slow, because you'd stop when someone would finish and climb back in the hole.

    I was about three people out of the hole, and thinking about the warning sign about the walkway being rated for only 4 people at a time, and how by my count there were at least a dozen, and I panicked. It was one of two or three times in my life when I felt like my brain had run off and was doing its own thing, and I had no control. I didn't make a scene, but internally, I was completely terrified, and probably wouldn't have been able to move if I hadn't been part of a press of people on both sides inexorably shifting around the walkway. I don't think that utter loss of any rational control can be adequately described unless you've experienced it.

    The view was, apparently, beautiful, but I have no memory of it; all I remember is that it took 6 hours and all I could think of the entire time was getting back inside.

    • I can relate with your story as a fellow acrophobic (relatively mild...), and it reminded me of a similar but very different situation I lived.

      I was on a holiday with friends, we were planning to do some canyoning. I scouted the path beforehand just not to get stuck, and everywhere I read that there are always alternative paths to jumps. The day before we make a hike, 700m of climb over 5km, steep as hell and in the evening my legs were butter (not sure if the same is for you, but the more I don't feel my body in control, the more fear takes over).

      Next day, we go canyoning and I could legit barely walk. I start the course already thirsty, and after almost 1h we were barely halfway. Having to climb and jump (small stuff) made me sweaty AF, I was completely dehidrated. At some point we reach a place and I clearly realize there is no way back. I am the last one of the group, tired and thirsty as fuck, we are all tied on a rope, and we are on top of a big boulder. There are 2 ways down: jump 10m or go down with the rope.

      I have spent close to 10min on top talking to the guide, asking completely moronic questions, and I have 8 of them on video because my friend was just before me and filmed.

      I ended up jumping, I figured that with the energy I had left, I would rather do something that takes 2s rather that rope myself down. I probably managed to do that just because I was that dehydrated and almost in a delirious state. I remember looking down the water and just the memory makes me dizzy. But the feeling of not having an option B (or C) is what really gets you, this is why I could relate with your story even though this is a completely different situation.

      Fun fact, I ended up being the only one in my group to jump 10 meters, and now the memory is a mixed bag of emotions, but I will always have brag rights with my friends.

      Edit: I added a picture of the jump as seen from top. It's a screenshot from the infamous video.

      The view from below maybe is more realistic...

  • A sudden, relatively small ice patch on a curvy mountain road with no road barrier and a car coming towards me. I swirled towards abyss, then a rock wall, then back to the abyss, and the other car somehow passed me too. Thankfully neither me nor the others were hurt.

  • Very currently scariest, the night before yesterday a neighbour almost got killed by her son. She's in her 50s and he's in his 30s, I woke up to half the apartment building being closed off and police everywhere. He had called SOS himself and told them he killed his mom, and they found him outside the building at 3am, he was covered in blood and barely there mentally. The entryway still had blood on the floor and the door to the apartment building is broken to shit. It's still so recent that we haven't heard anything more, she's in hospital in critical but apparently stable condition.

  • Fell on the road with a car going straight at me, I slipped in panic when I tried to get up, I don't know if I was actually in danger but it was close

  • Almost spun out because I hit a pothole, luckily the oncoming lane was empty and I managed to recover though

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