Ask Lemmy

I grew up in St Catharines Ontario, home of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo the serial killing couple who abducted, raped and killed teenaged girls, including her 12 year old sister, for a while in the 90s. It was EVERYTHING in my world for a long while. I was extraordinarily fanatically careful about where I went from then on, never travelling anywhere alone, etc. Bernardo also raped a great many women at bus stops before escalating to murder.

And one night I hit my twenties and said fuck it and decided to walk home from the bar we were doing karaoke at, and isn't there a man with a car idling at the top of the small hill I was climbing waiting for me for what seemed like hours. It was plain he intended to take me, and I think it was only the stark terror on my face that made it clear I'd be a very unwilling victim and fight back and that I was sober as a judge. He told me he was just going to offer me a ride, and I said no, saucer eyed, and he paused for a minute and then said "sorry, I didn't mean to scare you" and drove off.

As a baby, my son went through a period of febrile seizures. Basically, if he got a fever, it could cause him to have seizures. Even after learning what was happening and that it was "harmless," it was an absolutely chilling/gut-wrenching experience, but the first time was particularly nightmarish.

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.

On a trip to Iceland, was hiking with my mom. I see a spot I want a photo in so I hand her my phone and trek out there. It was a small outcropping at the same height of the trail, overlooking some gulleys. Others had been out there because there was a worn path.

I'm standing out there for my photo, and some wind blows through. It picked me up off my feet. Like, I was weightless and severed from the ground for a few seconds.

I knew in that moment I was going to die. The wind would carry me over the edge and down to the gully below. Luckily, it didn't last long enough to do that, and dropped me back on my feet, but I was so close to death, I could feel it.

People, the Icelandic wind is no joke. There was no uptick to warn me, no dirt or grass or whatever whipping around. It wasn't A windy day. It was just no wind, then sudden wind strong enough able to pick up a 190lb woman clear off the earth.

I kept to the main trail after that.

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.

Unironically, I cannot remember.

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.

That time I ate way too much cubensis and was molecularly taken apart and put together again by the void, that was fun.

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

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.

My first deployment in a fast-attack submarine, in the fall of 1991. We were working under British operational control, and they ordered us to cruise surfaced, in the North Sea. I was standing watch as a lookout, with another lookout and the Officer of the Deck (OOD), in the sail superstructure of the boat. We were wearing body harnesses and lanyards, clipped into the superstructure - normal procedure.

I was a sailor aboard USS SUNFISH (SSN549), a Sturgeon Class boat, where the sail superstructure was 25 feet tall. We were in 48 foot seas.

The 3 of us on watch that night were washed overboard more than 10 times each. Often all 3 of us at the same time... flung overboard, hanging by our lanyards, trying to roll around and grab onto the ladder rungs, or one another, to get back into the bridge pooka. None of us broke any bones or lost any teeth, but we were pretty battered and bruised by the end of it.

That was the first time I got to see the entire boat out of the water... at the top of the wave, I could see the stem planes, stabilizers, the end of the towed-array housing, and the propeller. At the bottom of each trough, we'd see just a tiny hole of sky, through the water, as it all crashed down upon us, and we all hold on, trying to stay inside the superstructure.

We pulled into the Navy Base at Rosyth Scotland the next afternoon. The windshield, booked in for surface operations, was completely missing, as well a the port running light. We sustained damage to our observation periscope and main communications antenna as well.

The experience was both scary and exhilarating.

During Helene, I had a tree fall through my house while I was in bed, and it stopped about 6 inches from my face

The cops had a shoot out with my neighbor in the apartment next to mine. I wasn't positive it was gunfire, and I walked into my living room to get a better assessment. I was about a foot away from whizzing bullets, but I still wasn't 100% sure lol. I decided to not risk it and take cover on the floor of my bathroom, until about 20 minutes later when the cops busted my door down and kicked me out of my apartment for 2 days. When I came back, I had 17 bullet holes in my wall (all from the cops) and my fridge and cabinets were all shot to hell. I definitely almost died that day

My six-year-old and my eight-year-old started fighting and chasing each other around on a skinny trail at the top of the Grand Canyon with very long drop-offs and no fences to either side.

They didn’t die, then, but each time I remember it again they are at risk of being murdered

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

Two days after breaking up, I found out that my ex had lied to me about everything about himself, and had gotten out of prison for beating his mother to death shortly before we met. I met him because he had been a canvasser with a friend of mine (also concerning, tbh), and he just fit right into her friend group, and nobody had any information about his life before that. Once we started comparing stories after we found out, it all clicked into place.

Even worse, he killed his mom after she tried to give him some tough love (it sounded like normal, healthy parenting from the reports) about drinking too much and I broke up with him for the same reason. I was certain he was going to kill me for a while there, but that’s no longer a worry because I live in another country and he can’t get a passport.

When a car ran over the person who walked right next to me.

For about three weeks I was having bad thoughts going round and round in my head all day long, and I was barely able to do my work.

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.

Paragliding, I was literally on the last step from the clif, the next step would be off the cliff. Right as I took that last solid step, I got a collapse (meaning my wing folded, this basically turns it from a parachute to a shopping bag in the sense of keeping you from falling to the ground)

Luckly I noticed, took a few steps back and started going "what the fuck was that???" Sat down for 15 minutes while figuring out what I did wrong. After the 15 minutes I took off again, this time safely.

I'm pretty good at handling scary and dangerous situations so even though I was a literal step away from probably death, definitely life long disability, I can't really say that I was extremely scared.

Ballistic missile hit less than 50 meters from me.

Sudden low blood pressure after seeing my own blood. I went temporarily blind and my hearing was weird for a bit. Thankfully, my father rescued me.

The reason I didn't faint was because, when I felt my blood pressure dropping, I immediately kneeled to avoid further injury.

That was most certainly the scariest thing I've experienced. Somehow, it was scarier than actually fainting.

The time I was charged by a grizzly bear in western Alberta

Heartbeat stopping in the night. Luckily, the heart has mechanisms to restart itself, and the last one finally kicked in. According to the doc, this only took five to ten seconds, but it felt longer than the complete last class on a Friday afternoon.

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.

Hydroplaning on a motorcycle