Hey Pandas, What Is A Terrifying Experience You’ve Encountered Firsthand? (Closed)

I saw a girl get hit by a car when i was ten. She was fine, just very shaken up but i wouldnt stop crying as i was a bit of a crybaby at the time

A tie between seeing a tornado that was less than a kilometer away, and almost being run over by a big snow vehicle (Sno Cat?) on the side of a ski slope when I was 10 or 11

The helplessness I felt watching my fiancé die.
He had survived being in a war as a ranger and paratrooper and being a sergeant for the sheriff's office for 20 years.
6 in the morning, I get woken up by a thud. Open my eyes and he was kneeling on the side of the bed. I called 911. He had stood up while I was talking to the operator but looked at me and said "(my name), I can't breathe ". I said it's ok pumpkin, I got you, I promise, and he lost consciousness. I dropped the phone to catch him and we both went down. Now I'm just screaming the address o er and over cause I didn't know where the phone went and I was doing cpr.
At the hospital they had to shock him 3 times, and watching that was terrifying. Then, each second he didn't wake up for the next 8 days was worse than the one before it.
They finally made me leave the hospital midnight, on the 8th day because he was an organ donor and the patients had all been prepped and were waiting and as I walked out the front doors, there was the organ donor van RIGHT THERE, and a helicopter took off. At that moment I realized he was laying in the hospital morgue with his body ripped open and emptied out.
I used to have nightmares that I couldn't find him or that he died and he'd wake me up every time saying g, it's ok princess, I got you-- in still waiting for him to wake me up. He's taking too long this time....

Watched my youngest son die and be brought back multiple times when he was an infant. His first year was the most terrifying year of my life. He is almost 16 now and doing great.

Seeing a very large LeMans heading directly at me, knowing there was no place to go. Head-on collision. Severe injuries, but no deaths.

Locked in a room while hundreds of buzzing stink bugs fall on my head at seven years old.

When my dad had to get his appendix removed literally the day I had to go under anesthesia to get three baby teeth removed. So basically, I wake up early in the morning to get ready. I open my door to see my cat there sitting me silently. I thought that this was odd because he usually starts meowing like crazy whenever he is at any bedroom door. I follow him downstairs to find my dad on the couch in extreme pain. I remember bawling in the car while my mom was rushing him to a sister hospital near the one that my surgery was supposed to be. Yeah, that was not a fun day. My dad is fine now.

Hi, my name is Kathy, I am a severe, chronic Asthmatic and I have ended up in Intensive Care, asphyxiated and/or 'Dead On Arrival', more times than I care to remember! On one memorable occasion, a fractured rib punctured my left lung during rescusitation attempts, causing the lung to completely collapse and very nearly killing me. Twice I was actually declared dead and student doctors were allowed to "practice" rescusitation on me (successfully, as it turned out!) after the more experienced ER doctors had given up on me!

Then there was the time that I finally got into a regular ward after 4 days in ICU, and they tried to give me Penicillin, to which I am so violently allergic it that it can kill me! So I'm explaining this to the staff, and they tell me I must be mistaken because penicillin had been administered to me in the ICU for 4 days already. Naturally, I was horrified and I demanded that someone go and check my ICU charts and see how it was that I had survived 4 days of something that should have killed me. Finally, one young doctor agreed to go just to get me to shut up, and came back looking distinctly unnerved... He then related to the rest of the staff that I had indeed been administered penicillin in the ICU, every 4 hours - and every 4 hours I had immediately suffered sudden cardiac arrest, been rescusitated, and then the process was repeated... again... and again... and again... And that wasn't even the most disturbing thing about the whole experience: we had a repeat performance 5 months later, down to the very last detail. Turns out that, in those days, they didn't check for previous hospital records when you were checked into the ICU, they just winged it and hoped for the best!

But one time stands out as even more terrifying, in fact I still have nightmares about it, even though it happened nearly forty years ago... I had ended up in hospital again after a serious bout of pneumonia and was back in my old nemesis, the Intensive Care ward. Due to my very serious condition, I was on a ventilator and had been sedated. I woke up to find myself paralyzed due to the sedatives, but also totally blind and partially deaf. Based on previous experiences, I was able to identify what had happened and where I now found myself. I was comforting myself with the thought that at least this time round I had retained some hearing, when something occurred to make me realize that being able to hear what's going on around you may not always be such a good thing... Very faintly, as if from really far away, I could just about hear a conversation going on between several people. I sensed that, although they sounded quite far away, they were actually very close by. From the little I could hear, it became apparent that they were ICU doctors discussing one of their patients. Only when I heard my name mentioned did I realize that they were talking about me, and what they were discussing suddenly became very up-close and personal, and frankly absolutely terrifying. They were discussing taking me off the ventilator, disconnecting me from the one thing that was keeping me breathing, keeping me alive! In fact, there was quite a spirited debate going on as to whether I wasn't in fact already brain dead and if there was any point in keeping me 'alive' at all - especially as they might need the ventilator for someone who actually had a chance of survival... So I'm lying there attached to these beeping machines, tubes coming out of me everywhere, unable to breathe, unable to move, unable to cry out at all, desperately, silently screaming "Please, please don't disconnect me!" And among the deeper voices, there was one a bit higher and softer, and finally that voice appeared to close down the discussion and I felt them moving away from me. I lay there for hours trying to get my body to move, my lungs to shout out - and nothing happens. And then the voices are there again, the same discussion, the same deep voices explaining why I should be disconnect.
And then the voices are there again, the same discussion, the same deep voices explaining why I should be disconnected, the same softer voice closing down the debate, and me silently screaming... This went on and on for what seemed like forever, but what I afterwards found out was nearly 5 days, until, exerting the kind of strength usually needed to move a 10-ton lorry, I somehow managed to slightly wiggle my little finger when a doctor was examining me, saving myself from being 'disconnected'... After I finally managed to fully wake up from the sedation, I met - and tearfully thanked over and over again! - the woman intern who had kept me 'connected' and alive, against the advice of all the much more senior male doctors, who had all insisted that I wouldn't, couldn't, possibly survive...

Had a family trip to a theme park. End of the day, we are all exhausted. Then as im being dropped of with my two daughters. As we are opening the sliding door of the minivan, we are being shot at rapidly. The targets for this drive by were in the parking lot. We just happen to pull up at the exact time they decided to attack. No one was hurt. But it terrified all of us to out very core.

The Loma Prieta earthquake: October 17, 1989, 5:04PM.

I was tubing down the Provo River a few years ago. I was in an inflatable raft with my cousins (which, looking back, those inflatable ones are not good for river rafting), and ours popped. They both got into different rafts, but I couldn’t. So I grabbed onto one, but couldn’t get in, so I was dragged behind the raft for a solid twenty minutes. I kept hitting rocks, nearly hit my head several times, and almost drowned. I was able to get out eventually, but it was so scary, and now I really hate rivers :)

Kayaking on the Rappahanock with my family. There was a rock. According to my dad we were supposed to go over the rock. I hit the rock wrong (which was very easy to do), flipped, and my legs got stuck. It takes a while to get your legs unstuck if you're also panicking and trying to get your heead above water. I refuse to go on even small rapids now.

Once I got chased by a cow-sized dog. Ended up falling on concrete and bruising my knees and elbows. The funny part is, right after that, my bloody self had to go in for the first day of internship at this fancy company.

Renal Colic.
There is just pain in your head. -It will not stop until they give you opiates.
Worst experince ever.

robbed at knife point in my own home. i still dont lock my doors but theres an axe beside my couch and a steel pole beside my bed. I have no fear of it happening again

My ex-husband would have SEVERE night terrors since coming back from Iraq. 3-4 nights a week he would “wake up” (similar state as a sleep walker) and think I was trying to attack him, proceeded to try and “fight me”. Regardless he insisted on sleeping with a loaded gun next to him on his nightstand.
Absolutely refused to get himself help.
Longest years of my life,still have sleep issues.

A few weeks ago a guy tried too break into my house. I was sleeping in my bed when I heard a pounding on one of the glass doors at the back of my house. My parents called the police and we all rushed out to the car.
After the police took him away I overheard that he was down at a restaurant earlier that night and he had held two people at knife point.

Seeing my small dog being run over by a car and dying.

A couple decades ago, I worked in a movie theater in our district office as an office assistant. I used to be a floor employee but got promoted. Every now and then, when they needed help, they would call and ask if I could come down and help them out. No biggie.
One day I'm at my desk and our GM calls me asking if I could meet him in one of the theaters. I'm like "uhh, sure. be right there" Didn't think anything of it.
Long story short, there was this guest in the seat. Approx. 275-300lbs. Slumped over, non-responsive. 911 had already been called. The GM wanted me to help get him from the seat to the aisle to do CPR. Luckily, this guy was in an aisle seat. Mind you, I'm 5'5" and at the time roughly 150lbs. My GM is shorter than me. But we were both in good shape.
Get the guy on the ground and I begin chest compressions. Every time I pushed down, there was gurgling coming from his throat. EMTs arrived shortly after and took over. Found out dude was DOA. (Which the 2 of us pretty much figured)
I went back to the office and the ladies I worked with noticed I wasn't....right. I told them what had happened. They kindly asked if I wanted to leave for the day. I didn't. What was I going to do at home? But needless to say, I was a bit shook for most the day.

I almost drowned once. It was at a big lake, I was sitting in one of those donut floats near the middle of the lake, and I apparently shifted the wrong way and fell through the middle. Note I was somewhere around nine at the time, so falling through was very easy. I couldn’t swim, so when I went underwater I was terrified. I was trying to get to the surface and failing, looking up as I fought to get air. Then someone grabbed me and carried me to my parents. I sat there coughing for a few minutes and didn’t go anywhere further than where my feet were still planted on the ground. My parents never noticed it happen. I don’t know why, but the most vivid part of that memory is the view as I was looking up at the surface. It was one of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen. The greenish water with sunlight shining through it, ripples clearly visible, refracting the light in different ways.
I’m almost fifteen now, and that image is still extremely clear. I still can’t swim, I’ve never put any effort into trying to learn, though. It was terrifying but pretty at the same time, and I hope it never happens again.