re: What's the Scariest shite that has ever happened to you?

As a stupid tween, my brothers and I decided to go swimming a little further out at the lake by my parent’s house. We thought we’d all swim down and grab some dirt and swim back up.

It was much deeper than I thought and when I reached the bottom, it was all mud and my foot got stuck for just a second. There was no way to push off so I had to swim back up with no momentum.

I remember freaking out because it was taking much longer than I thought to reach the top. I recall blacking out the last few seconds before feeling the air rush back into my lungs. I was above the water line and breathing again. Not sure how I did it, but apparently I did (or something helped me to do it).

I still think about that feeling of impending death today.

I went in to China in 1989 to talk to officials at Beijing University about tools that were used for chip design. In their lab they had 30 sets of proprietary hardware and software that were banned from export to hostile countries like China. They call their system Dragon Master, but it was Chip Master from a company called Daisy.

I sat down at one of the systems and hit a few keys to make the software go to debug mode. I then moved around in the code to show them the names of the authors along with records of when and where the code had been written. They were shocked, and my team was immediately escorted into a small room and 2 armed guards with machine guns were placed at the door.

I assumed we were all about to get shot or best case go to jail. After about 4 hours this old guy in a Mao suit shows up and apologized for holding us while they did an investigation. He said some people at the university had been very bad, and he wanted to "make things right". He handed me a notarized check for $30,000 made out to me and wanted me to sign a sales agreement for the systems valued at more than $3M. I did it just to get out of there, and we caught the first plane we could get on from Beijing to Hong Kong.

When I got back to the US, I took the check to Daisy and told them the story. They didn't want the money because they didn't want to give the Chinese approval of how they handled it. They just told me to cash the check and use it or give it to charity.

China became part of my regular territory in 1993. In 4 years all of the old Mao guys had been replaced by younger men that wore western garb, and they were actually reasonable guys to work with.

Rock climbing in Pocket Wilderness in east Tennessee. I put my hand on the next ledge up and heard a loud and unmistakable SHKSHKSHKSHKSHKSHKSHK from a rattlesnake.

I got back down to the bottom VERY quickly.

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Caught in a riptide by myself when I was 11/12 in Gulf Shores

Luckily I knew to swim to the side and not try to fight it

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Had a similar situation happen to me when I was about 10 in Destin in the late 70’s but I didn’t know anything about undertows. I don’t think many people really did at that time.

I remember it vividly, I was in about chest deep water facing the beach and I’d dig my toes into the sand and the tide would just pull my feet out from underneath me. As it pulled me out to neck deep water, I’d try to swim back towards the shore but was making absolutely no progress, so eventually I would tread water to rest and it would just pull me further offshore. Thankfully my mother on the beach (who can’t swim) was watching me and I was waiving to her, only to have her wave back like, “Hey! I see you! Looks like fun!” I’m thinking, “No bitch, I’m not waiving at you, I’m about to drown!”

Thankfully after a couple more minutes of this, she thought I was getting too far from shore, so she sent my older sister to go get me with a raft thankfully, or we may have both drowned. My older sister reached me with little time to spare because I was fricking exhausted after swimming in that goddamn undertow for what seemed like at least a half hour. It was a close call.

Thank God my sister was on a raft because it took us a while to get back to the beach. I fricking cried when I got back to the beach because I realized how close I was to dying. My mother did also when she realized what had happened.

It would have absolutely destroyed my mother if I had drowned while she sat there on the beach waving at me. I doubt that she would have ever forgiven herself for it.

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Everclear

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Sounds very similar to my experience that i posted earlier. in the moment time seems to slow way down and you have no idea whats going to happen next.

These cellphones are dangerous and these young drivers dont understand unfortunately until its too late.

Glad you’re ok

Doing about 90 on a BSA Bonneville and went between the front of a pickup truck and a gas pump with about a yard to spare.

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An odd thought occurred to me. Had I not been able to stop, the talk around the company would be how I left Thomasville and simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Maybe my car would eventually be found somewhere downstream?

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Can you not read a freaking map? You go blindly down these roads that lead to a pig trail and don’t even think to fricking stop and get out a damn map? You just blindly follow your google maps? God damn! How old are you? I’m flabbergasted!

Do yourself a favor and get a map, keep it with you and learn to read it!

May have shared this at some point over the years.

One day when our middle son was 10, we took all three of the kids to the Optometrist for checkups. When it came his turn, his Mom went in with him and i stayed in the lobby with the other two. I noticed they were in the examination room much longer than the others when the door opened and my wife asked me to come in.

The Doc told my son to step outside and then he proceeded to tell me that our son had Toxoplasmosis in his left eye. He went on to add that his assistant was calling ahead to the Medical College of Georgia and that we would need to head that way immediately.

The Optometrist didn’t take time to explain what Toxoplasmosis was and rushed us out of the office and to the hospital. Of course my mind was racing and my wife was trying to look it up on line.

Once we arrived at MCG, there was a small group of folks waiting, and they immediately whisked our son away. My wife went with him, leaving me to pace up and down the hallway. After about an hour a Doctor came out and sat down to explain what was happening.

His first question was did we have any cats? Yes, we had an old barn cat that the kids loved playing with. The Doctor went onto explain how our son had more than likely picked up a parasite from the cat and rubbed his eye, causing the Toxoplasmosis.

What followed was 4 hours of blood work and examinations. We were told that his was one of the only cases they’d ever seen. The really scary part was waiting six weeks to see if the antibiotics had killed the parasite, preventing it from moving to either his other eye or into his brain.

In the end the antibiotics worked but not before he had become legally blind in that eye. Today he’s good to go but for those few weeks I was terrified he was going to wind up completely blind.

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a young male attempted suicide and flinched at the last second, blew the front portion of his face off;

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You work in a Lafayette ER by chance? Kid I grew up down the street from did this when we were in high school.