My cousin trapped under the ice I was standing on.

He survived, but imagine looking down at your feet and seeing through the ice the face of your cousin screaming silently.

He's absolutely fine now (You'd be amazed how easy it is to break ice with your fist when the adrenaline kicks in) but the image will always haunt me.

There was this one time my Junior year in high school. I was going to a forensics meet, which mean that I had to leave my house around 5 AM. I had to carry all my stuff out to my car, which is parked at the end of our long driveway. As I was loading everything in the backseat, I heard a twig snap behind me. I spun around, and standing directly under the glare of a streetlight was a man. It was dark, and the light silhouetted him. All I could make out was a long coat, long crazed hair, and a large bag. He began to walk towards me. I dropped my things and bolted for my house. My mom was still in the kitchen and asked me what was wrong, and I told her that there was a guy out there. She peeks out the window and says, "Jesus Christ, Emily. It's the newspaper guy.".

An absolutely enormous elephant seal popped up about three meters in front of me, looked at me, let out a huge grunt growl and swam under me. My whole body just left me and I felt real true terror. I was alone in the ocean on dusk. I have seen some stuff but that, that was the scariest monster bus sized mother of fright to this day.

Once I had to get up really early in the morning to go on a trip for my job. It was about 3:30 in the morning and I had forgotten to go and get gas for my car the night before. I stopped at a gas station about a mile away from my house because it was well-lit and it was in a nicer area.

Anyways, I was pumping gas and then I got the weirdest feeling that I needed to move. I moved behind my car and then away from it and then I noticed this huge guy hiding in front of my car. He was sneaking towards me when I got the urge to get away from my car.

I was completely alone and I'm just a small girl. I almost always have mace or something with me if I am by myself. This time I had a knife and pulled it out and started screaming for him to get the hell away from me. Then he started moving closer around my car to me. I screamed even louder and an attendant came out who called the cops.

Definitely one of the scariest moments of my life.

I was once jumping some cliffs into a river with friends. A random girl comes up to join in. Not to say that we were "experienced cliff jumpers" because that doesn't exist, but we did it at the same place a lot, and sort of knew what could be done and what couldn't. It was definitely a sketchy jump. There was no run in, and you had a fairly narrow window to jump into. Anyways, we were fine, having fun, and this girl goes. She does it right, just jumps in, and thats that. Then she comes back up all excited. She says, "I'm going to try to run into it." She back ups and before we can say anything just takes off. As predicted, the run in which was rocky and had tree roots, and required a step down of about a foot and a half, proved impossible. She caught her foot and tumbled right over the edge. Straight down about 20 ft onto rock. Thank Christ her top half landed in the water, but her legs were completely mangled. My friend and I jumped in and puller her out, sister called the paramedics. They came sauntering out all calm and cool, and when they saw the the girl their faces went white, and immediately called back up. Not long after that an emergency helicopter arrived. The scariest moment was looking over the edge that initial time not knowing what was going to be laying 20 ft below.

TL;DR girl falls off cliff while trying to jump into river.

I went snorkeling one time and I was all by myself far from the boat when all of a sudden I caught a fast moving dark object in the corner of my eye. I look over to see a shark. I begin to back away slowly when I see two other sharks swimming right behind the first one. I looked for the boat and saw it was too far too swim to without the sharks catching me. The three sharks started to circle me and occasionally brushing into me. Then the weirdest thing happened all three of them just swam away. Never been more freaked out.

Mine is really specific. When I was 16, I got delayed for a flight. A man (a local teacher) was chatting me up. Again I was 16 and thought it was friendly.

When he got up to get a drink for himself, this black woman who had been knitting quietly across from me moved and sat next to me. She did not leave my side. When he came back with TWO drinks, and asked for his seat back, she looked him in the eye and said “for today, this is MY child”.

I don’t know her name but I’m grateful for her.

Called out for weakness and wife tells us that he had been crawling around for a day or two (older couple where the husband has the final say dynamic.) Wife is telling me about a spot in 2002 while my partner was assessing the husband, and I was trying to redirect the conversation to events happening now. Walk into the bathroom where he’s sitting on the toilet, and turns to look at me and that spot from 2002 was now necrotizing half his head. Corner of the eye to the back of his head was untreated skin cancer. Ear was gone, which ironically his only complaint was that ear itched. They had been covering it up with a beanie style hat when he would go out and he just refused to go to the doctor for the whole 50+ years they had known each other.

A patient had such severe gangrenous necrosis in both legs below the knee. She had been crawling around her apartment. The smell permeated the whole unit. I had a nursing student with me to change the dressings. Doused a mask with peppermint oil and put another mask over the top. I was legit afraid that her leg would just come off in my hands while changing the dressing. She was so afraid of surgery that it still took several days to convince her it was necessary.

A majority of my medical career was spent working in plastic surgery at a level 1 trauma center. Ive seen lots of cases so heres my maggot story: We had a homeless patient that came to the ED for chest pain and had literally 10 layers of socks on. When the socks were removed all of his metatarsal bones were fully exposed, no flesh. He didnt even realize his foot was basically all bones because he had went years without taking off his socks. It probably started as a diabetic ulcer but the maggots did their job plus some.