Secret Subject Swap - Scariest Thing

 

Welcome to December's Secret Subject Swap. 

Again 6 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts.  

Sit back, grab a cup and check them all out:

Baking In A Tornado
Wandering Web Designer
A 'lil HooHaa

Climaxed
Part-Time Working Hockey Mom

The Crazy Mama Llama 



My subject is

What is the scariest thing that ever happened to you?

It was submitted by: Wandering Web Designer - thank you, Rena!

Imagine it's Friday, and you haven't even started writing the post that is due like right now... scary, huh?

Good thing it's "only" Thursday night, but still. I've been procrastinating this topic, because I'm not sure what to do about it. Here are my options:

• My own birth - I'm pretty sure it was a scary experience. I was told I was crying, so I didn't think this was like fun. just don't remember the details?
• At age five I needed hip surgery. My mom - being the Kindergarten teacher and supermom that she is - tried to prepare me as best as she could. She read a story to me over and over about a little girl that needed to go to the hospital to have her appendix taken out. The misleading part of this story was that this girl, Elizabeth was her name, got to go home after only a few days. I had to stay there for freaking ten weeks, and it was lonely and scary, the nurses and doctors kept prodding and poking me, and the days were endlessly long, especially when there were no visitors. At some point I got a new roommate, Stephanie, she was seven and had back surgery. She attended hospital school and told me all about it every day. 
• When I was about nine years old, my Dad had some kind of colic during dinner and needed to go to the ER. Back then my Mom didn't have her driver's license yet, so my uncle had to drive them. Us kids stayed home alone, and this was scary. I thought what if he won't come home again? I hadn't always been at me best behavior, and I felt bad about it.
• In my early twenties a stranger tried to grab me in broad daylight on a busy street. My intuitive reaction both scared and reassured me. I slapped him and yelled at him "don't ever do this to me or any other girl, you understand?" What (in hindsight) scared me about it was that if he was another (armed) guy on another day, in a dark alley he would only be more aggravated by my assertion. The reassuring (and somewhat surprising) part was that I wasn't intimidated.
• Even though I knew this was going to happen over the course of a few years, letting my baby brother move to Israel and join the army was scary. 
• One cold winter morning I was on my way to work, and I noticed the roads were super icy. I drove as carefully as I could. At some point it was going a bit downhill, and I wasn't sure what to do: hitting the brake may cause the car to spin, not braking may cause the car to go too fast and not be able to stay on my side of the road. To make matters worse, I saw in my back mirror that a truck was approaching, and the distance kept getting shorter. That was scary for sure. For a moment I considered jumping out of my driving car to avoid getting hit by the truck. The truck driver and I somehow managed to keep calm, brake slowly, keep in our lane and move on. Phew!
• Quitting my job and apartment and leaving my friends and family behind to start over all alone in California was scary, too. Would I be able to eventually get a job and a work permit to sustain myself? 
• Waking up on 9/11 to texts that talked about burning skyscrapers and an impending WW III and the TV broadcasting on the current events was super scary. Experiencing San Diego that was usually buzzing going into grounding mode was scary.
• Upon my returning to my home country Switzerland a week later, our airline Swissair got grounded as well. There was a fire in the Gotthard tunnel, a small plane with Melanie Thornton (wonderful dream - the holidays are coming) on board crashed approaching Zurich airport, and a lunatic shot and killed 14 politicians at Zug's parliament building. 
• Not getting pregnant for several years and finally getting pregnant were almost equally scary, and giving birth to baby Colin, needing two units of blood and not being able to breastfeed was no walk in the park either. Let's not forget coming home with a newborn without really knowing what were doing.
• In the twelve years that I've been a Mom I've had some scary incidents that included knocked out teeth, twice, no, wait, three times, glandular fever and temporary paralyzation of his legs.
• The 2016 election of Mr T was surprising and super scary back then, and I had no idea how bad it was gonna get!
• In the light of recent events a global pandemic with a lockdown, home schooling and working from home, I'd say the scariest thing about it is that we don't know if and when this will be over, what the long-term consequences are, and if / when we may resume our "normal" life.
• A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer in September, and she got immediately started with weekly chemo treatments. She basically left work from one day to the next and spends her weeks either preparing or recovering from the procedure. Learning about her misfortune scared and prompted me to finally sign up for that overdue first mammogram I had been procrastinating. The results were "normal", so I'm definitely grateful.

So what's the bottom line? 

• I think all in all I have been spared the really scary stuff. I still have both of my parents. Losing (one of) them is certainly my scary outlook. 
• Even if sometimes in life it feels like I'm all alone and nobody cares, there are in fact several people who are there in one way or another. 
• If all else fails, I still have myself, Google and my - what seems to be pretty well working - common sense.
• This, too, shall pass.

How about you, what scares have you had in your life? 

Let me know below, and please also visit my fellow bloggers' posts.