itt post potential horror stories that turned out fine, for the benefit of random googlers.

don't read horror stories online! the people whose experience is "don't get me wrong it sucks to be locked up but nothing really happened" do not post their stories online so you are hearing just the worst stuff! still hoping u beat the rap

― honkin' on joey kramer (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 10:14 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is good advice not just for this situation but really for anything you are prone to feel anxious about, such as mysterious illnesses

― max, Tuesday, 9 November 2010 16:25 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

let's buck this trend

For a few months I had a cough that started out as hour-long spasms that kept me up for hours at night/almost had me puking to barely noticeable with just a bit of phlegm, but that sort of lingered for a few months. My mother was worried I had some deeply impacted sinus infection that could potentially travel up to my brain and kill me. I went to see an ENT and he told me I was perfectly fine, and to just take some Mucinex DM if the cough was irritating me at all. Now I am totally a-OK!

I started having chest pains. People tell me that chest pains can mean serious business - collapsed lung, heart attack, maybe cancer. Was bummed for months. Had no health insurance. Writing tearful letters in my head: "Dear Mom and Dad, I'm sorry to have to tell you this..." Got a job with health insurance. Went to Kaiser. The doctor tells me I have acid reflux: buy an otc pill, watch what you eat.

when i was a kid my friends and i used to go swimming at the lake as soon as the weather seemed hot enough. we had a game where we were bringing to the surface the heaviest rocks from the deepest place. i remember once i had a runny nose after that: maybe i was infected by a lake bacteria that could have eaten my face but my immune system fought it off , maybe it was just a normal cold. i still have my face! the end.

I had glandular fever aka mono and my lymph nodes swelled up to the size of golf balls (seriously, I should've taken a photo, it looked weird as hell) and I thought of all those stories you hear about how someone's friend of a friend had mono and it knocked them out for a year and they were never the same again and etc

Only symptom I got apart from the swelling was a pretty nasty sore throat. I was totally fine a week later.

Apparently despite its nasty reputation most people get glandular fever and don't even realise they have it, cz for most people the symptoms are cold-like and fairly mild and they don't go to the doctor. Like, by their late 20s pretty much everyone has the blood markers that show they've had it, even if only 20% or whatever think they have.

left my car unlocked while paying for petrol. Still here

Apparently despite its nasty reputation most people get glandular fever and don't even realise they have it, cz for most people the symptoms are cold-like and fairly mild and they don't go to the doctor. Like, by their late 20s pretty much everyone has the blood markers that show they've had it, even if only 20% or whatever think they have.

This was exactly my experience with mono. The only reason I had any reason to suspect I had it was because I had a cold for a month and started sleeping in heavily, missing a bunch of classes. My wife (girlfriend at the time) on the other hand, ended up hospitalized for a week because of it due to severe dehydration and liver damage.

oops that code is not in keeping with the spirit of this thread

we negotiated with terrorists, now the opposing parties run their own parliament together and denounce extremists on either side.

crack my fingers, wrists, shoulders, knees, ankles and neck all the time. Still moving freely.

thirded on the glandular fever front, except my experience was a hellish two days then POW, it was gone.

hey moms, even though there is crime in this city in which I live, and you read about it all the time and tell me about it all the time, I have never been murdered.

have pulled ghastly faces in storms, always able to return to normal expression

i quit my job without much of a plan, and within 9 months had a great job

my girlfriend and i "went on a break," dated other people, decided to try again, after a lot of work and time and patience we are really strong and in love

weirdly i was just thinking of starting a thread where people could reassure each other that its going to be ok

I had blinding headaches for days, coming on like ice-cream headaches and then dissipating. No other symptoms, just the headaches. Scared the crap out of me. I was so sure that I had some kind of inoperable brain tumor that I couldn't sleep the night before my doctor's appointment.
Doctor checked my ears, throat, and said, "You have a sinus infection." Yay! I nearly cried I was so happy that I didn't have 6 months to live. I was *this* close to hiring a parade float.

I met my husband online in 1995. (cue scary music, dun dun DUN.)
We met in person in 1999. To my surprise he was not:
a)overweight middle aged woman
b)peedo-rapist
c)cuckoo military AWOL dude that locked me in the basement
He was a total bro! I moved to the States to be with him in 2002. We've been married now for 8 years, happy as clams. Bros 4 life, no kidnapping or murder to date.

once my mom was supposed to drive to my apartment and she didnt show up for hours and it turned out she was just late, not dead in a ditch somewhere

I swam in the ocean in Australia for my entire childhood and didn't get eaten by a shark once.

swallowed gum
feelin' fine

Left the keys on the door of a friends' yellow Golf convertible on Glasgow High Street. Realised about ten minutes later, when the metal detector at the Barrowlands didn't go off. Ran back to the car, which was still there, with the keys still in the door.

on in

I swallowed a watermelon seed: 25 years on, no watermelon growing in my stomach.

My flight was called at an airport, so I went to get my passport out, and it wasn't there. Realised it must've fallen out when I went to the toilet half an hour ago. Ran back to look and it was still there. Did not miss flight. Hooray!

Though, if you are randomly googling "my flight is boarding now, did I leave my passport in an airport bathroom?" then you should probably stop titting on the internet and do some running around.

I had blinding headaches for days, coming on like ice-cream headaches and then dissipating. No other symptoms, just the headaches. Scared the crap out of me. I was so sure that I had some kind of inoperable brain tumor that I couldn't sleep the night before my doctor's appointment.
Doctor checked my ears, throat, and said, "You have a sinus infection." Yay! I nearly cried I was so happy that I didn't have 6 months to live. I was *this* close to hiring a parade float.

Ha, I had this totally, but just over the course of one day. I couldn't move my head without screaming. I was convinced I had meningitis. A quick trip to A&E, a large dose of Sudafed Max Strength and a course of antibiotics, and I was fine.

One time I walked home in the snow and a bunch of icy water got into my boots. My feet were very, very cold for about half an hour thanks to this. When I finally got home and took my boots and socks off, my feet were navy blue. I was worried I had frostbite so bad that my flesh was necrotizing. It turns out, I had put on a brand new pair of navy blue cocks, and the water had made the dye from them come off all over my feet. Not dead.

Oh God, I mean navy blue socks.

*embarrassed*

haha!

a cautionary tale we can all learn from

My wife and I were flying to Costa Rica for our honeymoon, leaving from Detroit and getting a connecting flight in Atlanta. We woke up extra early and got to the airport in plenty of time, hoping to avoid and false starts to the trip. What we didn't anticipate, however, was that the storms of more than 30 hours previous would still be playing havoc with the flight schedule. As it turned out, our flight was going to be delayed and would not make our connecting flight. And that was to be the only flight from Atlanta to Costa Rica that day. So the agent at the counter told us, in no uncertain terms, that we'd be waiting until the next day to get down there. Not the most promising start to our honeymoon, especially knowing we'd be losing a night off our resort stay. As we dejectedly started to walk away from the counter, trying to figure out our options, the agent told us that there was another flight, delayed from the previous evening, leaving in about 30 minutes that could get us to Atlanta on time. She put us on standby. Great! But then she told us there was already 12 people in front of us on the standy list. Not at all great, there was no way they'd burn through that many people to get us on the plane. Instead of dwelling on that, we rushed through security and got to the gate. Once there we started negotiating with other people to see if we could trade spots with them for our later flight. Let me tell you folks, it isn't like the movies where people ooh and ahh over newlyweds. Even when we were offering $100 cash to trade, everyone we talked to politely declined. Just as we were giving up all hope, our names were called and we were able to board. Which was weird, because we never heard any other standby names called before ours. My wife's theory is that the guy at the gate bumped us up the standby list. Anyway... we made our connecting flight and enjoyed the hell out of a week in Costa Rica.

Please excuse typing errors.

It's nice when a kindness happens quietly.

For real: I thought I had cancer. I had a lump in my hand which kept growing bigger and bigger. Because my mother had a tumour in her hand which ate up half the bones in her wrist, I was so terrified I didn't go to the doctor for years and years. Finally it became so painful I could avoid it no longer.

The doctor stuck a giant comedy sized needle in it, and drained out some pearly liquid. It was a ganglion bursa. I had some surgery and it was fine. No cancer. The end.

this isn't me, but a friend: he had been in La Paz for a while and it was time to leave, so, with all of his luggage (constituting pretty much everything he owned - he was going around South America for a year), he hailed a taxi to the bus station. Even though he's a street-smart guy, things somehow conspired (I forget how, but it made sense) that all of his luggage, passport, phone and all, got in another taxi which he was told would meet him at the bus station, while his own taxi took him somewhere other than the bus station and let him out. So, thinking he was 100% fucked, he hopelessly wandered in the direction of the bus station because he had to do something. When he got there he saw a couple of children walking around with his luggage - he stopped them, and they told him that there had been some confusion and they were told to find him and give him his luggage. So he got his luggage.

(to maintain the spirit of this thread, I won't mention that they stole his phone.)

My brother told this story about when he was greyhounding and hitching around America with a friend. They got a lift at night from some random guy to somewhere or other, and they found themselves being driven down ever lonelier and darker roads, until they stopped in the middle of a deserted junkyard. The guy turned around and said "Well, it looks like it's the end of the line for you guys..." ... then turned back, drove out of the junkyard and took them to where they wanted to go.

Which in turn reminds me of another story I heard from a friend once, when he was hitch-hiking around Italy. He got a lift from a couple, and got talking, and the conversation went this way and that, until the chap driving said "perhaps you would like to come back to my place where I can video you making love to my wife, and then you can make love to me, and then we can all make love together". My friend politely declined. I think perhaps he also requested to get out at this point.

this is probably TMI, but I used to have a skin tag — a harmless little pimply nub — just above my right armpit. one time last summer I went on a half-day-long hike in the mountains, and when I got home that afternoon I didn't bother to bathe or check myself for ticks. the following afternoon, aware of the earthy odor I'd picked up from the trail, I got ready to take a long shower.

as soon as I took off my shirt, I realized that something had gone wtf. overnight my skin tag had swollen to three times its original size and turned a sickly shade of dark grey. it was beetle-shaped, somewhat numb, and stiff to the touch. on closer inspection, I saw some little black threads wrapped around it. they were wiggling. it took me a couple minutes and countless "eww, yuck!"s to realize that a tick had burrowed itself directly beneath my skin tag, gorging itself with blood and depriving the area of precious oxygen.

now I've always had an aversion to having necrotic flaps of skin attached to my underarms, so I knew I had to get rid of the thing at once. with minimal medical knowledge, I sterilized my Swiss Army Knife scissors in a pot of boiling water. I tied dental floss around the base of the skin tag to cut off the blood supply, and I numbed it with an ice pack. finally I snipped right through the skin tag with my scissors. it deflated like a fleshy water balloon & didn't hurt a bit. relieved, I picked some remaining bits of tick guts out of the wound and did my best to dress it up.

within two weeks, the spot had healed so fully that it didn't even leave a scar. I even felt bold enough to nix the skin tag on my other armpit in like fashion. to this day my body remains blissfully free of all warts, skin tags, and moles. I gained a lot of wisdom and confidence from that bloodthirsty deer tick, and the ensuing Lyme disease wasn't that bad, really (joeks).

― broa super (unregistered), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 10:16 PM (7 months ago)

my girlfriend and i "went on a break," dated other people, decided to try again, after a lot of work and time and patience we are really strong and in love

― max, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 2:35 PM (Yesterday)

I can't help but interpret this as, "we benched-pressed and squat-thrusted our way back to each other's loving, muscular arms."

http://i56.tinypic.com/o0tfgm.jpg

kinda heartwarming but mostly gross and sweaty.