Have You Ever Really Been Scared Before?

I’m not talking about the goose bumps while walking through a haunted maze at an amusement park or feeling the sweaty palm nervousness about standing up in front of a group of people and giving a speech on something. What I’m referring to is that spine chilling fear that roots you to the spot and turns your blood to ice. Where you feel yourself going weak in the knees and your stomach starts to tie itself in knots and you wondered how on earth you got yourself in to this mess? Where you can actually feel your scalp tingling in anticipation of a scream being ripped from your throat! Yes, that’s the fear I’m talking about. I never really felt that fear before. I only thought that I had! I had faced death head on and came out the victor in a battle for my life a decade ago. I was on the low side of my mid-twenties when it was found that I had a brain tumor about the size of a grapefruit sitting in my noggin. Non-cancerous fortunately, but deadly all the same for its position and size and for the side effects that had already been happening. The neurosurgeon spent thirteen hours scraping around inside my cranium to get it all out and left me with one heck of a headache and a titanium plate as a commemorative badge of honor, but for the most part, it was gone! And none to soon to be honest with you! If we had waited even a few days more, there was a good chance that the tumor would have taken my life with one good sneeze. Was I scared about it? Not really. I didn’t have a chance to be scared. When the doctors found it, they had to get in there and get it out within a couple of days of finding it. So there really wasn’t time for me to become scared about it. The fear I’m referring to now is something altogether different. I’m talking about roller coasters and one in particular: Sheikra at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. Sheikra is a steel roller coaster with a track consisting of steel tubes or rails that measures a total of 3188 feet in length with a total height of 200 hundred feet. It has one inversion and a vertical angle of ninety degrees which you experience twice! Yes, I did say twice! It has three cars per train so while one is running, another is filling up. These cars are arranged eight people across in a single row for a total of twenty-four riders per train. The ride’s top speed is seventy miles an hour that last for a three heart pounding minutes that seems to go on for much longer than that! Sheikra is a species of African hawk that is known to dive straight down for its prey, which is exactly what this ride does! While waiting and winding through the line to get on this ride, your anticipation builds. You can see the cars go through their movements and hear the screams of the riders and you begin to wonder if this is for you. But you figure, “it’s only a ride, how scary can it be?” After sitting down and strapping in, your car climbs to the top and hangs at a ninety degree angle for several seconds before plummeting straight down into a tunnel. You are so stunned by this you that for a moment, you forget to breath. As soon as you have caught your breath, you are soaring straight up into the air two hundred feet and heading in to the inversion and you ARE screaming! It curves back around out of the inversion and hangs again at that ninety degree angle, perfectly, serenely. You know it is going to soar straight down again and there is NOT A THING that you can do about it, except maybe scream some more. You are so scared that you can’t even close your eyes as you race back to wards the ground at seventy miles an hour! At the last second, your car veers out parallel to the ground and slows it itself down by using a water break that splashes the knowing onlookers watching form the ground. The car returns to the unloading platform and you are waiting for the safety harness to unhook so that you can TRY to step out. Your knees are shaking, your stomach was left behind somewhere on that first ninety degree angle, and you’re scared. You can hear the screams overhead of the next passengers and you wince. You know what fear is now, at least I do.