I am completely terrified of having surgery. Mainly because I am afraid that I will wake up during the procedure, unable to move because of anesthesia, but acutely aware of being cut open. Quite frankly, I thought that perhaps I had picked up on this fear from an urban legend or something. But it happens. You can imagine my horror when THIS was the first item in my Google Reader this evening.
If I ever have surgery, I’m going to check out the doctors that tend to go overboard on the anesthesia. I want someone a little heavy-handed. I’m ok with being groggy for a couple of hours afterward, as opposed to feeling someone cut me open and having nightmares for the rest of my life.
I have a lot of fears. I have a fear of being buried alive that I can trace back to a specific moment in high school. I was passing through the club restaurant on my way to a tennis lesson and a soap opera was on. One of the main characters was buried alive and it was showing her waking up IN HER COFFIN and realizing what was going on and freaking out. It turns out that her twin had rigged a speaker system in her coffin so that she could hear all the terrible things the evil twin was doing as she suffocated. I was late for that tennis lesson and I didn’t do very well that day. I kept thinking about how awful being buried alive would be.
The worst story I have ever heard about being buried alive was the story of Thomas a Kempis. Thomas was a monk and author of a book called The Imitation of Christ. He lived during the 1400′s in England and died about 1471. Buried, funeral, all that jazz. Then, a couple of years later, the Church decided that they wanted to make him a saint, so they exhumed him. I am not sure why he was exhumed, but he was. When they opened his coffin, they found the bottom of the lid completely destroyed with scratch marks and splinters underneath the monk’s fingernails. And to add insult to extreme injury, they denied him sainthood, saying that a true saint would not fight death so vehemently.
Another thing I am afraid of is sort of a variation on the same thing. One is someone being underneath my car, slicing my achilles tendon with a knife, stealing my keys and using my car to run me over. I realize this is sort of specific, but I think it was a scene in Urban Legend. I’m pretty sure that happens to Rebecca Gayheart at the end. The other is someone hiding in the backseat of my car. In my nightmare, I look in the rearview mirror and there is another set of eyes staring back at me, very movie-like. When I was in high school, I had a car that someone could climb in the trunk and push the backseats down to get in the cab and I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends that this was my one true fear. My friend Andrew stole my keys during musical rehearsal and popped my trunk so that he could sneak in my car before I left. Needless to say, I did not talk to Andrew for a while and I almost killed both of us when he revealed himself.
Other fears include (but are not limited to): drowning, spiders, snakes, mice and ghosts.
Ok. So spill it. What’s yours?