Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.
I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.
The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.
Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.
Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.
I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.
The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.
Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.