Apparently I'm afraid of heights

[MadMike]

I didn't think I was. But earlier today, I found out otherwise.

Awhile back, I noticed what looked like water damage in the ceiling of the spare bedroom. I found out a few shingles apparently blew off the roof. I went on the internet to find out how to replace them, and it looked quite easy.

I had today off, so I went out and got the supplies I needed, and borrowed a ladder from one of the neighbors. I even bought some rope so I could tie myself to the pipe on the roof, just to be safe. Everything was going great, until I got up there.

Once I got up there, panic set in, and I couldn't move. I couldn't even make my way to the pipe to tie the other end of the rope to. Maybe I would have been OK then, but I'll never know. I sat up there for awhile, frozen and breathing heavily, before I finally made my way back to the ladder. My son was holding it for me, and he said I was shaking so bad, I made the whole ladder shake. I had a glass of water when I got back inside, and couldn't even hold it steady.

Times like this, I wish I had bought a ranch house. Guess I'm going to have to call someone who isn't such a wuss.

From now on, I'm sticking to safe stuff, like drywalling and painting.

[lordlundar]

Guess I'm going to have to call someone who isn't such a wuss.

A wuss?? You have a fear of personal injury should you make a mistake. Thankfully it isn't full blown acrophobia. You can get on small stepladders, right?

It's a precarious position and one wrong move means a trip to the hospital. Pretty brave to get up there in the first place.:respect:

[Tanasi]

I wouldn't advise tying off to the pipe. The pipe is the vent for shower/sink/toliet and most likely is PVC and it won't hold you. What you do is throw the rope all the way over the house and tie it off to the bumper of you wife's car. Before you go back up make sure you have a can of ape-shit (some call it roofing cement but I call it ape-shit), putty knife, your shingles, hammer and nails. It's not a hard job at all, besides if you fall the ground will catch you.
While at the hospital if they ask you if you're allergic to anything say "gravity".

[MadMike]

besides if you fall the ground will catch you.


Yeah... I was kind of trying to avoid that option...

I did have my doubts as to whether the pipe would even hold me. That's another thing that had me scared. It also wasn't that long, and I didn't know if the rope would have slipped off.

Tying it to the car might have worked. I bought a whole 50 feet of rope. However, the driveway and garage are on the the same side of the house that the damage is on, and there would be nothing to stop me from falling over the edge. I don't even have a chimney to loop the rope around. And I don't feel like tearing up the yard by driving one of the cars across it.

My neighbor gave me the number of a guy who does jobs like this. He says he's fully licensed and bonded, and his rates are reasonable. Just waiting for a call back from him.

No way am I going back up there. Just the thought of it is almost enough to send me into a panic.

[saint]

Hell, I cant even get pass the 2nd rung on a ladder without feeling dizzy and scared.
Wuss= Me, not Mike. :P

[Der Cute]

Mike:

It takes more of a man to admit he's got faults, than it does to say, "Oh yeah, I'm going ice skating on our new roof today!"

High five (pun yes) to be able to see your limits; and not plunge down to meet them.

I dont mind heights myself; its just that I dont know which end of a hammer means business.

Cutenoob


PS I need some shelves, anyone want to come and put them up for me? I'll cook dinner!

[LewisLegion]

I'm afraid of heights too. I thought I was over it until we took a trip to the falls. I had a hard time crossing over the bridge over the road which was about twenty feet up, and I couldn't even go to the rail on the observation area...I couldn't get closer to it than about thirty feet.

Heights...*shudder*

[Broomjockey]

I'm not afraid of heights, it's ladders and ladder-like devices that make me freeze. I get very shaky on the 2nd rung, and just gets worse the higher I go. Even stairs missing the back scare me, and I have to watch the ceiling. I think I've traced it down to when I was in daycare, I slipped climbing a jungle gym ladder, and hung from my ankles, until the lady in charge came and got me.

[ForestDragon]

Heights scare me as well, but it seems only under certain conditions. I have no trouble at all looking down from a high bridge or out a tenth-story window, but whatever I'm standing on has to be solid and there has to be some sort of barrier between me and the drop.

I went up the Astoria Column (a tourist attraction in Astoria, Oregon, USA), which is basically a tower a hundred feet or more high with an observation platform at the top. Kids were thundering up and down the stairs making the whole structure shake (or so it seemed). I started getting that awful feeling like somebody was tying a knot between the stomach and the sphincter (you know what I mean...). After I finally reached the top and looked around, I had a hard time making myself let go of the surrounding railing, and since I wanted to get back down to the blessed solid ground, I then had to go back down that same staircase, with more of the thundering herd going up and down. Frickin' joy.

Anything up high that vibrates does this to me, whether it's the stairs inside the Column or trying to cross a bridge when the 'road' part of the bridge is that wire mesh type of thing, so you get to look down at the river 40 feet below while trucks race by, shaking the entire structure.

Oh and climbing ladders onto a roof? Forget it. I have a very good and graphic imagination and a horror of slipping and falling. Wobbly ladders suck the Big Green Pocky One and I avoid doing it if possible.

[ringo]

I don't like heights either, but I do love roller coasters.. go figure :D

[gijoecam]

I hate heights and love coasters too. :)

I'm not as bad as I used to be. Work and home maintenance often have me on ladders and in manlifts, and I've learned to work through the anxiety (which was never crippling to begin with). I also found that a good, sturdy ladder to work from makes all the difference in teh world. Around the house, I have a Little Giant Ladder (yes, from teh infomercials) and believe it or not, it is, in fact, better than any other ladder I've ever used. It's not perfectly rigid, but far, far more stable than any aluminum or fiberglass extension ladder.

The only problem with tying a rope to you is that rope isn't a good fall arrestor. A harness with a safety cable and lanyard (or retractable lanyard) is the only thing that makes me moderately comfortable. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that provides me with all the safety gear I need and whose company policy is Safety First.

-Joe

[Tanasi]

Yeah... I was kind of trying to avoid that option...

I did have my doubts as to whether the pipe would even hold me. That's another thing that had me scared. It also wasn't that long, and I didn't know if the rope would have slipped off.

Tying it to the car might have worked. I bought a whole 50 feet of rope. However, the driveway and garage are on the the same side of the house that the damage is on, and there would be nothing to stop me from falling over the edge. I don't even have a chimney to loop the rope around. And I don't feel like tearing up the yard by driving one of the cars across it.

My neighbor gave me the number of a guy who does jobs like this. He says he's fully licensed and bonded, and his rates are reasonable. Just waiting for a call back from him.

No way am I going back up there. Just the thought of it is almost enough to send me into a panic.

Actually I was kidding about tying off to your wife's car bumper. Remember that urban legand about the guy that did that and got jerked off the roof and drug down the street. Rectum damn near kilt'em.
Like Joe wrote unless you know what you're doing it's best not to tie off. I have a climbing rig so I could either asend or desend to get out of trouble. I would suggest at a minimum for you to learn to tie a swiss seat and get a climbing quality steel d-ring/caribeener, or maybe a tree-stand harness with the leg straps.
I'm not necessarily afraid of heights as I have a lot of learned respect for gravity. I've been chased out of tobacco/hay barns by waspers of all kinds, I've flat out fallen, and while I can't prove it I've been pushed. I guess where I'm the most nervous is going from ladder to structure and back. My youngest brother was terrified of heights to the point our Dad had to cut a hole in the side of a house we were working on to put him through.
However if you're not comfortable doing the job then hire it out. That would be a lot less painful than broken bones (I also know from experience.)

[MadMike]

That would be a lot less painful than broken bones (I also know from experience.)

As do I, which may be where this whole phobia originated. I took a header off one of those really tall, old-style TV antennas from about 15 feet up when I was about 14. If I had landed on my feet and rolled, I probably would have been fine, but I landed on my hand first, and didn't even know I had fallen until I felt the ground smacking me in the side of the head. Pretty much shattered my wrist. I now weigh about twice what I did back then, so I can only imagine the damage if it had happened today.

Hard to believe that I haven't been on anything that high, at least not unsecured, in roughly 23 years, but I guess this was the first time since then. Before that, high places like that didn't bother me at all. Like some others mentioned, I'm OK on roller coasters or anything where there's a barrier. I think I might have even been OK if the roof was flat.

At least I can fix the damage to the ceiling once the roof is fixed. I'm fine with going up a small stepladder. Worst thing that could happen in that case is I fall a few feet.

[Tanasi]

As do I, which may be where this whole phobia originated. I took a header off one of those really tall, old-style TV antennas from about 15 feet up when I was about 14. If I had landed on my feet and rolled, I probably would have been fine, but I landed on my hand first, and didn't even know I had fallen until I felt the ground smacking me in the side of the head. Pretty much shattered my wrist. I now weigh about twice what I did back then, so I can only imagine the damage if it had happened today.

Hard to believe that I haven't been on anything that high, at least not unsecured, in roughly 23 years, but I guess this was the first time since then. Before that, high places like that didn't bother me at all. Like some others mentioned, I'm OK on roller coasters or anything where there's a barrier. I think I might have even book OK if the roof was flat.

At least I can fix the damage to the ceiling once the roof is fixed. I'm fine with going up a small stepladder. Worst thing that could happen in that case is I fall a few feet.

Old folks like us always land like a ton of bricks. A few years ago I fell walking down a wet wooden ramp. My right leg bent back under me and I thought "Well you've done it now, you've either blew out you knee, broke you hip again, or both and you get to lay here in the wet until someone comes looking for you." Turns out I was OK but I sure was sore the next day. I've got a year or twelve on you so believe me when I say getting old is painful.:(

[AFpheonix]

At our old house, mom insisted on having a cedar shake roof, so we did. Egads. We'd have to get up there every year to pressure wash it and treat it, and of course, being in a forested place in oregon, it would get slick from whatever goo was growing on it at the time. Scared the crap out of me everytime I'd slip up there. I never fell completely off, but there was a few times I got pretty close to the edge.
We'd tie ourselves off to do the "suicide" portion of the roof: the backside of the garage where there was a 2 story drop to a cement pad. Although, we usually tied ourselves off to the motorhome, and if I was doing it, my sister would sneak into it and start it up just to hear me scream "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!" :mad:

Yay, the roof on the house and the one at the barn both had to be replaced when the family bought it, so they're both brand new, and we don't have any trees near either building so we never have to clean out the gutters. Yay!

[MadMike]

Well, it's finally taken care of. After playing phone tag with several roofers, and finding out some of them were backed up for months, my supervisor gave me the name of a guy she knew that did little jobs like that here and there for not a lot of money. He called me Monday night, and then came by Tuesday morning and did the job. He only charged me $75. I couldn't have been happier!

So now I'm in the process of repairing the damage to the ceiling. That's a lot safer than being on the roof, and the kitties have been helping me. ;)

[Lackwit]

Good for you for getting the roof repaired, MadMike. That kinda work is best left for professionals anyhow.

Does anybody else have this? Whenever I'm close to a railing, say, on a stairwell, or at a multi-level shopping mall or something, and I can look over the railing and see mulitple floors down, it sets up the following chain of thought:

"You know, all that's saving you from falling is this railing. If it weren't there, you would fall fifty feet and hit that floor like a sack of watermelons. Look how short and flimsy this railing really is! Hell, you could just pick your foot up over this thing, easy as pie, and your life would be over. It's that far of a drop..."

:eek: Then, of course, that starts me blanching and shaking, and people look at me like i'm crazy...but with thoughts like that, they're probably right.

[Banrion]

Whenever I look over a railing like that, all I can think about is that scene in American Psycho, when the guy drops a running chainsaw like 5 stories down and manages to hit his mark. EWW!

[Seanette]

Does anybody else have this? Whenever I'm close to a railing, say, on a stairwell, or at a multi-level shopping mall or something, and I can look over the railing and see mulitple floors down, it sets up the following chain of thought:

"You know, all that's saving you from falling is this railing. If it weren't there, you would fall fifty feet and hit that floor like a sack of watermelons. Look how short and flimsy this railing really is! Hell, you could just pick your foot up over this thing, easy as pie, and your life would be over. It's that far of a drop..."

:eek: Then, of course, that starts me blanching and shaking, and people look at me like i'm crazy...but with thoughts like that, they're probably right.
I don't have symptoms noticeable to anyone else, but I'm very familiar with that line of thought, plus a few other nastily fatal ones.