37 Seconds

by Stephanie Arnold

  Everyone who had seen me over the past two weeks kept telling me how great I looked. I know I looked better than the first day, but the reality was that I didn’t feel good and probably looked even worse. And I could count on Rosalind to give it to me straight. When she first saw me, I was being wheeled in from dialysis. I caught the look on her face. Her eyes were filling with tears and her mouth was wide open. She tried the best she could to hide her face behind someone, but I’d seen it. The look on her face told me I had a very long way to go.

  My feelings would fluctuate. One minute I was determined to beat whatever this was, and the next minute I was severely depressed, convinced that this was it. I needed to sleep, I wanted to eat, and I wanted to be less swollen and pain-free. I wanted a sign that I was moving forward and wouldn’t stay trapped in what I felt was a state of purgatory. It was too massive a request, so I whittled it down to just the next five minutes. I wanted to feel better for the next five minutes.

  I asked Ro, “What would you do if you were me in this situation? What do I do, Ro?”

  She said, “Ma, I don’t know what to do for you other than to pray.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Please let’s pray.”

  Here we were, a Christian and a Jew, asking G-d for help. She said she felt the spirit of G-d in the room while holding my hand, and we started to cry. I felt nothing but an obscene amount of pain and distress, and I couldn’t focus on praying. She prayed for me. She prayed that I would get a good night’s sleep. She prayed that I would get stronger and that I would look and feel noticeably less swollen.

  After I went to bed that night, I actually slept two hours, which felt like a full night’s sleep to me. And wouldn’t you know it, I woke up a little less swollen and with a little color in my face. When Rosalind saw me, she remarked, “Oh shit, it worked!”

  My situation was turning.

  The doctors saw improvements in my heart, lungs, blood, and overall physical health over the next few days, but my kidneys were still “off-line.” I could go home soon, after they put a semipermanent port in my chest for outpatient dialysis.

  Three and a half weeks into my ordeal, I was released from the hospital. I had a slew of doctor’s notes, appointments I needed to keep, and medicines and directions to follow to stay on top of my health. It was going to be a long road to recovery, but it was a short distance to home and in that moment that was all that mattered. I was wheeled to the car and got in. I kept looking behind me, like some mistake had been made and I was going to be brought back upstairs. I should have been focusing instead on Jacob’s first ride in a car. He would soon see his room, his home, and his new world for the first time.

  When we pulled up outside of our front door, I looked up at the sky, I looked down at the rich colors of all the flowers, and then I looked at all the people outside on the street who seemed like they didn’t have a care in the world. Their bodies were moving fast, children were laughing, and people were gardening. I began to sob. It was a really strange feeling to be among the living when I felt so dead inside. I felt like the world had gone on without me, which was incredibly unsettling.

  Still, I was glad to be home. Climbing the stairs to my bedroom felt like I was climbing Everest without any oxygen. I lay down on my bed and was happy to feel real bedsheets and not smell “hospital.” My homecoming signified that I was on the mend.

  Then, several hours later, my temperature spiked to 103. My feelings of freedom and hope were dashed. I knew what was going to happen. Jonathan called Julie, and she said the words I was dreading: “Go to the emergency room now!”

  Chapter 9

  AND SO I WAS BACK in the hospital for what turned out to be unsuccessful attempts to figure out what was causing my temperature to rise. One doctor said it was probably a hospital-borne illness. Regardless, the heavy-duty antibiotics worked, and I was released one week after being admitted.

  The transition to life back at home was rocky. The nights were when I felt most alone. Everyone in the household would be asleep, but I was too petrified to close my eyes. I was worried that I wouldn’t wake up.

  One night I found the good-bye letters I had started. As I reread them, with tears in my eyes, I realized that I hadn’t finished them because I wasn’t supposed to. My signature would have meant “the end,” both figuratively and literally. Something had stopped me from finishing them, but I didn’t have a clue what that was.

  As time went on, the purple-striped incision down the center of my belly started to close, but the C-section was left open. It looked like a second mouth just above my pubic bone. It was extremely painful and looked and felt disgusting. A five-inch window into my innards. The doctors said to keep it moist with saline-filled gauze and to change out the dressing two times a day, removing any clots with a pair of surgical tweezers. Jonathan had learned how to do the procedure at the hospital. With anal-retentive precision, he would line up all the tools and bandages, wash his hands and arms up to his elbows, and put on the special sterile surgical gloves the way the nurses taught him so he wouldn’t contaminate any part of them. Then he would flush out the clots, clean the wound, and redress it. He said he liked playing doctor, but I knew that it was more than that. It was his way of showing me unconditional love.

  I had never experienced this intense kind of deep-rooted love before I met Jonathan. The love you seemingly only find in movies. My friends and family could see it in the way we looked at each other or held hands every chance we got. We vowed to be there “in sickness and in health,” and I guess we got to test that out. Jonathan was passing with flying colors. The catastrophe wasn’t changing our bond. It was strengthening it.

  The healing had begun. I started physical therapy and began walking again, little by little. I couldn’t breast-feed Jacob, and that hurt me more than I can explain. I am not one of those moms who needs to breast-feed until her child is five years old, but with Adina I had enjoyed the bonding, the skin-to-skin contact, and the quiet time. I loved being that lifeline. Jacob was up every couple of hours, and someone other than me would have to feed and change him. I couldn’t lift him. I couldn’t even feed or change myself. How was I going to take care of a newborn? It was heartbreaking.

  If you have ever been on dialysis or had a heart attack, abdominal surgery, or breathing issues, you know that any one of those conditions can incapacitate you for weeks or even months. I had all of them at once, in addition to having a baby and family who needed to see me get better as fast as I could.

  Pushing myself, I got better, in relative terms, quickly. After two weeks of outpatient dialysis, my kidneys kicked back in. It felt like I went to bed one night three times my size and woke up the next morning in my skinny jeans. The change didn’t really happen overnight, but after seven weeks I finally had the fluid off of me. And because I hadn’t been able to eat for those seven weeks, I was skinnier than I had been before I got pregnant. If there was anything good to come out of this ordeal, it was the weight loss. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a diet to anyone. Ever.

  Even after seven weeks, I couldn’t hold Jacob or put Adina to bed. Or go up and down the stairs without getting dizzy. I wasn’t allowed to drive. I had major abdominal pain, and I couldn’t lift anything that weighed more than a pound. My stepdaughter Valentina had arrived and was a big help with her siblings, but I couldn’t even enjoy the little time we had together. I was in a fog. I was, for all intents and purposes, my husband’s fourth child. He took care of all of us, and we had no idea how long this was going to last. He had taken an unpaid leave from the New York Attorney General’s Office, and we didn’t know what we were going to do when it was time for him to return to work.

  The same look would come over the faces of all of my visitors when they saw me. They looked like they were seeing the walking dead, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. They would resort to small talk: How was I feeling? What did the doctors say? It was all very nice, but nothing too intimate.

  My psychologist frie
nd was one of the few people ready to engage and talk about what I had said to her before I delivered the baby. “Of course I was devastated by what happened to you, but I wasn’t in shock. You had prepared me for what was about to happen.”

  Chapter 10

  I WAS GETTING PHYSICALLY STRONGER by the day, but every time I tried to start processing what had happened, I would lose it. Especially when it came to my premonitions. How and why had I seen my own death? Was there a deeper meaning to the premonitions? I started searching the Internet hoping to find something . . . anything.

  On the first page of my search, I saw story after story about people who had seen their future before it happened. Like 10-year-old Welsh schoolgirl Eryl Mai Jones, who told her mother in October 1966 that she was “not afraid to die. I shall be with Peter and June.” Her mother didn’t pay any attention to this strange statement. A few days later, on October 20, Eryl Mai tried to tell her mother again. “Let me tell you about my dream last night. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it!” Again, her mother passed off her daughter’s comments as just imaginative thoughts. The next day, October 21, a catastrophic collapse at a mine above the town sent a huge, liquefied landslide of water, rock, and shale down the mountain. It destroyed everything in its path . . . including Eryl Mai’s school. Eryl Mai, her friends Peter and June, and 113 other children, along with 28 adults, died that day. And Eryl Mai had seen the whole thing before it happened.

  Incredible. There it was in black and white. Proof that premonitions are real. I was comforted knowing I wasn’t alone.

  I kept searching. There was the story of Dan Pearce, a popular blogger who runs a website called Single Dad Laughing. He recalled a time when his son was three and “threw a huge temper tantrum when we were trying to leave the house because he ‘didn’t want to crash and die.’ After about 10 minutes, he just stopped and was ready to go.” As they were walking out of the house, a bad car accident happened right in front of them. They would have been involved in that accident had his son not thrown a fit. The child had seen the whole thing before it happened.

  There was Trisha Coburn. Her premonitions came to her in a series of dreams in which she was “standing at a barbed-wire fence across from five or six terribly frail people with huge, dark eyes and ghostly pale skin.” She felt that they were trying to tell her something. She continued to have the same dream week after week, and each time the number of people she saw grew. And each time she couldn’t figure out what they wanted her to know. But Trisha knew something was wrong. She called her doctor and asked for a physical even though she had gone through one six months before. Her blood work came back fine. Another dream brought “100 people wailing, screaming, pleading with me.” Trish kept saying, “I don’t know what you want from me! Please, please tell me what I’m supposed to do.” Trisha’s last dream had the same scene, but nobody was there. She pleaded, “Come back, I need you to help me!” A voice said, “Look deeper.” Trisha called her doctor and asked what the deepest part in the human body is. Her doctor said, “I suppose it’s the colon.” She demanded a colonoscopy, and that’s when the doctor found a black mass. It was cancer, and it was fast-moving. Her doctor said that if she had waited two more months, she probably would have died.

  I could totally relate now. I had seen what was going to happen to me before it happened. And then it had all happened exactly the way I saw it—except for one thing. I didn’t die . . . for good. That funeral scene never came to fruition, thankfully.

  These cases gave me great relief and confirmation that we can in fact sense things before they happen. That we can “know” things and that we need to speak up about them, no matter how ludicrous they may sound to others—including a loving and supportive husband.

  Jonathan read these stories with me but remained unconvinced that any of the events they recounted were spiritually related. I was so frustrated that he didn’t even seem to believe these stories, which were so well documented, that I thought, How can he believe me? Even though he had lived through my premonitions and then seen them come true, he still had a hard time believing them. He thought there had to be a scientific explanation. His skepticism made me start to question what had happened all over again. I knew I had to dig a little deeper to see if having premonitions followed by the experience of almost dying was just coincidence or if I’d received some sort of real insight into the future. Jonathan’s relentless pragmatism pushed me to find answers—because now I was on a mission to prove to my husband that the premonitions were real.

  I needed evidence. I needed to talk to some of my doctors who had been there with me through all of the months of foreboding. I wanted to know if there was a scientific explanation for my premonitions. Maybe they’d had other patients who had experienced the same sense of gloom and doom or seen their own “mini-movies.” And if there were others, maybe I could glean some sort of pattern or commonality between us. I was looking for any morsel my doctors could give me. Anything.

  My first call was to Dr. Grace Lim, the anesthesiologist I spoke to on the phone a month before I died. I asked her why she had flagged my file after I told her about my premonitions, and she said, “It is rare for someone to tell me that they are certain, without a shadow of a doubt, about some bad feeling they have. You were calm but gravely concerned.” She said other patients experiencing anxiety about their particular procedure were usually calmed after talking about the risks and possible outcomes. But not me. Grace said my sense of “misgiving was so intense and unwavering” that it stuck with her.

  Certainly, the risk of having complications with the placenta previa also caused Grace to flag my file, but she said she was haunted by my last words to her on the phone that day. I had said with a sigh, “It is what it is.” Whatever was going to happen to me was already written in the cards, and nothing anyone told me was going to change that or make the fear go away.

  Grace said that my sense of foreboding, coupled with the medical risk of the placenta previa turning into something more, motivated her to create a protocol for my case that involved bringing in more blood and additional lines and monitors and having a crash cart available. That protocol, those simple words on a report, helped save my life.

  Interestingly, Grace told me about a “feeling” of her own the day I checked into the hospital. She said, “I told Nicole that I was worried something weird was going to happen.” It was more than just a fear, she explained. Grace said she knew she had to be in my OR instead of attending to another C-section happening a few doors down. There was really no need for her to be in my surgical room because Nicole Higgins, the other anesthesiologist, was already there. Nevertheless, she felt compelled to be standing there with me. Grace said, “There was something about that day, and I felt G-d’s presence and my spirit connected to yours. I needed to be there.” Although she considers herself spiritual and believes that “G-d plays a big part in every patient interaction,” she said she still can’t explain my premonitions, or her own for that matter. “I honestly don’t know what to make of our mutual premonitions. It would be difficult to study this scientifically.”

  Grace also told me that three weeks before my emergency, she and Nicole had gone to the annual American Society of Anesthesiologists conference. They attended a seminar where they listened to abstracts of new studies and medical methods. During that session, a paper on amniotic fluid embolisms was presented, and they learned a new method for saving the life of the mother within seconds of the acute incident. Neither one of them had ever attended to a patient with an AFE before, and there was no reason to believe they might ever see one. “I thought the information was interesting,” recalled Nicole, noting that she stored the paper away just as she did with any other interesting abstract. “I didn’t think that a few weeks later I would have one.” I don’t believe that was just a coincidence.

  I asked Grace if she was surprised by all that happened. “Of course we were all in shock and ta
ken aback. We were prepared, but you were more prepared. You had G-d’s presence all around you that day and probably for as long as the premonitions started to occur.”

  Early in our conversation, Grace had said that she was more spiritual than many of the doctors she knew. I was thankful for that. There is no doubt she was put into my life for this reason. I also believe her spirit was connected to mine that day and during the weeks before. The OR was prepared to save me that day because of Grace.

  I started thinking about that connection and why it happened. Why did Grace randomly answer the phone that day and then instinctively get what I was saying? Why did she have those very real and fearful feelings the moment I was wheeled into the delivery room? Was it coincidence that Grace and Nicole went to an annual conference just three weeks before I died, and that they just happened to attend a seminar where they learned new techniques for saving someone with this rare condition? There was something bigger working here, some giant force putting things in place to ensure my safe return. Nothing about what happened to me was a coincidence. I was sure of it.

  I called Nicole and asked her what she thought about my premonitions coming true. “I don’t know what to think about it,” Nicole said. “As a scientist, it’s really hard to explain it. But I can’t discount it either.”

  Lastly, I wanted to talk to Julie, my OB/GYN, to find out her thoughts. After all, she was the one doctor who had been listening to me for months about all of my fears. She had delivered Adina, and she was more than just my doctor—she had become a friend. Still, I had no idea if she was spiritual or religious. I had no idea how she would feel if I even broached the subject, but I was curious to know how she felt about all that had transpired. She readily answered my questions.