“You realize just how spooky this was, that you knew something bigger was going to happen,” Julie said. We went back over each premonition, and she confirmed that, except for the one showing my funeral, each one had come true. It was comforting to know that she finally believed me, even if it was after the fact. “It really blows my mind,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s an explanation of how or why you had the premonitions. You just called it, and you were right.”
The doctors’ responses gave me great relief and validation. They helped me feel like I wasn’t crazy. That it had all been real. Here they were, scientists who believed in fact and not conjecture but who seemed to believe that I could see into my future, even though there had been no hard evidence to support it.
It was at this point that I became completely convinced that my insight into what was going to happen to me was absolutely real. Jonathan couldn’t argue. Like the doctors, he always explained the world through hard facts, yet all of a sudden the people who thought like he did were convinced otherwise. “It’s interesting,” he said when I asked what he thought about their responses. Then he quickly changed the subject. It was still beyond his comfort zone.
I was trying to process all of this information both mentally and emotionally, but it was too hard to do alone. I knew I needed professional help.
Chapter 11
I WAS FEELING BETTER, but I also sensed that integrating all that had happened was going to overwhelm me if I did not get some help. Physically I was doing better; mentally I was not. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotional pain, and Jonathan wasn’t remotely ready to acknowledge his own emotional trauma. In fact, his stoic responses of “I’m good,” and “I’m just happy we got through this,” were making me feel like I needed to simply appreciate the fact that I was alive and “get over” everything else. I was frustrated that I couldn’t just do that.
So I decided my next healing hurdle would be psychotherapy. Therapy had always helped me navigate uncharted waters in the past, guiding me when I was at a crossroads and had choices to make. I knew I needed to discover coping mechanisms for dealing with everything that was beyond my scope to handle. Therapy needed to begin for both of us as soon as possible. Jonathan might not have wanted to admit there were any issues here, but he knew he had to be there for me and go through this with me, even if only as a spectator. I was hoping he would eventually engage and discuss his pain. I was sure it was there, even if he denied it.
I asked several of my doctors for referrals to therapists who had expertise in women’s issues, postpartum conditions, and difficult childbirth. I also wanted someone who had the extra credential of having dealt with near-death experiences. It turns out, such a person was not easy to find in Chicago.
My healing agenda was a long one: I wanted to unburden myself of the guilt I felt for not being connected to Jacob initially, I wanted to relieve myself of the survivor’s guilt I was feeling, and I needed to face the beast that had tried to destroy me. I needed the courage to read about AFEs, understand the condition, and ultimately let go of my own experience with it. I knew that if I didn’t deal with all of this head-on, the fear would bury itself deep inside me and I would never be able to get it out. I wanted psychotherapy to give me the tools I needed to get over the physical and mental pain, but I also wanted someone to help me understand my premonitions and how and why they occurred, as well as someone who could help bring healing energy. These were big shoes to fill.
I met with the first therapist. She was lovely and very accomplished. When we got down to business in the first session, I said, “I need to learn how to protect myself when we embark on this spiritual journey.” I’d read that when you delve into any spiritual work, you should visualize something like light or a dome around yourself in order to protect your energy field so nothing can penetrate it while you are learning about the metaphysical. She replied in a very sincere, linear, psychotherapist kind of way, “Why do you feel the need to protect yourself?” I smiled. I knew it would take a lot longer than one session to explain to her what I meant, and I didn’t have the time. So I thanked her for seeing me and moved on.
After a few weeks and a few more therapists, I found one I liked. She was in her late thirties or early forties, blond, beautiful, and a mother of three young children. She had a no-nonsense way about her. She wasn’t the type of therapist who would say, “What do you think?” She would tell you exactly what she thought and how we were going to deal with this. I appreciated that approach because at this time my “take control” personality had gone into hiding and I needed someone else to take over the reins and just tell me what to do. I trusted her instinctively, I talked to her openly, and most importantly, I listened.
I told her I felt detached from my body, I cried all the time about nothing and everything, and I didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened. To my relief, she said that what I was going through was normal. She taught me about acute stress disorder, which comes in many forms.
Jonathan sat with me and listened too. He answered most of the therapist’s questions because I kept crying. He took over and asked her what we needed to do. What would be the best way, he asked her, to hit different milestones? How would we know when we were out of the woods? And at what point would she feel the therapy had been successful and we could stop? I thought it was a little too early to ask that last question, but I was proud to have him by my side, being my man, stepping up, taking notes, and helping me get back on track.
She told us that, if after six months I wasn’t feeling better, I would move into something more serious: post-traumatic stress disorder. Some cases of PTSD can be crippling, she said. I might be afraid of very simple tasks or even nervous about being responsible for my children. Then a different kind of intense therapy would begin.
That’s when I made a decision. I never wanted to teach my children to live in fear, and I needed to lead by example. That therapy helped me gain the strength I needed to face the beast. This thing had almost killed me, and I was not going to let it cripple me for the rest of my life.
Whenever anyone mentioned my experience in the hospital, I would usually deflect conversation about it by saying, “We dodged a bullet.” People would accept that and move on to the next subject. I was relieved that we could take the attention away from the 800-pound gorilla in the room in this way. But in one session my therapist said, “You didn’t dodge a bullet. The bullet hit you dead-on. You survived the bullet.” She told me I needed to accept that, and all of a sudden I had a newfound respect for what had happened. I needed to acknowledge it and give it the respect it deserved.
From that point onward, anytime someone asked me about what had happened, I told them how I survived, not about how I died. That shift opened up conversation instead of shutting it down. I would look the person asking in the eye and be immediately engaged in a deep conversation about how I saw what happened to me before it happened. At times it felt unnatural to be so open with my feelings, but I felt that, if I’d been able to sense that things were going south for me, maybe others could too if they listened to their own instinct. And people listened.
It wasn’t about me. It was about helping others understand that if they sensed something, they should say something because speaking up could save their life. Whether it was the barista at Starbucks or a close friend, I spoke to everyone.
One day a friend of mine called to tell me she had a strange pain in her belly and was feeling restless. She had delivered her baby six weeks before. Her husband thought she was being emotional, but she knew something was off. She called to tell me she had an appointment to see her doctor, but she was scared. I asked why she was scared, and she said, “I don’t want to die.” That put me on high alert. I told her to get to the hospital right away, and I would meet her there after taking care of the kids.
She went in, and her instinct turned out to be right. The exam revealed that they had left a piece of the placenta in her uterus. Removing it, they sa
id, would be a 20-minute procedure. They could do it immediately and all would be fine. No big deal. But by the time I got to the hospital two hours later she was in a medically induced coma and in the ICU. After a few days in the ICU, she came out of it, and when she was recovering at home, she said she would never stay quiet again. She had learned that her instinct was far stronger than she gave it credit for. And her spiritual strength grew exponentially.
My friend’s experience was another reminder to me that in our society people aren’t always encouraged to listen to their bodies or their feelings. Yet we ignore our deep inner knowings at great peril.
At times I felt consumed with an almost evangelistic zeal to tell my story and encourage other people to trust their feelings, trust their bodies, trust their own inner knowings. If you sense something, say something. That became my motto, and no one was outside of my reach. As I was telling a plumber about what happened to me, his assistant overheard me talking about the feeling of foreboding. He asked me what that felt like. Then he told me he had been putting off getting a stress test for his heart even though he sensed something was wrong. He was too scared and thought that what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. I told him that, on the contrary, hiding from something because of fear could kill you. He called to set up his appointment that very same day. Later he called to tell me that the tests showed something, but he wouldn’t elaborate. He did say that he wasn’t in immediate danger and doing the test had been the first step in protecting his life. He was grateful for the push.
One by one, people would engage with me about my experience, wanting to know details and how it could help them in their everyday lives. They asked so many questions like: “What were you feeling that made this different from just a passing thought?” . . . “Did you tell the doctors, ‘I told you so’?” . . . “Had you felt like this before?” I answered them all, and I always followed up with, “If you sense something, say something.”
I was getting stronger and could finally open my computer to read story after story about AFEs and the likelihood of survival. There wasn’t much.
I found a story about a couple who had been married for a few years when they decided to start their family. Their first daughter was born and the mom spent several months parenting alone while her husband was deployed overseas. During the birth of their second child, she suffered an AFE. The baby was fine, but mom was not. She lost her life. Her husband would say his military training prepared him to save lives but he couldn’t save his wife’s. I started to well up.
The next story talked about a very young couple in a very religious community. They welcomed their healthy baby, but when the mom was being brought back to her room to recover, she went into cardiac arrest. They saved her, but the AFE had cut off oxygen to her brain for too long. After many days of being in an unstable condition in ICU, it was determined she would be in a coma forever. Her husband is now taking care of his wife and baby at home, with the help of his community, family, and prayer. Something no husband or father should have to endure, let alone one so young. He was only 25 years old.
By this point in my reading, tears were flowing down my face. There were stories upon stories about AFEs, and the outcomes were incredibly painful to read. There were marathon runners, first-time mothers, young women, older women, black women, white women, Hispanic women, Asian women, Indian women. I learned that AFEs have nothing to do with age, race, or birth order. What I read confirmed that an AFE is completely random and that the difference between surviving and dying depends on where you are and how quickly it is diagnosed.
The tears were coming at a much faster pace now. Again, the guilt I felt about surviving was becoming a heavier burden, and then I thought about Jonathan and how painful this would have been for him had any of these outcomes been his.
I don’t know why, but I kept going.
Another couple was excited to be first-time parents. One day the husband went to work, kissing his wife good-bye as she sat relaxing on the couch four days shy of her due date. When he returned later that morning to check on her, she was still in that same position. Apparently her water broke, she had suffered an AFE, and both she and the unborn baby died right there on the couch. Alone.
Devastating. I was sobbing and couldn’t stop for several minutes. When I finally calmed down, I decided I was tired of crying. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “What right do I have to cry here when these women no longer have the ability to speak?” I knew I had to do something more.
My cousin Sari started researching AFEs and came upon the AFE Foundation and its founder, Miranda Klassen. After Miranda suffered an AFE herself years ago, she felt a calling to start the foundation to help families in the same situation. She helps fathers understand what has happened, directs families to resources, and provides much-needed guidance and support. Most importantly, Miranda is working on research to come up with a way to diagnose the likelihood of an AFE before it happens.
She called Miranda and told her that, when I was ready, I would be reaching out to her.
My cousin stayed with me for weeks after I got out of the hospital, and we would talk into the late hours of the night, philosophizing about what had happened, going through our family history, and discussing what responsibility I had as a survivor. I wasn’t completely sure what that responsibility looked like, but Sari was. Although I knew that AFEs are rare, I was hearing more and more about them. Sari, who’s a journalist, wondered whether they are rare or just underreported. She said, “I know you are weak now, but you will get stronger, and you have a voice. You need to use your voice and your experience to help others.” Okay. I understood that. I was on a good path and getting stronger.
We felt there was great value in getting the word out about this unpredictable possibility called an amniotic fluid embolism. I did believe that others would benefit from knowing about AFEs and about my premonitions and story of survival. Most importantly, I thought people should know about the AFE Foundation. So, seven months postpartum—and for that matter postmortem—I agreed to let Sari call a friend at CBS in Chicago, and they picked up my story. My entire catastrophic event was told in just 90 seconds. I was happy I put it out there, but I never expected what would happen next.
Yahoo grabbed it from CBS as its cover story the next morning, and it went viral. Katie Couric tweeted about my story, and so did Victoria Justice. I was “trending.” What? I was invited on The Doctors, Good Morning America, and Steve Harvey. And my cousin was right: AFEs and the foundation were thrown into the spotlight and people wanted to know more.
Days later, when the media frenzy died down, I kept thinking about the last thing Steve Harvey asked me. “What did you see when you died?” I told him, “Nothing.” No bright light. No dead relative. I never wanted to make up an answer. The fact is, I remembered nothing. Or at least that’s what I thought.
Chapter 12
THE THERAPY I HAD BEEN DOING over the last few months had been good. I was starting to feel like I was among the living again. But I knew I needed to try to remember what happened in the OR that day. When I asked the therapist about returning to the moment I died, she replied, “Why do you feel the need to go back there? You are obviously blocking this out because it was traumatic. Let’s focus on something else. You don’t need to go there in order to heal.”
I was functioning well, healing, and getting back into a routine. Jonathan was in total agreement with the therapist that I didn’t need to remember what happened when I died. He kept asking, “Are you trying to find an answer to help you or others?”
“Both,” I replied.
I had lost six days of my life. I wanted to know what had been going on around me and, more importantly, where I was during those 144 hours. My body had been attached to machines in the ICU, but where was I? This question kept nagging at me. There might be something to remember, or there might not. But as long as I had questions that might have answers, I wanted to try to answer them.
Jonathan
asked, “What if there is nothing to find out and you go through all of this, opening a wound, just to discover there is nothing there?” I admitted I was scared of the process, but I wasn’t worried about the possibility of the therapy not working. All I wanted to do was explore these questions for possible answers. If it led me to a dead end, so be it.
I started looking into nontraditional forms of therapy and came upon regression. Regression therapists use hypnosis to put you into a deep meditative state and take you back to the moment of distress. The goal of this type of psychotherapy is to retrieve memories of traumatic experiences and through insight and emotional release, be able to gain mental, physical, and emotional relief. This sounded promising. I had never heard of this type of therapy before, and neither had Jonathan. I wasn’t sure I would be able to relax and be hypnotized, let alone allow someone to guide me. But I knew I had to give it a shot.
Luckily, a friend had told me about a regression therapist she had used before in Miami named Linda Burns. I wanted to do it. Jonathan kept saying, “Why are you doing this? We are good, you are getting stronger, healthier, we don’t need to go back.” Maybe that was how he felt in the “we” department, but that wasn’t how I felt. I was still feeling a heavy burden, and it wasn’t coming now from my body or mind. It was coming from something else—from the same place where I had sensed things earlier. I felt like I was somehow being guided to do this.
I explained to him that traditional therapy couldn’t help me deal with everything that had happened. “There was nothing traditional about this entire ordeal,” I said, “so why would we think the therapy should be?” I wasn’t heavy physically any longer, but it felt like something was still weighing me down. I felt I needed to at least attempt to get some closure and to understand what had helped me see the future. Maybe I could do that through regression.
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