Jonathan wasn’t ready to acknowledge that anything other than coincidence and good medicine had saved my life. But he knew I believed otherwise. He wasn’t going to stand in the way, but he wasn’t going to make it easy for me to share this experience with him. He wanted my desire to do this to just go away as fast as it could.
I was extremely nervous the first time I picked up the phone and called Linda for an appointment, but when I spoke to her I felt immediately at ease. She’s a Cuban Jew, just like me, and her slight accent and inflection made her sound like one of my family members. There was great comfort in that. Her voice reminded me of my Grandma Ida. I took that as a sign that this was exactly where I needed to be.
I set up my first session with Linda and recorded it. I videotaped our sessions because I didn’t know what I would remember if I was really hypnotized and I wanted to share that information as accurately as possible.
I had never been hypnotized before and wasn’t sure I could get to that relaxed of a state. But I was open to whatever came next. Linda explained to me that my mind was my only limitation. It was probably good that I hadn’t done much research into hypnotherapy because I would have come to the session with preconceived notions, anticipated too important an outcome, or been disappointed if nothing came of it. I had no expectations, and honestly, I thought I would leave empty-handed.
At this point, Jonathan seemed less concerned about the therapist than about what I would find in the “unknown” places I might visit through hypnotherapy. It was the first time he was thinking from a spiritual perspective, though he probably didn’t even realize it.
After getting some background information, Linda told me to relax and try to get into a meditative state. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. What I saw next blew my mind.
All of a sudden I was whisked back to the OR just before the procedure. I saw my body on the table with the doctors preparing for surgery. My mouth was ajar, but no words were coming out of it. The doctors were “checking in” with me, telling me what they were about to do and asking if I understood, but I wasn’t responding.
Linda watched as my face started twisting in pain. I realized I was looking back at the moment when my spirit separated from my body. There I was, standing next to my body, trying to warn everybody in the operating room that I was about to die.
ME: I separated because I don’t want to see what is about to happen?
LINDA: You don’t want to see them cut your belly?
ME: Yes.
LINDA: Do you feel them cut into your belly?
ME: No. It’s just a body. I don’t feel anything. I want to remove myself from being there. I can’t do anything. The baby is coming out, but it’s too painful, too fearful. So I just separate. I go away while they do their job.
I began to cry with a feeling of great heartache.
ME: I’m waiting for my husband, wanting to hold his hand, wanting to be with him, wanting to be in the labor and delivery room with my daughter. But I don’t want to be where I am.
I felt my chest tightening.
LINDA: So, as you start to pull away from that moment, just allow yourself to be there as you separate. What is that like?
ME: I’m doing so much talking to people before going into the operating room, telling them I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to die. These are the things I was thinking of, these are the premonitions I was having. By the time I get to the operating room, they’re about to do surgery, there’s no moving, there’s no getting out of it. No matter what I say, I can’t change the circumstance. . . . I can’t move, so I just quiet down and I separate. I just don’t want to watch me die.
LINDA: So you choose to separate? You choose to go further away so you don’t have to be there? Understandable. And there’s a place you go which will come to you. So go to the moment where you last remember being right before you float away, right before you separate.
ME: I’m freezing cold right now.
I needed to stop. This was way too much, way too soon. I hadn’t been expecting to actually be hypnotized in the very first session. I thought we would talk or maybe learn some breathing exercises. I certainly didn’t think I would see what I saw. I was still crying when Linda brought me out of hypnosis. She asked if I was okay, and I answered, shell-shocked, “Yeah, I didn’t expect that.”
What had just happened? Did I really travel back in time to the operating room? Had I stored all of that experience deep inside my memory and only now was able to access it? Was I making it up, or did it actually happen?
Linda started talking. “This was very real, of course. When I asked you to go back to the time when you separated, did you get a static feeling in your body? Was it kind of . . . it was mostly visual, but did you feel anything?”
“I was feeling a buzzing all around my body.” She told me that was a very good sign—a sign that I had reached a deep meditative level.
My fear started to subside, and I began to get excited. I was a sponge, I wanted to understand everything. I explained to Linda more clearly the visuals I was seeing while under hypnosis. I saw my daughter Adina.
LINDA: She was in the room?
ME: No, she was down the hall.
LINDA: So what did you see when you separated?
ME: I was above it [my body], but I was next to it. So I was on my left side. I remember the EKG there. I wasn’t on the ground next to me.
LINDA: Did you see anybody in the room?
ME: There was someone standing on my left side that was right next to the curtain. I just don’t know who that person was. Dark hair. It could’ve been Nicole—it could’ve been the anesthesiologist.
LINDA: What else did you see or feel?
ME: I remember feeling the pressure, the soap going on the skin. I remember all the doctors looking up at the clock, but I also remember only one woman standing to the left side of me.
LINDA: Who was it?
ME: I just wonder if it was my grandmother. Wow.
I was shocked. Was Grandma Ida there? She had been dead for more than 30 years.
It was at that point I became convinced that I had not been alone, both before and during the entire ordeal. My cries for help had been heard—just not by anyone in this world.
ME: Can we take a break for the day? I’m feeling exhausted.
LINDA: I like that you had a catharsis.
I was trying to process what I’d seen and felt. And then I finally understood.
ME: They actually warned me ahead of time. They actually gave me the tools to be able to find the people who would help me prepare for this.
LINDA: You helped save your life. They helped save your life.
They had been guiding me. They had been around me. I wasn’t sure yet who “they” were, but I knew one of them was my grandmother. All at once I felt relieved and scared. And crazy. The logical side of my brain kept rejecting what I’d seen. I asked Linda, “What if it’s not real? What if it’s all made up in my head?”
Linda wasn’t fazed by these questions, which I found hard to understand. For me they brought up feelings that were extremely hard to reconcile. I also had more questions coming out of this session than I did going into it. What had I gotten myself into?
Drained and disheveled, I said good-bye to Linda.
How was I going to explain any of this to Jonathan?
Chapter 13
ALL OF THE MONTHS of traditional therapy hadn’t made me feel as good as this one regression session did. I wanted to tell Jonathan everything, but I didn’t know how. It was hard for me to put it all in words, so I just sat him down in front of my computer, pulled up the video, and hit Play. After two minutes of watching, he slammed the computer shut and said he didn’t want to see any more. He said he couldn’t bear to watch me in pain and reiterated how opposed he was to what I was doing. “You need to stop!” Then he walked away.
I had been hoping for a different reaction, but I guess I wasn’t surprised by it. Jonathan works with
equations, probabilities, and statistics, and he’s an expert witness who testifies in cases where people count on him to give them the facts and to be real and honest. For that reason, there was a major disconnect between my husband’s thought process and his attempts to “justify” how and why I had survived. He preferred not to think about it.
Also, the actual event had terrified him, and now the regression therapy was making him even more uncomfortable and scared. In the video, he saw me in great pain, both physically and emotionally, but I also wondered if his reaction came from seeing for the first time what had happened in the operating room. He had not been there in the OR when I died, and now he was watching it as I was reliving it.
He begged me to stop the therapy. He told me, “This is too painful.” I understood. It was painful for me too, but I explained to him that I was more fearful of what would happen if I kept all that pain inside me. I didn’t want to go through life being scared to drive by the hospital or to deal with any situation that might trigger the acute stress disorder. I wanted to be free of pain, and I was now convinced that this was the way to learn how to deal with it. Jonathan, coming from a family of intellectuals who don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves, understood logically what I was saying, but the fear in his eyes said something different. I finally asked him, “Are you scared for me or for you?”
“I don’t know,” he answered candidly.
Jonathan said he could watch himself experience pain and torture a million times over, but one moment of watching me in pain was unbearable. He continued: “I don’t understand any of this spiritual stuff, and I cannot comprehend how remembering these moments could possibly help you. I see it only hurting you.”
I got it. I knew that, for now, I needed to move forward without sharing every little detail with him. He wasn’t ready to receive it, and I didn’t know if he ever would be. But I knew I couldn’t stop.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK I headed back into the operating room to have a surgeon fix hernias that had developed in the scar tissue. They call it a Swiss-cheese type of hernia: the scar tissue starts to pull apart, creating holes. The fear is that the intestines could pop through those holes, forcing an emergency surgery. Luckily, my doctors had discovered the hernias before they had progressed that far.
I told Linda I didn’t want to do regression as much as I wanted to work on meditation exercises that would keep me calm going back into surgery. I was scared I would have another heart attack during the procedure, and I wanted to try to work through that fear. I also put regression on hold because a doctor friend had told me that it can be harder to come out of anesthesia once you see that “other” world: the search for answers may make you want to remain there in that enlightened state longer than you should. I understood.
As Linda taught me how to breathe into my pain and fear, we talked for hours about intuition. I confided in her about my past intuitive experiences, which I had chalked up to coincidence. I was sure now that they weren’t. I knew that, through Linda, I would come to understand more about my intuitions and how in the world I could have felt those things about others before they happened. Most importantly, I would learn how I had been able to see my own future.
I told her about my last conversation with Uncle Marvin and how I’d known I was never going to see him again. I discussed the heart pain I’d felt when Grandma Ida had a heart attack 1,500 miles away from me. She said that many people have a heightened sense of intuition and that intuition is your soul’s way of connecting to the soul of another. “Everyone can do it,” she explained. “It just takes practice. Yours happened to be gifted to you.”
I desperately wanted to know more, and as quickly as possible, but I made a promise to Jonathan that I would not get hypnotized until I was in a safer postsurgery zone.
The surgery day came. After meditating and doing the breathing exercises, I had a feeling of calm unlike the first time around. Jonathan was there, my mother came to town, and my friends showed up. Some of my doctors showed up too, even though they weren’t attending at the surgery. I was playing Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and I was ready. Everyone else was nervous, but I looked at them and said, “I don’t have any premonitions about this one. It will be a piece of cake.” And it was. I went home eight hours later.
My sessions with Linda continued, and I went back into hypnotherapy full force. But this time it wasn’t working. I was thinking too hard. Every time I got to the point where the surgery was about to start, I would start hyperventilating and feeling pain in my chest. Linda would need to bring me out. I was blocked, and now I was finally beginning to understand what Jonathan was afraid of.
At one point I was feeling strong stomach pain. Sharp pain. I didn’t know if it was the therapy and going back to those moments during the first surgery, or if it was the pain from the recent surgery. I felt a little uncomfortable. I didn’t want to go backward with my physical recovery. I knew that going forward with this therapy was the right thing for me to do, but I also knew I had to tread carefully.
Through the next sessions, Linda made me feel safe enough to go back again to that day. We continued with regression as I tried to really comprehend what I was seeing. At the beginning of one session, before going under hypnosis, I asked Linda to help me understand.
ME: It’s one thing to see the filmstrip as you explain it, one-dimensional. All of a sudden, through your work, I’m seeing things three-dimensionally. It’s so vast. It’ll take a lifetime to understand. I guess I just have to accept it.
LINDA: You have to accept what?
ME: I have to accept what those visions were—just that. Because if I dissect it and say, “Okay, how’s that possible?” I come back with, “It’s an impossibility.” I just have to accept it. Blind faith in Hashem [G-d]. I have to accept it. But the miracle that happened to me? Was it a miracle by the hand of G-d? Was it angels that were there to help me?
Linda didn’t answer. I think she wanted me to come to my own conclusions. So we moved on to the hypnosis. Maybe I would get clearer answers with my eyes closed.
LINDA: What do you feel when you separate?
ME: I literally feel myself rip out of my body, and I’m standing next to the EKG unit. Next to me, on the other side, is Grace Lim, the only doctor who flagged my file.
Actually, I explained, I wasn’t standing. I was floating a few inches above the floor. Then, amazingly, I floated out of the OR and down the back hallways to see Adina with Tessie in the labor and delivery room. Adina was playing with the blood pressure cuff, and Tessie was trying to get her to sit down and listen to a story. Adina was singing and dancing around and pretending she was Doc McStuffins. It made me laugh, and then I became sad and nervous. I had to go back to the OR to check in on “me” again.
I was hoping that the brutality about to happen to my body was over, but I came back too soon. My listless body, with eyes open, was still on the table just waiting for them to start the operation. I could see that my spirit wasn’t planted on the ground. And I could feel it. It felt as if I was as light as a feather. My spirit was actually floating, and I knew my spirit wasn’t in my body.
I felt the opposite when I looked at my body on the table. I could feel the heaviness of my body on the operating table as life was getting sucked out of me. My body was just dying. My spirit was standing next to the EKG unit, hearing those last few beats of my heart before I was about to flatline. My spirit was standing in between the machine and Dr. Grace Lim. Grandma Ida was there too. She was rubbing my left thigh, telling me everything was going to be okay.
Linda asked me how it felt to be outside of my body. I told her I felt very light and that I was able to move from one place to another in a flash. She asked me if this was my first out-of-body experience. I told her it was, then said, “I feel like the curtains are being pulled back on Oz.” She asked me whether I believed in it.
ME: Yeah, but there’s a twinge of, well, maybe it can be explained by something else.
I was
still having a hard time accepting fully what hypnosis was showing me. But I was seeing things I couldn’t have otherwise known and getting clarity as to what happened to me in those moments. Linda asked me how I felt about going back in. I told her I was beyond excited, but also feeling afraid to feel the pain again.
LINDA: I don’t know if you need to feel it. If it’s too much, you can always disassociate. That means you pull back and you watch it. You are not in your body.
ME: I don’t know how to do that yet.
Even though I had seen myself separate from my body in that early therapy session, I wasn’t sure how I could force myself again to separate from what I was seeing. “That’s why you’re practicing,” Linda said. “You’re not the first person, you’re the second person. It’s not happening to you, it’s happening to another person.” She said to look at what I was seeing like I was watching a movie about someone else. To be a spectator or observer. I closed my eyes.
LINDA: If you haven’t done so yet, go to the hospital and be there next to her. So understand, you’re there to be of assistance. This has already happened to a part of you. The other part of you is there to help her.
ME: So I’m just there stroking her hand, telling her what everybody’s doing. I tell her, “I know you’re scared and that Jonathan is not here. But I’m here for you and I hear you. I’m listening to you. It’s very real. I’m going to be here the whole time to get you through this.”
LINDA: What else do you know about her?
ME: Her heart is beating fast, and the nurse is telling her to calm down . . . that it’s not good for the baby, that she doesn’t want to put the baby in harm’s way, so calm down.
LINDA: So she sees everybody doing what they’re doing? What else is going on inside her?
37 Seconds Page 9