ME: The baby is getting ready. Just moving, kicking. She can’t move her arms and her legs. She’s shivering. They’re asking if she wants more blankets.
I told Linda that I was trying to take her hand in mine.
ME: She can’t grab hold of my hand, but she feels the pressure of my hand. She’s in tears, telling me that she doesn’t want to die. She’s angry that she’s in this position. She doesn’t want to have the baby.
LINDA: She doesn’t want to have the baby?
ME: No.
LINDA: Because . . . ?
ME: Because of the way she’s feeling. She doesn’t want to die, and she’s mad for going through the process to get herself pregnant because all of this could have been avoided. She’s fearful of that child. She’s fearful of that baby because he’s going to take her life, and she’s also hating herself for feeling that way because this baby is innocent. She wants to love him, but she doesn’t.
LINDA: What else happens now? What do you need to do now?
ME: I just have to keep whispering in her ear, telling her what’s going to happen, step-by-step, so as she feels pressure, so as she feels iodine going down, she knows what’s happening. The anticipation is worse than knowing the moment-by-moment, so I’m there to tell her frame-by-frame what’s happening.
LINDA: So you can see what’s happening as you stand next to her?
ME: I’m her eyes and ears because she’s tuning out. It’s hard because no one is paying attention to her, because they’re focusing on their job, but they’re not paying attention to her real fears. They’re just looking at the numbers and just looking at what they need to do.
LINDA: So it must be real hard for people not to pay attention to her. Such a difficult time in her life. . . . So now what happens?
It was surreal to believe I was standing there watching what was about to happen to me. I felt like I wanted to protect my body on the table and stop the doctors from doing the procedure that ended my life. But I couldn’t. Linda told me to be the guide, so I started to describe to “myself” on the table what everybody would be doing. I reminded her that she was going to be okay and that this was all she really needed to know to get through this. I promised her, I guaranteed her, that she was going to be fine. No one else in that room could do that for her.
ME: A nurse is checking the tools to make sure it’s all in line and everything they need is there. One doctor is telling another doctor some story that I can’t quite hear. There’s a lot of hustle and bustle around me. And they’re saying: “Patient: Arnold. Stephanie. Forty-one-year-old woman. Complete placenta previa. Blood on hand. O negative.” Something about extra IV lines. Heart rate. Pulse. Give the numbers. I can’t hear what they are. The time is? I don’t know. And then the doctors do a roll call. “Dr. Julie Levitt, obstetric gynecology. Dr. Nicole Higgins, anesthesiology.”
I described how they painted my belly with soap and where everyone was standing. Then I watched as they started the C-section.
ME: I don’t feel anything. Dr. Higgins is down by my feet, which is odd because she controls my breathing. She should be up at the top, not down by the feet, but for whatever reason she’s down there. . . . I see them pulling apart the fascia, the muscles. I see it, but there’s no hurt. I tell the Stephanie on the table, “You are going to be fine. You’re going to get through this.”
I watched Jacob coming out, and he was fine, and then, when they went back in for the placenta, I knew what was about to happen. I knew I had to warn myself that I was about to die. I looked up and saw what I can only describe as my spirit with a hand on top of the EKG monitor. Tap, tap, tap. Her finger was tapping to the beat of my heartbeat. Tap, tap, tap. It was getting louder. It was almost as if she was counting down to the flatline.
ME: I explain to Stephanie, “It’s going to happen very quickly, and I’m going to brace you, and I’m going to hold on to you, and I’m not going to let go.”
The moment was terrifying. I began to cry as I felt that pain all over again. As I was recounting it to Linda, something made me thrust my chest forward as if I was having a hard time breathing. I realized I was feeling the moment of my death. Tap, tap, tap. I watched as my spirit’s finger slowed down to a final TAP, and I heard the beep from the monitor as I flatlined. I looked down at the table and saw my eyes roll back.
ME: I hear them screaming. They say, “Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie!” and Nicole runs to the head of the bed. “She’s turning blue,” she says, and the EKG machine goes flat and I’m done. My body just collapses. I hear them say, “Hit the button. Call the code. Hit the button.” [I start sobbing.] They hit the button, and it seems like 40 doctors and nurses rush in and they’re, like, “Get the cart.” They get it up.
I had to let go of Stephanie’s hand when one of the nurses, who was very big and strong, pushed me out of the way so she could start compressions. Julie kept saying, “This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.” Nicole said, “It’s an AFE, it’s the only thing that can do this. She’s in cardiac arrest.”
I saw a weird flash but was more focused on the chaos, which was at a fever pitch. I watched in horror as they worked on me. It was hard at this point to be just an observer. Not only was I watching what was going on, but I could feel it too. Two different perspectives.
Meanwhile, I noticed that nobody in the OR was talking to me. They were just treating me like a science experiment that had suddenly lost its electrical activity. They were all doing their jobs, but not realizing I wanted to know what was going on.
I watched as Julie stood frozen in shock. I saw Nicole put a tube down my throat and get my breathing back. I gagged. I looked down at my C-section and saw blood pouring out. I felt them jabbing my arm as they put another IV into it and called for another blood bag. They cut into my side to put in another tube. The blood they were putting into me was pouring out of me seconds later. I was feeling lighter and lighter.
I watched every detail as they brought me back to life. I could see my blood on Julie’s face as she wiped her forehead, and I could hear Nicole speaking very loudly and asking for different medicines.
It was at that point that I realized my spirit was no longer in the room and I understood what the flash had been. I had seen my spirit shoot up into the sky at the moment of my death.
Fully bonded: After a troubling beginning to our relationship, I became Jacob’s mom in every sense of the word.
LORI ALLEN PHOTOGRAPHY
Chapter 14
HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE to be back in the OR and see everything? Had Nicole really been at my feet and not where she was supposed to be at the head of my bed? And why did Julie freeze? Was there any validity to what I’d seen?
I kept wrestling with these questions. Maybe it could all be explained as some part of me that could accept it storing the information in my brain when the rest of me couldn’t. But then came another question: When I floated down the hallway and watched Adina and Tessie playing, how could I have known what was going on in that room? Was I even right?
As I struggled to process all that had gone on during that regression session, I started thinking about what else I saw in the OR. I’d seen Julie down by my feet, but she wasn’t doing the delivery. I’d seen another doctor there cutting into my abdomen and helping to pull Jacob out. Someone who seemed familiar. Strange. And if a curtain had been put up so I wouldn’t see the C-section as it was happening, why could I see right through it to my feet and see this other doctor? It didn’t make sense.
Was I making all of this up, or did I in fact see the whole thing? The only way to find out for sure was to talk to my doctors and Tessie. But my first stop was Jonathan. I asked him if someone else performed the C-section. He said he was never told that. He said that when Julie came out of the operating room covered in blood, she explained what had happened but said nothing about someone else performing the surgery. He just assumed she did.
I had purposely stayed away from reading my medical records and l
istening to my doctors’ stories about what happened in the operating room. I didn’t think I was strong enough yet to read or hear it, but I had another reason as well. I didn’t want to know too much before starting regression therapy. I didn’t want my recollection to be tainted. I needed to find proof another way.
I sent a message to Nicole, and she agreed to a video-recorded call. I planned to play her the tape from my last session and record her response. I asked Jonathan to join me. He was looking forward to hearing her version of what really happened.
I was nervous. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the regression. I almost wanted to just show her one quick moment, not the entire tape, but Jonathan said I needed to show her the entire piece to get her full reaction. I got on the call and played the tape. Jonathan would not watch it, and I had to walk away. I went to the bathroom, broke down, and threw up.
Jonathan came to find me in the bathroom. He picked me up and wiped my tears, and after a little while he said, “Come on, go back and find out what she thinks. I’m here when you need me.”
Nicole was silent. She had tears in her eyes. She said, “Watching you, I’m back in the operating room the day that it all happened. You took me right back into that moment. It brings back memories for me. It was hard to watch. I remember what I was feeling in those moments, and you took me right back there. I’m a little skeptical.”
My heart sank, but I knew I needed to hear the truth and not what I might have perceived to be the truth. If she told me that none of it was true, I would have closure. I would also know that the therapy was working to alleviate the stress I was under. At least now I would have my answer.
“You are obviously in distress,” she continued. “It’s hard to watch this. Is it hard for you to watch this?”
I answered, “I had to walk away from it, so yes, it is.”
Nicole said that she didn’t remember some of what I said, but then some of it she did. “Part of me is a little bit skeptical. The scientific part of me says that you were under anesthesia. You had no blood pressure or circulation. How could you remember this?”
So was she saying that she believed what I was saying in my therapy to be true?
“Part of me is a little freaked out, because it may call into question everything we think about regarding medicine and what we think happens. And then part of me thinks, wow, it’s pretty amazing.”
I didn’t want to hear any more. I thought she might change her mind and discount everything. “You know I was under stress too,” she said. “Not to the same extent as you were, but it does provoke a little anxiety in me too.” She continued: “The skeptical side has to do with a lot I know about medicine, or better, what we think we know about medicine. We didn’t put you under anesthesia. You were unconscious with no blood pressure. So I mean, I guess it is conceivable that you could definitely have sensory input from that time. We think about it and we think, okay, if you don’t have any blood pressure and there is no blood going to your brain, how are you possibly going to have any kind of sense that was going on? But I mean, I guess you can!”
That was good. What Nicole was saying would give Jonathan a possible scientific reason for some, but not all, of this. I asked her where she had been standing. She told me, “At the foot of the table.”
“Why?” I asked.
She said she went to the foot of the table because there were others by my head and she wanted to get a better view. I asked her to tell me if the sensory input she referred to could include sight, because I saw everything happening around me even though my eyes were closed. “Probably not,” she said. Still, she had no other explanation. “I just don’t know what to make of this.”
I screamed for Jonathan after I hung up. Surely he would have to believe this now. He said, “Wow, that’s incredible. You sure you didn’t hear any of what you saw from her before your session?” Well, now I was getting pissed off.
I immediately called Grace on video chat and asked her a ton of questions. Why had she felt compelled to stay in the OR? How had she felt about me that day? What was she feeling now that time had passed and she’d had time to decompress?
In answering, she was very conservative, showing no real emotion but just telling me that she had felt strongly that she needed to be there in the OR that day. Soon we were in deep conversation, and I was waiting before showing her the tape. I knew the right time would come.
I told her that in my session I’d seen some things in the operating room. She had been standing next to the EKG unit, I told her, then I explained that my spirit was standing next to her. Then it hit me: my spirit was standing next to Grace, and only Grace, that day because she was the one I felt had been connected to me from day one. She’d known something was going to happen, and so had I. Everyone else was doing their job as if nothing was about to happen. But both Grace and I knew differently. I’d felt safe with her and knew that she would be there in my time of need.
Again, her response was conservative: “Anything is possible. It doesn’t freak me out, I am open to it.” And then she confirmed that she was in fact standing exactly where I said she was.
In the last five minutes of the call, she explained to me that what happened to me was not what she would describe as a seizure, but more of a gagging, like dry heaving. I decided to show her the tape of the moment I “seized.” When she saw it, this straight-faced doctor’s look changed. Her lips started to purse, tears welled up in her eyes, and she began to look a little uncomfortable. When the code moment had passed, I turned off the video and asked, “Did it look like that?” She answered, “It looked exactly like that.”
The responses of these two doctors only strengthened my growing conviction that what I’d seen through regression was real, but I continued to try to get more validation. I guess I didn’t want any loose threads to unravel this new information.
I asked Tessie about the time she spent in the labor and delivery room with Adina. She confirmed that Adina played with the blood pressure cuff and that she had pretended to be Doc McStuffins. How did I know that? she asked. And had I seen her dancing in the room too? “No,” I said, “but I must’ve left before that party had started.”
Lastly, I made arrangements to see Julie for lunch. I showed her the tape, and she started to cry. When it was finished, she spoke with both a shaky voice and an unbelievable sense of enlightenment. “It is accurate down to where Nicole was, where I was. Exactly as it happened, you recounted it in detail, and blood pooling up, and I couldn’t close you right away and making a drain and waiting in the OR.” I asked her if she had said, “This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.”
“I don’t know whether I said that out loud or in my head,” she responded, “but I definitely said it.” She also corroborated her “frozen” state. She explained that, besides being in shock herself, she’d had to wait for Nicole to finish getting me back up on-line before she could do her job and close me up. So she just stood there. But a nurse had told her she could do something while she was waiting. She could put my uterus back in my body. That had snapped her back to reality.
Then Julie shocked me by going a step further and acknowledging that my description of what happened that day went beyond possible scientific explanation. “There was no way that you would have had any other ability to recount that, in that kind of detail,” she said, “unless you were in the spirit and your body was on the table. There was no other way.”
Finally, I asked her the question that, more than any other, had become the defining one for me. Had she been the one to perform my C-section? I held my breath.
“No,” she replied.
Chapter 15
JULIE’S CONFIRMATION that another doctor had performed my C-section solidified my feeling that I had “been there.” I’d seen what happened in the OR. I’d gone back there. But I was still a little confused about whether this was a suppressed memory, the work of my imagination, or some other type of ethereal experience.
I tried
to break it down. If I was imagining what I saw, how could the doctors confirm it? If I was gaining access to a suppressed memory, how could I have seen through the curtain blocking my view of my feet and seen that Julie didn’t perform the C-section but another doctor did? That left one answer. The experience was an ethereal one.
I didn’t need to ask any more questions about what had happened in the OR. I was ready to move on. Jonathan was relieved to hear it, but his relief was short-lived when I wondered aloud, “If I could see the operating room, would it be possible to see more? Was I present during my six days in the coma?” He wasn’t happy about that. Back I went to regression.
Slipping into a hypnotized state came easily as Linda gently guided me. It didn’t take long. Suddenly I was in my ICU room, watching Jonathan.
ME: I see him sitting next to me. I see him holding my hand. I see him whispering in my ear, telling me he loves me and that I’ve got to come through this. He says, “I can’t live without you. You have to come through this.” He’s stroking my hair.
LINDA: Where are you?
ME: Over his right shoulder.
LINDA: You’re out of body in the hospital?
ME: Yeah.
Over the next few hours, I described how I floated down to the maternity ward to see Jacob. I told Linda I saw my brother-in-law Roy and Jonathan bringing my mother into my room.
LINDA: Can you feel her pain?
ME: I can feel her pain.
LINDA: Do you see what she sees?
ME: I do. It’s the first time in my life that I actually feel that she feels pain regarding me instead of her own pain and her own stuff. It’s genuine pain. She looks like she’s going to throw up. She’s got a fanny pack around her stomach, and it just looks like it weighs more than her.
Then, my view changed.
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