ME: Everything is white right now.
LINDA: Allow yourself to be in the rays of light. Allow yourself to surrender to this light.
ME: It just feels comfortable, warm, pleasant.
LINDA: Are you in the light still?
ME: It’s starting to fade. I’m coming back to the hospital.
I took a detour and saw my dad, with tears in his eyes, sitting in his kitchen and drinking his espresso.
ME: He’s saying the Shema, telling Uncle Marvin to watch over me, and he keeps repeating, “Marvin, don’t let anything happen to her, you stay by her side.”
LINDA: And as you see this, because you can be in two places at once, can you also be in the light? Do you sense Uncle Marvin?
ME (LAUGHING): Yes. He laughs. He says, “You see, even in heaven I have to take your father’s orders. I hear you, Ralph. I always hear you.”
I then saw that I was no longer alone.
LINDA: Open up even more . . . to this level where you’re at. Tell me what else he says.
ME: Other people are around. They’re not threatening, not intruding on the space. They’re just curious.
LINDA: What are they doing?
ME: They’re looking at me and smiling. I feel like I’m two steps down from them and they’re two steps above me. Like I have to climb up to be on their level, but I’m not.
LINDA: Do you want to climb up?
ME: I’ll climb up.
LINDA: What else is the significance there at that level? What do you do there?
ME: Everybody looks normal. They don’t look sick, they don’t look like spirits, because I don’t feel like a spirit. There’s something about them that’s brighter. It’s like after you have a facial and there’s a glow on your skin.
LINDA: Can you see their bodies?
ME: Yeah.
LINDA: All the way down?
ME: Yeah, all the way down. I see the body. I see legs. I don’t see feet. And I see the head.
LINDA: What kind of place is this?
ME: Like a congregation. It’s outdoors. It’s bright white. It’s open. It’s got that mistiness under your feet, but it’s got this warmth. It’s a perfect temperature. People are dressed in different outfits, but it’s comfortable. Somebody’s dressed in a vest with a button-down shirt with khakis, and then you have somebody else dressed in a long dress that’s flowing. And you have somebody in shorts and a T-shirt. Whatever was representative of them at their utmost comfort or the epitome of who they represented in a physical form.
LINDA: Can you connect with one or two that are there?
ME: My Aunt Betty.
LINDA: What about your Aunt Betty?
ME: She offers me a Coca-Cola. She’s the only one that would drink Coke with me. She was just funny. I can tell that they’re watching because she says, “I see your mother is still exercising like an animal. She’ll be alive past everybody else we know.”
I went on.
ME: They’re happy. They’re not in pain. They’re happy and comfortable, and Aunt Betty looks fantastic. Her skin doesn’t look dried out, tired. She looks rested. She looks to be in her late thirties, forties. Not like she looked toward the end of her life. She calls out, “Rae . . . Rachel.” My grandmother (on my mother’s side) shows up, and she looks beautiful. She says she spent all her time down there counting all her money and “here none of it counts.” So they make me laugh.
Then tears started to flow.
ME: I’m sad.
I was crying because I realized I wasn’t supposed to be there.
ME (CRYING): I love them very much . . . but I don’t want to be there.
LINDA: Do they give you any message? They see you suffering. They know what you’re feeling. Do they have any message for you?
ME: My uncle says, “I’ve always known you to be a fighter. I’ve always known you to survive.” He says, “You know what to do.” But I need help, and he says, “You don’t need help. You know what to do. You’ve always known what to do. You knew what to do when you were telling the doctors, you know what to do now.”
LINDA: They have faith in you. They have faith that you know what to do.
Suddenly I needed to come out. I felt pain down my throat and my stomach hurt and my throat was dry. As Linda brought me out of hypnosis, I started sobbing uncontrollably. I had seen something that I couldn’t explain and had connected to people who had been gone for years. But the true source of my anguish was having actually felt what my body felt while I was going through all the operations.
LINDA: Tell me about this pain if you can. What did you get in touch with? What did you feel?
ME (SOBBING): I don’t know if it was the operation. I don’t know where I was, but I just felt it everywhere. I felt my whole body with tubes, cutting knives, blood and pulling, and my throat not being able to breathe and my heart hurting.
LINDA: The symptoms should begin to subside. So it was more getting in touch with what happened that day even though you weren’t in the body?
ME: Yeah, but I turned around to look at me. When I was standing with my uncle and he was saying, “You’ve always known what to do,” and I turned around, and I saw everything being done. I was watching the scalpel go down my entire abdomen and the doctors use a tool to pull everything apart because of the tissue they needed to get to. And it looked excruciating. And I couldn’t breathe because there was a tube down my throat and it was tightened, and my heart was sore from going into cardiac arrest. I realized I was conscious as my spirit looking at me. It was gruesome. It was a horror movie. Put the right music to it, the right lighting, and the right makeup, and you could’ve scared anybody.
LINDA: That’s why you’ve been staying away from this?
ME: Uh-huh.
LINDA: Even though consciously, physically consciously, you didn’t really feel that experience?
That question created more questions. “But how do you know you don’t feel it? Because of medication? If the spirit is separate from the body, does that mean you can’t feel it? Like, how do you know you can’t feel it? Because what I just felt, felt real. How do I know that pain isn’t stored someplace and comes out?”
Linda explained that the pain could certainly be stored in some sort of repository inside my brain and my body, but urged me to think of the pain as being in the past. She thought it was time to prepare to do some healing by relaxing and thinking about that bright, white place.
ME: The people, they weren’t unhappy, they were joking. They were trying to make me laugh and trying to keep me distracted.
LINDA: What do you make of that?
ME: Probably for the reason that they didn’t want me to turn around. They didn’t want me to see it.
It was a strange feeling. It was nice to see my uncle, aunt, and grandmother, and I understood that they wanted to protect me by keeping me from turning around. That made me feel safe. But I knew I couldn’t stay there with them, and that may have been why I turned around.
ME: The place I needed to be was with my husband, with my body, so I could come back to be with my husband.
LINDA: Very powerful feelings.
ME: Yes.
Again I asked her: Was it real? Did I really see a congregation of spirits? Linda wouldn’t give me a direct answer. She just said that I would know in the future.
I continued to go through hours of regression therapy and to see more things that were inexplicable. During one session, I met my husband’s father, Philip, who had passed away long before I married Jonathan. Philip told me about his life’s regrets and his feeling that he should have been around more for his family. During the whole “meeting,” Philip was playing with a coin that was foreign, larger than a regular-size coin, and made from a metal I couldn’t identify. We didn’t talk about the coin during our visit, but it was memorable enough that I asked Jonathan about it. He said he didn’t know of any coin and was doubtful that I had even seen his father. I asked Jonathan’s mother and sister and Philip’s b
rother and sister-in-law about it. No one knew anything about the coin. But weeks later, when I asked Jonathan’s brother Jeremy if he had ever seen such a coin that was his father’s, he replied, “Funny you should say that. I found a unique coin wedged in the crevice of Dad’s old suitcase a while ago.” Jeremy said that it was a foreign coin, one he thought was from their trip to Croatia. That made the message clear to me, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The message was for Jeremy, not Jonathan. Jeremy had been with his father the moment he died, and he was devastated by it. The message was to try to relieve Jeremy’s pain by telling him that there was nothing he could have done to save his father. Philip was only sorry Jeremy had to witness his death and wanted him to remember the happier moments, like the time they had spent in Croatia, not the last time they saw each other.
Now even Jonathan’s skepticism was starting to fade.
In the midst of a marathon five-hour regression session, I saw other things and people. I believe I saw my best friend’s brother, who died when he was seven, ten years before I knew her. He told me, “Tell Sister I always remember how she twirled my hair. I miss that. And the next time she plays with her son, I will be watching her. I’m always around her.” When I called to ask her if that meant anything to her, she broke down in tears and told me she used to twirl his hair all the time. It was something that was calming to both of them. I have no idea where that vision came from or how I saw her brother, but I was learning to roll with it.
It wasn’t just visions I was having. I continued to feel things too. I had spasms in my stomach whenever I ventured into the deepest parts of the regression. I felt a tugging in my stomach every time I tried to go back into what looked like a lighted triangle or anytime I saw my spirit shoot up. There was always an attachment to my body. When Linda asked me what it signified, I told her it felt like an umbilical cord tethering me to the real world, “a physical reminder,” I said, “that we are connected. And if I let go or become detached, all I have left is my body and I would be dead.”
That connection was a lifeline to the afterlife, and all of a sudden it was pulling me back to this life.
Chapter 16
AFTER THAT REGRESSION SESSION, I realized I had to stop living in the past. My journey from death back to life had taken both a physical and mental toll on me, but I was determined to live life to its fullest now. I had an amazing family who needed my complete attention, and a loving husband who needed me to be whole again. I wanted to open myself up to this new life, but I needed to have complete closure first. I decided that would come on Jacob’s first birthday. My re-birth day.
I wanted . . . needed . . . to thank everyone who had worked so tirelessly to help our family stay a family. And I needed to go back to the hospital and thank everyone who had helped save my life.
As we drove up to Prentice Women’s Hospital, a wave of nausea swept over me. I kept reminding myself that I was there only to visit and not to stay, and the nausea went away. I took a deep breath as I got off the elevator on the eighth floor, where I gave birth. The blood drained from my face and the sick feeling returned. Jonathan held my hand tighter and told me, “It’s okay. I’m here . . . this time.”
We continued on our way as I tried to gain more confidence. We had arranged for the hospital to gather as many people as possible who were there one year before, and we were escorted upstairs to the nurses’ station. Our chaperone guided us toward the room, but I didn’t need her to show me the way. I knew where it was. I turned to the RESTRICTED PERSONNEL ONLY door and asked if we were going that way. I knew that once I went through those doors, it would be the third hallway on the left. I knew all of this because it was the hall I had floated down to watch Adina and Tessie playing. I had never been back through there at any other time. It felt like déjà vu.
As we entered the room, nurses started coming up to me, hugging me, shaking my hand, and telling me they were on duty the day I gave birth and coded. Some had been in the delivery room and kept everything running. They might not have performed starring roles, but their parts had been essential to my survival. I knew that. They said they were thankful to see me in such good shape. I told them I was the one who was thankful.
One nurse introduced herself to me as Jessica. She said, “You probably don’t remember me, but . . .” I interrupted her and said, “You were the one who broke my ribs.” I knew immediately that she was the nurse with the strong hands who pushed the “observer” me to get out of the way when she started chest compressions. I had seen her through regression therapy. She smiled and said, “I would break your ribs all over again because it helped save your life.” With tears in my eyes, I hugged her and told her I would be forever grateful.
We handed out cards and small gifts to everyone on the floor who had helped me that day and served as lifelines for my family throughout the ordeal. It was a small token compared to the gift they had given me. Many of them told me they usually didn’t get to see patients after they left the hospital. I was glad to be able to show them how their incredible efforts paid off.
I went down to dialysis. I saw the same two patients who had been lying next to me when I was going through treatment there many months before. They were still there, getting dialysis for their kidney issues, and I felt great empathy. Then I got hit with another wave of nausea. Jonathan held on to my hand, instinctively knowing what I was thinking as the head nurse inside the room asked if she could help us. I asked to see Carla, and the woman looked at me and said, “You look familiar.”
I said I had been a patient there the previous year, and I wanted to say thank you to Carla for helping me. She said, “Oh my, you were our patient, I didn’t recognize you. You look wonderful.” At that moment, Carla stepped out from behind the curtain as she was getting done with another patient. We hugged and both of us started to cry.
As we were wrapping up, a doctor came up to me and introduced herself. Dr. Hyo Park said that she was in the operating room that day. In fact, she said, she was the one who delivered Jacob. There she was, the missing link. The face behind the “familiar” doctor at my feet I had seen in regression. She went on to tell me that she had met me before that day. She was the resident in Dr. Schink’s office, the gynecologic oncologist I went to see when I was having my premonitions. Dr. Park was the resident whose name I never got and who had sat there without saying a word during that office visit, just taking notes. She was the “other” doctor Julie had told me about. Dr. Park told me she also helped care for my wounds after the surgery. She was there before, during, and after. Wow. It wasn’t a coincidence.
I asked her at what point she realized that what had happened to me was what I had predicted. She said, “I was in the operating room when you coded, but I didn’t know it was you. I was in the second operation hours later with Dr. Schink, but I still didn’t know it was you. They sent me down to speak to your husband after we had you stabilized in the ICU, and as I was walking to your room I caught sight of your husband, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. My stomach dropped and I said, ‘Oh my G-d!’”
“Where do you believe the premonitions came from?” I asked her.
“I honestly don’t know,” she replied. “I know we have only learned about 10 percent of the brain, and what we don’t know or cannot answer might be within the other 90 percent.” It was the scientific answer I expected. The next thing she said I didn’t.
“It was a little freaky and still freaks me out thinking about it. It’s nothing they prepare you for in school at all. But personally, I think those visions helped save your life.”
The last piece of the puzzle was complete. I finally understood that not only was I saved to be around for my beautiful family but that I also had a mission. I needed to pass along the message that if you sense something, say something. Doing that had saved my life, and it could save someone else’s.
A friend of mine suggested that I put together a website that could serve as a resource for other AFE survivors and their
families. I created www.stephaniearnold.net and started doing tweet chats and blog posts, talking about everything from pregnancy complications to love. The reaction was overwhelming, and it was continued therapy for me.
Your story is inspirational and my awareness of AFE moms, families, and their needs is forever growing. Sharing your story and the many stories of others is how I plan to help your efforts of healing!
Stephanie, You are a modern-day miracle who is now able to educate women and the medical community in much greater detail on AFE.
Your experience prior to giving birth will also be able to help women become more in touch with their instincts and can teach them to trust their feelings.
I touched base with Miranda Klassen at the AFE Foundation, and she asked me to sit on its board. The coverage of my story had thrust AFEs into the global spotlight, and people were starting to pay attention. Through social media, people found me, tweeted my story, friended me, and commented from as far away as New Zealand and Australia.
I told people wanting more information to search for the AFE Foundation’s work with Baylor College of Medicine and how it had created the first international registry for AFE research. Baylor started receiving more inquiries and requests for patient information. Now that more people were learning about AFE and AFE research, more cases and vital information would be collected. Ultimately, the spread of information should help answer questions that have been plaguing doctors and families for years. I felt really good about this work. It was good—really good.
You know how when you are getting married all you see are wedding magazines and wedding shows you never noticed before? That’s how I was feeling about AFE. Maybe it had always been this way, but every week, all of sudden, I heard about another case, another tragedy, another family in crisis. Women were reaching out to me and asking me about their sense of foreboding and what they should do. I would direct them to the foundation and give them questions to ask their doctors. I was amazed that people were seeking advice from me.
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