My Near-Death Experience: I said “I Don’t Think So,” To God

I didn’t know exactly who was coming for me, all I knew is that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Life is so random.

About six years ago, I had open-heart surgery.

It came about as a fluke.

I’d decided to up my game from walking on my treadmill to joining the YMCA because I was finally starting to feel fit again. The chronic fatigue I’d suffered for years after having my daughter was finally beginning to lift.

I went to a class, which was somewhere between pilates and weightlifting, and while pulling down on the apparatus behind my head, I felt a snap. Not pain, though, more of a foreboding. Like that calm moment in a movie when someone realizes the killer is in the house, but before the murders start.

It was a generalized feeling of dread that came over me. My sympathetic nervous system must have registered the injury.

I felt in one painless instant, everything change. It wasn’t dramatic, like a heart attack, I just knew that something wasn’t right.

Fast forward three days, and I’m in the emergency room after an overnight of inconclusive tests.

It took me two nights to realize I even had a problem. I was so used to being fatigued, I just thought I’d overdone it.

Two nights in a row, I woke up with what I thought was asthma.

On the second night, I called telehealth.

Where I live, we have a hotline you can call before you go to the hospital that will let you talk to a nurse about your symptoms.

I told the nurse that I heard a “crackling” sound when I was breathing out. I thought she’d say to me to take my Ventolin, go back to bed and call my doctor in the morning.

Instead, she said I had life-threatening symptoms, and I should call an ambulance immediately. She asked if I wanted her to call one as we spoke.

The next day, during the echocardiogram, the cardiologist showed my daughter, my husband, and me what they’d just discovered. I’ve snapped a tiny tendon-like cord in my mitral valve.

The reason I’d been exhausted and feeling not myself the last couple of days was that my heart wasn’t fully able to push the blood through my system.

I thought it was odd that I had no pain, and fatigue was my only symptom. I later found out that I had a severe arrhythmia in the ambulance that caused them to give me nitroglycerin and to ask me repeatedly about my heart condition.

Fast forward two more days, and I’m saying goodbye to my husband as they’re wheeling me into surgery. I wasn’t scared exactly, I was in more of a disassociated state. It’s how I coped as a child and how I sometimes still cope with severe stress.

I thought I was just being calm, but the PTSD I suffered for the next few years says differently.

The next time I woke up was in intensive care.

They took me out of the induced coma for a few minutes, so I could see my husband. I had a breathing tube down my throat, and apparently, I tried to pull it out, I don’t remember that.

I do remember coming out of the back of my head, up to my eyes, and seeing my husband.

It is a weird place to be, inside your head in an induced coma.

I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it was like being shoved in a dark room in the farthest recesses of my psyche. I was asleep for a lot of it, but not all, and even though I couldn’t find my way out of my head, I knew I was in it.

I stayed back there for two days, surfacing now and again for the odd listen while I recovered.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a wire in my heart and drainage tubes under my ribs as well as the breathing tube.

At one point, I became conscious enough to hear that someone in another bed was having an emergency. At that exact moment, my breathing tube popped off of the mask that was now over my face, but my nurse was indisposed.

All I could think was, “great, I’ve survived the surgery but am going to die in ICU.”

It took all of the strength I had to reach down and grab the oxygen tube that was now beside me on the bed and try to lift it to the mask, in my head I was screaming for help. In reality, I was whispering, “help me.”

I was hooked up to monitors, and there was more than enough staff, I should have known they would notice what had happened, but imprisoned inside my body, I panicked.

Eventually (probably seconds) later, the nurse came back to reconnect me, and everything was fine. I went back into my head and swam around in random thoughts, memories, and dreams for the duration of my time in ICU.

Oddly, my near, near-death experience didn’t happen there.

I made it out of ICU in one piece and on the mend.

The experience of them pulling out the drainage tubes from under my ribs is something I might wish on my worst enemy, but no one else. I remember the nurse snipping two little stitches and then telling me to take a deep breath.

As the tubes came out, I made a noise that I have never heard before and could never recreate. I wasn’t like the pain noises of giving birth, it didn’t even seem to come from me.

When the tubes came out, I did something so guttural and primal it was completely involuntary. It’s weird when pain makes your body make noises for you.

Then there was the feeling of getting the heart wire pulled out of my heart through a vein that ended in my arm. That was something bizarre, not painful exactly, but indescribably uncomfortable.

I am eternally grateful for sedation and pain medication.

I lived in and out of the back of my head for about five days. Between the pain meds and the pain, it was the place to be.

It was so painful to move, I’d lay in an uncomfortable position for hours, building the nerve to make that last adjustment so I could sleep.

When your chest has been freshly cracked open and wired shut, you come face to face with the fact that the body is an interconnected miracle. When an injury is right in the middle of your body, you can’t escape the consequence of any action.

I remember bursting into tears when I realized I was going to sneeze. I thought it would kill me.

It was a grueling test of my endurance and spirit.

One day as I was lying in my hospital bed, not sleeping or awake, I felt myself retreating to the back of my head again, that place where I lived during my coma.

Down and down, I floated, although it might not have been actually down. It was like when you are falling asleep, and you just start floating, you’re not flying or sinking, just floating.

I started floating downward but not down in the physical sense. It was more like going through a tunnel on the same level but into a different area, a place where you’re here but not here.

I remember looking up and seeing complete blackness. So black it was dense like oil paint. Out of that darkness, clouds began to form. They weren’t white or glowing, it was more like the black outline of black clouds forming on a blank canvas. Like a cartoon.

I found it all very interesting as I watched the show.

All of a sudden, out of the cartoon clouds, a small hole appeared and opened up.

A light started shimmering through the hole, it was pearlescent and fluid. It was just a pinprick at first, but then it got bigger.

When it got to be about the size of a softball (in my mind) a bright light started shining through it. It was a shimmering light, with rays poking through the blackness.

Then it dawned on me, this is the light — THE light.

I didn’t want it to be my time, my daughter was only six, and it was two weeks before her birthday. So even if someone else thought it might be time for me to go, I was quite sure that it wasn’t.

I chose to inform god, or the grim reaper or whatever thought they were coming for me that I was not interested.

I looked up and in a voice that was more a command than a suggestion, said, “I don’t think so,” and in that second, it disappeared, and a nurse was at my bed, shaking me to wake me up.

She said that she’d noticed that my heart rate had gotten dangerously low, and she came in to wake me up.

Either that was a weird coincidence or something extraordinary happened at that moment.

My husband the atheist, thinks it was a simple hallucination, but I’m not so sure.

I don’t really know what to make of it.

It was real in my head. It was a weird coincidence that my heart rate was dangerously low at the moment the clouds opened up and the light appeared.

I don’t have any deep religious beliefs to make me wish this up. I wasn’t out there looking for God. If that was “God,” it came to me.

But I’m a spiritual person, and this has given me comfort and perspective, especially when dealing with the losses of my own.

A wonderful, former boss died of cancer a couple of years ago.

Near the end, she was imprisoned in a wasted body wracked with pain and filled to the brim with painkillers. I hoped that she could hide out in that place in the back of her head while she waited for the end.

I’m sure she wanted to hang on as long as she could for her children, who were young adults at the time.

As I sat with her, I imagined her floating in her mind. Diving deep for respite, bearing the pain now and again to come back up for moments with her children.

I know how it feels to swim through pain to hold your child.

I hoped she could find peace in her temporary home, the one inside herself. So when she saw the clouds forming in the darkness she could feel relieved and ready to embrace the shimmering blinding light.

I wonder how many times she shooed it away in her last days and what it was that finally allowed her to let go.

Life is full of mysteries, and what happens after death is the biggest one. I’m still not sure exactly what happened to me that day.

My husband is convinced that it was a coincidental dream, and he may be right.

But at that moment, when the blackness turned to clouds and the light pierced the darkness, I felt that there was something so beautiful on the other side that I could not allow myself to look.

I had to force my mind’s eye to turn away.

Somehow I knew that the danger was in the beauty and getting swept up in it was a bad idea if I wanted to see my daughter again.

So I said, “I don’t think so,” to God and came back to my family.

I was not ready to take that journey.

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