Near death experiences are pretty simple; they end one way…or the other. It’s the “near” part that one gets to live to tell and that part is what I am going to tell you about; one that happened to me several years ago.
One Sunday morning, I got up, only to realize that I had no energy to stay up so after my coffee, I went back to bed. For months I had been traveling, hosting travelers, traveling some more and running back and forth to my crazy-quilt series of jobs that I did to pretend that I was gainfully employed. So, I went back to bed to catch up on some much needed sleep.
For what seemed like the entirety of the two hours that I slept, I dreamed that I was having a heart attack. I was breathing hard and experiencing crushing pain in my chest and asking people for help. At times, I realized I was dreaming and tried to wake myself up, only to fall back into the dream and the accompanying fear. I pretend-woke myself up about three times before I finally got myself awake. I was exhausted. I had been having some weird sensations in my arm for a few weeks…a numbness I couldn’t explain, but it usually went away so I didn’t give it a second thought. My dreams probably latched on to that and turned it into something more dramatic.
Coincidentally, the next day I had a routine doctor’s appointment. My pharmacy had messed up my prescription and when I called my doc to have him resend it, they noticed I hadn’t been seen in awhile, and suggested that I come in. Fine. At my appointment, we chatted about boring aging stuff and then he said, “Anything else I should know about?” I said, “No. Well, I’ve had this thing with my arm, where it doesn’t move for a few minutes.” He said, “Hm.” He sounded serious. He never sounded serious. “It sounds like a TIA.”
A couple of things here…the first one is that one of the reasons I go to this doctor is because is not an alarmist. No worries, very laid back…take the meds, don’t take the meds…no skin off his teeth. I like that in a doctor. The second thing is a TIA is a Transient Ischemic Attack – a mini stroke. All of a sudden this guy is talking about strokes and blood pressure and he wants to listen to my heart and knock on my knees.
What kind of a doctor was he anyway?
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
“No”, I said. Like I was going to tell him about the white flashes in my eye.
When I left, the nurse said she was going to set up a carotid Doppler and I would get a call when they could schedule it. That sounded like I had several weeks before I had to worry about this again. Then, on the drive home, my cell phone rang. It was the radiology place calling to set up the appointment. For the next day.
That scared me. Since when does any test get scheduled for the next day? I’ve never had anything scheduled less than six weeks out. The fear from my dream came roaring back to me…was it foreshadowing? I was so scared that when I went home I didn’t even talk about it, not to my husband, my family or any of my friends. The appointment was after school, and I wouldn’t need a ride, so no big deal. I went by myself. After it was over, and they didn’t rush me by ambulance to the nearest hospital, I decided I was okay. The tech said I would hear from the doc by the next day.
As promised, the next day, the nurse called to schedule both an MRI and an MRA…of my brain. Guess when? The following day! Was I the only one who needed tests in Connecticut? I was a wreck. I imagined writing good-bye letters to my family. Just thinking about it made me cry. I pictured my head as a big black time bomb like in a cartoon…just waiting to go off. That’s what I was…a walking time bomb. Was my time up already?
So, let’s jump to the end. (No pun intended.) At my office on the afternoon after the rest of the tests, I got the call that I was fine. At least my brain didn’t indicate that there was any damage or potential danger . . . for now.
Even though that was a few years ago, I recall it again and again. Because, and not to sound too catastrophic here, but with us humans, there’s always danger. We’re all so fragile, so oblivious. And nothing has made that as crystal-clear to me lately as what my family has been experiencing in just the few short years since my own brush with mortality. Since I’m still around to realize it, I can share a couple of lessons I learned that day.
The first one of course is to always keep my mouth shut when I go see my doctor. And the second, more important one, is to NOT keep my mouth shut with the people I love. Keeping things to myself--good or scary--doesn’t do anyone any good. Especially me, but it’s not fair to the people I love, either. Then they don’t get to comfort me, boss me around, do endless research on the internet in the hopes of providing alternate diagnoses or feel scared themselves.
We’re always near-death, aren’t we? If it’s not in our own lives, our own families, it’s all around us, especially recently. Pandemics, school shootings, war—our world is constantly reminding us how close death is. But we’re also close to life; we have it right now. For many of us, that means we’re near friends, we’re near home, and we’re near family.
We’re near love.
Cindy: I’m glad you survived your near-death experience. I chronicled my own adventure in a piece a couple years ago - even though I categorically denied learning anything from the experience, clearly I did. . .
https://ruleofthree.substack.com/p/i-was-dead-but-im-better-now
Loved this, Cindy! The "near" life struck a chord with me. Yes, we are near life and near love and we need to stay present and enjoy as much as possible.