Speaker 1: Tell me what you loft was like before you died.
Speaker 2: I met my husband, married him, moved to Chicago from
LA We worked in TV for most of my career
and I worked extremely well under pressure. My husband's a PhD.
Economists from University of Chicago, very level headed, very grounded.
And we get married and I moved to Chicago and
we have our first child, and it was a difficult
process having children. So I had to go through IVF,
which is in mutual fertilization. It's done outside and inside
of the body, and we had after three rounds of IVF,
we had a beautiful, healthy baby girl after and the
only complication I had was that she was too big
and I had to have a c section, But it
wasn't complicated other than that. And then the second child, Jacob,
that I got pregnant with, that was after seven rounds
of IVF and first half of the pregnancy. The first
twenty weeks of the pregnancy no problem. We had no issue,
and at the twenty week old sound, I was diagnosed
with something called a placenta previa, which is basically where
the placenta is growing on top of the cervix. However,
when the doctor said, I had this placenta previa.
Speaker 1: It startled me and I look at my husband.
Speaker 2: I said, I have a very rare blood type O
negative and which is seven percent of the population. I said,
I don't want to be special in any other category.
And I have a bad feeling about this. So I
get back to the apartment and I'm typing on a
placenta previa.
Speaker 1: What's that then turns? If it happens to turn into
a placenta a creedo. If that happens, you might bleed.
Speaker 2: If that happens, as I keep reading, you might hemorrhage.
If that happened, you might need a hysterectomy. And if
that happens during the hemorrhage, you and the baby could
lose your life. And I sat back and I looked
at the computer and I telled my husband.
Speaker 1: I said, this is going to happen to us.
Speaker 2: The only difference is the baby's going to be fine,
I said, but I'm going to be dead on the
opgraading table. I didn't just talk to him. I talked
to everybody. I talked to nurses, doctors, you know, every
visit I had. I told that the doctors this was
going to happen. This was going to happen there, like Stephanie,
there's no indication that this is going to happen.
Speaker 1: And in their defense, the tests were negative.
Speaker 2: So at some point I was told that if I
deliver and I have an emergency situation where I need
a hysterectomy, my ob will not be the one to.
Speaker 1: Do the procedure. They will transfer to maternal fetal medicine.
Speaker 2: And with that it's an information, and armed with that,
I made an appointment with the head of Guyanag at
Northwestern Memorial Hospital. It is not easy to get an
appointment with a Guyana, the head of guya when you
are not suffering from any kind of cancer. So ultimately
Jonathan went with me to each and every appointment with me.
So he's sitting with me in this waiting room with
all of these women and so they have ivs in
their arm, they have no hair on their head, they
have their suffering from from cancer and they're barely surviving it.
So we go in, we meet the head of Guayanan.
He's like, miss Arno, how can I help you? The
resident is taking notes and because I explained my persent
of previous is going to turn into any creta, I'm
going to need a hysterect to me. My husband likes
to say that it was very mafia like. It's like
I see you, you see me, you're my doctor. All
I did was focused on, like how am I going
to say? No one is listening to me, so I
have to do this. My daughter was a year and
a half too, and I was taking on a stroller
and you know, we were walking across the park and
it was a winter day and I was explaining.
Speaker 1: How the fountain when it's flowing is beautiful.
Speaker 2: And then the fountain turned in my mind's eye of
blood and started rushing and I felt it. So then
I'm like I had a visceral reaction to a hemorrhage
in my body.
Speaker 1: And I grabbed this and I called my husband. I
said meet me in the in the emergency room.
Speaker 2: So I go to the emergency room and they triaged
me and they're like, miss Arnold, are you okay?
Speaker 1: I said no, I'm bleeding, and you know.
Speaker 2: I was wearing black leggings. I have no idea, and
so they were like, no, you're not amnantic. Fluid's fine,
Everything's fine. And my husband's like thank God, it's just
it's a false alarm.
Speaker 1: So at thirty six weeks to the day.
Speaker 2: My husband is on a business trip and I'm giving
my daughter breakfast and I start leaning on the kitchen
floor and I know that today's the day. So I
sent him a text saying, you know, we're going to
deliver today, and so he stops meeting.
Speaker 1: He gets on a plane wor skype chatting.
Speaker 2: When I'm triage at the hospital, the doctor said, you know,
the oars are very quiet right now.
Speaker 1: I know you've been stressed this whole time. Let's go
ahead and get Jacob out.
Speaker 2: Adina was playing and you know I kissed her a
million times because I was convinced it was the last
time I was ever going to see her. So they
take me down to the r I tell my doctor
there was something wrong. You need to put me under
general anesthesia, and she's like, I'm not going to put.
Speaker 1: You to sleep.
Speaker 2: I know you're nervous, but because John is not here,
but I'm here for you. If I put you to
sleep up with the baby to sleep, it's not good.
Speaker 1: So they set me up.
Speaker 2: When you have a c section, your arms are in
a tee. There's a curtain in front of your face.
The room is really cold, and it's phone chilling cold
for me because the fear is palpable now because I
know the minute that he gets delivered. They no one
else can see it, no one else. Everybody is looking
at the clock doing their job you'd.
Speaker 1: Call doing roll call.
Speaker 2: Everything else they cut, They take care of Jacob. Jacob's delivered,
happy and healthy, no problem, and seconds later I went
into cardiac arrest. I ended up having a very rare
pregnancy complication called an amniotic fluid embolism, and it's a
one in forty thousand risks where amniotic cells get into
the mother's bloodstream and if you happen to be allergic
to it, your body goes in tanaphylactic shock, and in
most cases you don't make it. I am the first
to have survived at that time from full blown AFY.
And there was something in the operating room. I predicted
a lot, but there was something in the operating room
I did not predict, and that was there was a
crash cart and there was extra blood available and I
needed both of them. I f thattline for thirty seven seconds.
Speaker 1: They got me back up. They intubated me.
Speaker 2: And tape my eyeshut, and then the second part of
an AFI starts, which is your body's inability to clot
blowood and so your normal body has twenty units of blood.
I was given sixty units of blood and blood product
to save my life.
Speaker 1: I'm on life support. They put me in a medically.
Speaker 2: Induced coma, and seven hours later show that I'm still bleeding,
and they call in the guynock that I had met
with to perform the hysterectomy. They do the pathology on
the universe and they show that a creta had started
to form.
Speaker 1: So on day six, I had kidney failure.
Speaker 2: As soon as they extibated me, I looked down at
my swollen belly because I'm severely endemic. I look still pregnant,
but I was in the hospital for a month and
it was hard for me to process everything.
Speaker 1: So I get home.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm trying to acclimate friends, family, shell shock.
So a friend of mine, Latina friend of mine said,
I think you should go meet with this Cuban a
regression therapist, and regression uses hypnotherapy to take you back
into the moments of trauma.
Speaker 1: So what the hopes are.
Speaker 2: Is that you could be the observer in those traumas.
It's like your memory, all right. Those memories are like
film strips stored in your head, and through the hypnosis
you can access them. The pain will not be as
severe as it was the first time around. And I
really wanted to understand what happened during those three months before,
and so I videotaped my therapy. I mean we did
it over Skype. I had split screens. I was like,
let me document everything. I didn't know if I'd remember anything.
I'd never been hypnotized before. We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
And so you know, it took well over thirty hours
of therapy to get me finally back into the arm.
And when she did it, my body convulse and sees
And then I started explaining what I saw with a
complete out of body experience. And which nurse hit the
button for the cove, which nurse jumped on my chest
to give me CPR. What my doctor was doing down
by my feet, what the anstesiologist was doing down by
the feet, Well, my daughter was doing down the hall
in the labor and delivery room. What my husband was
wearing when I go off the plane, what my mother
was doing when I was the third day of my coma.
Speaker 1: Like there were just all these little things.
Speaker 2: And when I got done with that session, there was
the sense of relief, like I felt better because not
only did I see all this, I saw hundreds of spirits,
and these spirits were not like And this was in
this moment of flatline where somebody said, oh, did you
see the light?
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know, I was an observer watching what
was going down.
Speaker 2: I saw my body on the table, and then I
saw my spirit perpendicular, and then as I flatline, I
see a shooting start. Now, maybe if I was the
eyes of spirit, I would have seen a.
Speaker 1: Tunnel of light.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but that's not what I saw. But
I went to this heavenly place. It was not I
didn't see God. I didn't see buildings, but I saw
hundreds of spirits and they were like two steps up,
like almost a gathering of congregation and people that I knew,
and that was lovely. And then there were people that
I didn't know, and one being his father, Jonathan's father.
And so when I explained that I saw his father
and then he had a message because he had a
specific coin and he had this tweed jacket, and I
was describing the details to the tweed jacket and describing
the details to the point because the point was a
foreign point and his father was a foreign service officer
and a diplomat.
Speaker 1: So it's pop.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe I could have made shit up in
my head. But he was like, tell, my father said
high right, and my father never had.
Speaker 1: A tweet jacket, right.
Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, fine, forget about the jacket. What about
the coin? And he's like, I don't know what you're
talking about, Stefane. So, like all these things, I take that.
So I take the tapes of the doctors. The doctors
were like, you shouldn't know any of this. It's accurate
down to where we're standing, what we were doing. Because
I said to my doctor, did you say this can't
be happening, This can't be happening.
Speaker 1: She's like I did, but.
Speaker 2: In my head, and so in her she was down
by my feet on her mask, covering her mouth like
saying and in her mask, there's no way, you know,
like with all the.
Speaker 1: Commotion and the chaos and the screaming.
Speaker 2: And everything that there's no way that I would have
heard any of it. And then this nurse one I
want to thank every Bundy. When I went to stay
hi to the doctors, the listenerse came up to me
and she said, you know, miss Arnold, you don't know
who I am, but it's really nice to see you
walking again.
Speaker 1: And I was like, you broke my ribs and she said,
and I do it again to save your life.
Speaker 2: And I was told later that she went back to
her office and cried for a long time because I
shouldn't know that she was the one that gave me
the CPR. And so it was accurate down to it,
I said, And there wasn't just one crash cart, there
were two crash parts and she's like, I don't know
about that, and then they went back and checked it
and it was absolutely accurate. And so to me, there's
no question. Not only does consciousness exist because the brain
starts shutting down after twenty seconds, and yes, hearing is
the last to go, but I most certainly couldn't have seen,
and my eyes were tape shut and I was on
life support, and there were just a lot of things
that happened. The actual afterlife, the actual consciousness and what
you're seeing, you're floating.
Speaker 1: I mean, people talk about astrol travel.
Speaker 2: They talk about the ability to feel things empathically around them,
those spirits around you, and I continue to feel that
there is a pleasant vibration around that. The sadness I felt,
and what I feel like a lot of people are
when they're afraid of death, is that they'll never physically
be able to touch their loved once again, that there
will be a gaping hole in their life because they
life goes on and they are not there physically to
take up space, but they do matter and they do exist,
and we go from a solid to a gas, you know,
and so we're still around. We're still we're still made
of energy. We just transition from one form to another.
So I've learned how to ground myself differently. But it's
also taken it's been a process to accept that what
this is is real because for the longest time, and
being married to who I'm married, and then also questioning, like,
you know, what happens.
Speaker 3: If I didn't speak up, like what happened, if I
didn't believe what was filmed with what happens if I
were you and saying Okay, I'm crazy, you know, like
I'm just going to shut up because obviously the tests
are negative.
Speaker 2: You know that scares me periodically because I'm like, I
am intuitive enough to feel it, or I was given
those messages that I was intuitive enough to listen to them,
and if I didn't, and what happens again, if it happened,
if other things happen, if I choose.
Speaker 1: To ignore them, what will the outcome be?
Speaker 2: And so I no longer question that it's not real
because for I think I wanted to question the validity
of it all and thinking that I made it up,
which is also the reason why I documented.
Speaker 1: Everything along the way.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I have to keep myself so honest about
every single process because as a reality producer, you know,
we do enhanced reality, and I'm like, this is my
own reality in this enhanced org, like in this supercharged world,
this can't be real. And so if you start imagining
where your brain and where I've been in TV since
I was fourteen.
Speaker 1: Like it's impossible to believe this is real.
Speaker 2: But thank god everything, Like I was constantly with all
everyone I told the Facebook, posting the goodbye letters, like
everything is so well documented. In order to keep me
honest about it, I was very I'm like, oh, I.
Speaker 1: Made this shit up, right.
Speaker 2: I was like, I made it up and no one
will let me get away with that ever, and that's good.