Adrianne G's NDE (translated from Spanish)

In 2005, I went to the hospital because I tried to drink a cup of coffee and where I thought it was, I couldn’t grab it. It was 6 inches from the place where I saw it. I got scared and ran to the hospital without worrying about a cough that didn’t even allow me to speak. There, they diagnosed me with atypical pneumonia but I didn’t have phlegm or expectorations, only a lot of coughing. It was all caused by a generalized lupus erythematosus.

After 15 days, I left the hospital with the recommended doses of cortisone and medications for joint pain that were sufficiently strong to control the lupus, but which wouldn’t affect other parts of my body.

That’s how the years passed until December 5, 2015. I entered the hospital because I couldn’t breathe. I was kept in the hospital for tests and they didn’t find anything abnormal. I left on the 12th to return on the 18th with a new crisis in my lungs that was keeping me from breathing. I had pulmonary edema. This time they took a liter of blood from my lungs. I was there until December 26, and they told me that the danger had passed and that I was well.

I returned to the hospital on February 23 with a great deal of fatigue and unable to breathe again. On this occasion I put myself in God’s hands, because I felt it that it was already the end and in fact it I already wanted to die because I was very tired. I had already endured ten years of continual joint pain, constant fatigue, and being overweight by 110 pounds caused by so many steroids and so much cortisone that I was given to control the inflammation in my joints So I was really exhausted.

So I said goodbye to everyone and on just the second day in the hospital, they transferred me to intensive care, first with nasal ports for oxygen, then a mask, and later they intubated me with a feeding tube and fed me this way for eight days. After that, they removed the tube and gave me a tracheotomy. Because I was in this condition, my doctors gave my husband a very discouraging prognosis. They told him that I had no possibility of recovering, and that if I recovered at all, I would have to be in a wheelchair and connected to an oxygen machine because my lungs were not able to regenerate enough because the damage had been so great.

In the process of the tracheotomy, which they did only to keep administering Mab Thera, a medicine recommended by my rheumatologist after the pneumologist said there was nothing else to be done, they let me go. The medicine was supposed to take effect in no later than two days, but five days passed and I only became more critical. The doctors had already given up, when suddenly the pneumologist jumped up and told my husband he didn’t know whose opinion we were respecting, but that we should listen to him because something unexpected was happening. My body began to show very slight signs of improvement, but to him the improvements were enormous.

At that moment, I had left my body and began to return home. I suddenly saw myself as a light, floating in a universe full of colors and forms that opened and closed, and I entered them and went through them full of joy, of happiness, of peace—a joy which there are no words to explain--until I came to another portal, so to speak, in which there was a female figure. She was only a light, but when she spoke, she identified herself as an aunt who had died four months before. And she told me, “Adriana, if you pass through here, you will not be able to return.” I understood that she was giving me a choice. I was still me, Adriana. I was not my body, but I was my essence, and I began to ask myself what there was to return to? Why leave that place where I was so happy, so full, and with such great joy and love in my heart, when I heard my daughter’s voice, telling me, “Mom, I need you for my wedding.” She didn’t have a boyfriend and during the 45 days that I had been in intensive care, she always told me that if I was exhausted, to leave, not to stay for them. But this day was different. She asked me to come back. I understood that we are in this world for love, because only a love of that magnitude could make us leave that peace and the unimaginable joy of that plane.

 

When I made the decision to return, I heard a male voice, telling me, “It is not going to be easy, but the best years of your life were still to come.” And so it was, from that point on, my recovery was wonderful. My alveolus began to function, my tracheotomy tube was removed. They told me I would not be able to talk without covering the hole for three to five days while it healed, and that evening I was talking and taking medication as if I had never had the tracheotomy. And it’s been that way since. Today, I breathe without oxygen, I walk, I travel. Only at altitudes of over 1600 feet above sea level do I need a little extra oxygen. My life is completely normal. I weigh 180 pounds, nothing hurts, and I feel better than ever.

 

From NDERF.org