Annamai's Recovery

On the morning of November 23, 1997, I started the day with a simple: I wanted to make a dream come true. I wiped the first winter frost from the windshield of my car and drove to the local Salvation Army in search of Christmas ornaments. It would to be the first time I decorated a tree with my fiance, Robert. I found twelve antique tin bulbs, bought them, and then headed to a chiropractic appointment, unaware that my life would never be the same again.

On this second visit to treat intolerable neck pain, the right artery of my brain stem was severed during a routine adjustment. It happened in an instant. Once the chiropractor released my head from his hands, I heard ringing in my ears. Intuitively, I knew something had gone terribly wrong, and somehow I knew it was all irreversible. "I feel really sick," I told him. "Just sit there a minute," he answered me. I then spoke my last words for months: "No. Something is really wrong." What was he going to do, and what was going to happen I wondered, but he simply said he'd be back, and left me alone in the room. I sat atop the adjusting table and tried to sit upright and breathe, but the collapse of my body began. His wife walked into the room just as I lost all muscular control and started to sway. I vomited and fell to the floor, my head crashing against the cement under the carpet. I was dying. I would soon be dead. I realized this.

I had no resistance to leaving the Earth. I was only 25, but my life had been complete. I knew all I had done and tried to be had mattered and was enough. Nothing felt unfinished, and I simply began to leave my body. No time passed before I was completely outside myself, shooting through the clouds, scaling through space, arriving and leaving plane after plane of Heavenly sites. I merged with my soul, then experienced a brief life review, heard vivid auditory answers from God, Experienced Heavens, saw angels, light bodies, visions of reincarnation, and was ultimately absorbed into The Tree of Life. Everything was indescribably tranquil. I heard the chiropractor's wife crying for help over and over. She panicked while I heard Nina Simone sing, He Was Too Good for Me.

Robert shared Nina with me a few months previous. She sang of who he was to me. I gasped, wanting now to return to him. God, return me to Robert please, I shouted within. Instantly, my deceased paternal grandfather appeared as an apparition. He guided me through the territory I had traveled moments ago, and once in the room he guided me back into my body. It was torturous returning. I felt the chaos and pain instantly. I would have another ten minutes of consciousness before slipping away again, this time into a complete coma for three days.

My large family and Robert, stood vigil while I was gone, once again. Thanksgiving happened at the hospital cafeteria and everyone prayed constantly. I awoke after three days and discovered the stroke resulted in "Locked-In Syndrome." This syndrome causes total physical and respiratory paralysis: literally the state of being trapped in your body.

Those with "Locked-In Syndrome" face horrifically low recovery rates, and better than 90% never recover. I knew this would not be my fate. I list some of the milestones, but arriving at each one was torture and pure suffering. Within two months I was breathing independently and learning to swallow and eat again. After six months, I could walk with a device. On the one-year anniversary of my stroke I was driving, just as I had predicted.

Though I regained the ability to maintain a career and home, and even though God spoke, assuring me that, "Everything will be fine," my life would not seem tolerable for years. Depression ravaged me. My anger seemed unyielding, and my recovery seemed endless. The NDE felt like a gift and a curse. Thousands of tears and books later, I found some answers, and listened to an emerging voice: My soul.

While still recovering from the stroke, I went back to school, and in January 2001, I received a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. Soon after graduation I began teaching English literature, Poetry, and Women's Studies at Wayne State University, University of Detroit-Mercy, and Lawrence Technological University. My suffering aside, my dear students helped me to remember what beauty there was in all of life.

We talked about James Joyce short stories, Sylvia Path poems, and globalization, but all the while, I knew I was suppose to leave the universities after three years. I had received the "knowing" while driving home from teaching my first week in the classrooms. I had no idea what was going to come after years of planning lessons, grading papers, and teaching. I had faith the answer would materialize. In August 2004, I visited Lilydale, a historical spiritualist community in New York with a girlfriend. It was there that I first "read" for a stranger. It was the easiest, most natural experience of my life. In 2004 I agreed to spend my life walking the path put before me.

And that's where I am today, and how we have met. My recovery continues, as it always will. More than saying I walk perfectly again, I'm happy to say I have a loving, conscious, peaceable life with Robert. He is a Master, a sage, and a Buddha. We have many ideas about what we desire next: A solar home, and a great gig on the road together. This will all come in time.

When I'm perplexed, or working hard to push us forward, I remember this: I asked to be returned to this realm not to achieve "success", and not because I left anything unfinished. I simply wanted the chance to have a life with him. I have everything I asked for.