When Stephanie Arnold found out she was pregnant with a second child – already in the first months of pregnancy, she felt bad, and not necessarily in the physical sense.
According to her, for many weeks she walked around with the feeling that something bad was going to happen in this birth, without having any idea where these thoughts and feelings were coming from.
In a recent interview with her, Arnold said that this early feeling that she was about to die – came true in the 20th week of her pregnancy, when she died for 37 seconds. “I saw the doctors from above, leaning over me and trying to save me,” she said in a recent documentary that tells her story. “I hovered over my body, and I also saw my relatives die.”
She said she had no ability to share with her environment what she was going through, before. “It was so hard trying to talk about feeling like something bad was going to happen, when I had nothing tangible to show. I told my husband Jonathan ‘I don’t know what to tell you, other than the fact that I have a strong feeling that something bad is going to happen.'”
If someone stopped her on the street and asked her how you were, and how the pregnancy was progressing – “I would just say ‘I’m going to die'”
It got to the point where, she explains, if someone were to stop her on the street and ask her how you were, and how the pregnancy was progressing – “I would just say ‘I’m going to die'”.
Interesting to note, but her death did not occur in the birth itself, as she gave birth to little Jacob with no problems at all. “It happened according to what I was told just a few moments after the birth,” she recalls. “I died a clinical death for 37 seconds, and I just saw them lead me to a room that gives life to Jacob and takes mine. Jacob was born and seconds later I died and moved on to a 3D movie where I could see everything going on outside my body. I saw it all. “What happens in the operating room, and I saw the anesthesiologist sitting in a chair next to my feet. I saw the nurse jumping on my chest to do CPR, and just about everything. There was no ceiling, no walls. Everything turned in many directions and I could see everything.”
One of the harder scenes she remembers from those moments of horror is her daughter with her caregiver, who was on the whole other side of the hospital altogether. “Suddenly I saw the doctor, Dr. Levitt, shout, ‘It can’t happen, it can’t happen’ before I felt a strong pull in my stomach and went back to my body.”
When she woke up, Stephanie was surprised to find that her near-death experience lasted six days (!) During which she was in a coma and with severe kidney failure. “It took me close to a year to recover from everything I went through, and I had to learn to do the simplest things in life, like eat or talk. I’m glad everything’s behind me,” she concludes.