Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

Stephanie Arnold 0:08
I met my husband. Married him, moved to Chicago from LA. We worked in TV for most of my career, and I work extremely well under pressure. My husband's a PhD economist 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 difficult process having children, so I had to go through IVF, which is in vitro 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 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 20 weeks of the pregnancy, no problem. We had no issue. And at the 20 week ultrasound, 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, It startled me, and I look at my husband, I said, I have a very rare blood type O negative and which is 7% of the population. I said, I don't want to be special in any other category, and I've have a bad feeling about this, so I get back to the apartment, and I'm typing on placenta previa, what's that then turns if it happens to turn into a placenta accreta. If that happens, you might bleed. If that happens as I keep reading, you might hemorrhage. If that happens, 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 told my husband. I said, this is going to happen to us. The only difference is the baby's going to be fine. I said, but I'm going to be dead on the operating 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. They're like Stephanie. There's no indication that this can happen. And in their defense, the tests were negative. So at some point, I was told that if I deliver and I have an emergency situation where I need a hysterectomy, the my OB will not be the one to do the procedure. They will transfer to maternal fetal medicine. And with that information, and armed with that, I made an appointment with the head of guy knock at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. It is not easy to get an appointment with a guy, not the head of guy, not 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 they're suffering from from cancer, and they're barely surviving it. So we go in, we meet the head of gynae. He's like, Miss Arnold, how can I help you? The the resident is taking notes, and because I explained my placenta previa is going to turn into an accreta, I'm going to need a hysterectomy. My husband likes to say that it was very mafia, like, it's like, I see you. You see me. You're my doctor. So all I did was focus on, like, how am I going to save my life? No one is listening to me. So I have to do this. My daughter was a year and a half two, and I was taking her on a stroller, and, you know, we were walking across the park, and it was a win. It was a winter day, and I was explaining how the fountain, when it's flowing, is beautiful. And then the fountain turned in my mind's eye to blood and started rushing, and I felt it. So then I'm like, I had a visceral reaction to a hemorrhage in my body, and I grabbed the stroller and I I called my husband, I said, meet me in the in the emergency room. So I go to the emergency room and they triage me, and they're like, Miss Arnold, are you okay? I said, No, I'm bleeding. And you know I was wearing black leggings, I have no idea. And so they're like, No, you're not. Amniotic fluid is fine. Everything's fine. And my husband's like, thank God. It's just, it's a false alarm. So at 36 weeks to the day, my husband is on a business trip, and I'm giving my daughter breakfast, and I start bleeding 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. He gets on a plane, horse, Skype, chatting. When I'm triaged at the hospital. The doctor said, you know the ORS are very quiet right now. I know you've been stressed this whole time. Let's go ahead and get Jacob out. Idina 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 or I tell my doctor there is something wrong. You need to put me under general anesthesia. And she's like Stephanie, I'm not going to put you to sleep. I know you're nervous, but Jonathan, because Jonathan's not here, but I'm here for you. If I put you to sleep, I put the baby to sleep, it's not good, so they set me up. When you have a C section, your arms are in a T there's a curtain in front of your face. The room is really cold, and it's bone chilling cold for me, because the fear is palpable now. Yeah, 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 call doing Roll Call. Everything else they cut. They take care of Jacob. Jacob's delivered, happy and healthy, no problem. And seconds later, I have went into cardiac arrest. I ended up having a very rare pregnancy complication called an amniotic fluid embolism, and it's a one in 40,000 risk where amniotic cells get into the mother's bloodstream, and if you happen to be allergic to it, your body goes into anaphylactic shock, and in most cases, you don't make it. I am the first to have survived at that time for a full blown afe, 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 flatlined for 37 seconds. They reached they got me back up. They intubated me and taped my eyes shut. And then the second part of an aFe starts, which is your body's inability to clot blood, and so your normal body has 20 units of blood. I was given 60 units of blood and blood product to save my life. I'm on life support. They put me in a medically induced coma, and seven hours later, showed that I'm still bleeding. And they call in the gynoc that I had met with to perform the hysterectomy. They do the pathology on the uterus, and they show that an accreta had started to form. So on day six, I had kidney failure. As soon as they extubated me, I looked down at my swollen belly, because I'm severely a demonic I look still pregnant, but I was in the hospital for a month, and it was hard for me to process everything. So I get home, I you know, I'm trying to acclimate friends family. I'm 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. So what the hopes are is that you could be the observer in those traumas. It's like your your memory, or those memories are like film strips stored in your head, and through this 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. And when 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, and so, you know, it took well over 30 hours of therapy to get me finally back into the or and when she did it, my body convulsed and sees and then I started explaining what I saw with a complete out of body experience. Which nurse hit the button for the code, which nurse jumped on my chest to give me CPR, what my doctor was doing down by my feet, what the anesthesiologist was doing down by the feet, what my daughter was doing down the hall in the labor and delivery room, what my husband was wearing when I got off the plane, what my mother was doing when I was the third day of my coma. Like there were, there were just all these little things. 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 flat line, where somebody said, oh, did you see the light? I'm like, you know, I was an observer, watching what was going down. I saw my body on the table, and then I saw my spirit perpendicular. And then as I flat line, I see a shooting star. Now maybe, if I was the eyes of spirit, I would have seen a tunnel of light, 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 of the tweed jacket, and he described the details of the coin, because the coin was a foreign coin, and his father was a Foreign Service officer and a diplomat, so it's pop you know, maybe I could have made shit up in my head, but he was like, tell my father. I said, Hi, right? And my father never had a tweet jacket, right? 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. Stephanie, so, like, all these things, I take that, so I take the tapes, 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 you keep this can't be happening. This can't be happening. She's like I did, but in my head, and so in her mind that she was down by my feet, on her mask, covering her mouth, like saying in in her mask, there's no way you know, like with all the commotion and the chaos and the screaming and everything, that there's no way that I would have heard any of it. And then this nurse, when I went to thank everybody, when I went to say hi to the doctors, this nurse 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. And I was like, You broke my ribs. And she said, and I do it again to say. Save your life. 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 I said, and there wasn't just one crash part, 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, the there's no question, not only does consciousness exist, because the brain starts shutting down after 20 seconds, and yes, hearing is the last to go, but I most certainly couldn't have seen and my eyes were taped 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. I mean, people talk about astral travel. 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 ones 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 if I didn't speak up? Like, what happened if I didn't believe what was feeling like? What happens if I were you and saying, Okay, I'm crazy, you know, like, I'm just gonna shut up, because obviously the tests are negative. 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, intuitive enough to listen to them, and if I didn't, and what happens again? If it happens, if other things happen, if I choose to ignore them, what will the outcome be? 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 everything along the way. I'm like, I have to keep myself so honest about every single process, because as a reality TV producer, you know, we do enhanced reality. And I'm like, This is my own reality in this enhance or like, in this Supercharged world, this can't be real. And so if you start imagining where your brain and I'm wearing because I've been in TV since I was 14. Like, it's impossible to believe this is real, 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, my I made this shit up, right? I was like, it's I made it up. And no one will let me get away with that ever and that's good.