Divine Encounters Episode 107 | Near-Death Experience Story
Stephanie Arnold says she knew, months before it happened, that she would die on an operating table during the birth of her second child, and that her baby would be fine. In this Divine Encounters episode she tells Alex Ferrari about the warnings she tried to share, the 37 seconds she says she flatlined, and the details she says she later recalled under hypnosis, including spirits she describes as a gathering of hundreds.
Key Takeaways
- Stephanie says that after a 20-week ultrasound showed a placenta problem, she felt certain she would die in the operating room while her baby would be fine.
- She says she told her husband, nurses and doctors, and that tests kept coming back negative.
- She describes a vivid moment on a winter walk when a fountain turned to blood in her mind and she felt a hemorrhage in her body.
- She says her baby was delivered healthy, and seconds later she went into cardiac arrest from a rare complication, flatlining for 37 seconds.
- She says that in hypnosis she described details of the room, the staff and family that her doctors later confirmed.
- She describes seeing her own body, a shooting star, and a heavenly place with hundreds of spirits, including her husband’s late father.
- She says we do not end, we transition from one form of energy to another, and that listening to intuition can matter.
| Guest | Stephanie Arnold |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 107 |
| What Stephanie says happened | A rare complication after a C-section delivery led to cardiac arrest and a 37-second flatline |
| Her premonition | She felt for months that she would die in the OR while the baby would be fine |
| Where she says she went | Out of her body, then a heavenly place with hundreds of spirits |
| Who she met | Spirits she describes as a gathering, including her husband’s late father |
| How she recalled it | Through hypnotherapy, which she videotaped |
| The message | We transition from one form to another; listen to your intuition |
A TV Career, a Move to Chicago and a Long Road to Motherhood
Alex opens with his usual question. Stephanie says she met her husband, married him and moved to Chicago from Los Angeles. She worked in TV for most of her career, and she says she works extremely well under pressure. Her husband is a PhD economist from the University of Chicago, very level headed and very grounded.
Having children was a difficult process, she says. She went through IVF, and after three rounds they had a beautiful, healthy baby girl. The only complication was that the baby was too big and had to be born by C-section.
A Second Pregnancy and a Bad Feeling
Her second child, Jacob, came after seven rounds of IVF. The first 20 weeks of the pregnancy went with no problem. Then, at the 20-week ultrasound, she was told she had placenta previa, which she explains is when the placenta grows on top of the cervix.
The news startled her. She told her husband she has a very rare blood type, O negative, found in about 7 percent of the population, and said, “I don’t want to be special in any other category.” She had a bad feeling.
Back at the apartment she started reading. Placenta previa might turn into a placenta accreta. If that happened, she might bleed, might hemorrhage, might need a hysterectomy, and in a hemorrhage she and the baby could lose their lives. She sat back from the computer and told her husband, “this is going to happen to us.” The only difference, she said, was that the baby would be fine. “I’m going to be dead on the operating table.”
Telling Everyone, and Not Being Heard
She did not only tell her husband. She told nurses and doctors at every visit. They answered, Stephanie, there is “no indication that this can happen,” and, in their defense, she says, the tests were negative.
At some point she was told that if she delivered and needed an emergency hysterectomy, her own OB would not perform it. She would be transferred to maternal fetal medicine. Armed with that information, she made an appointment with the head of gynecology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which she says is not easy to get without a cancer diagnosis. Her husband came to every appointment. In the waiting room were women with IVs in their arms and no hair, fighting cancer. In the meeting, the head of gynecology asked how he could help, and a resident took notes. Her husband likes to say it felt very mafia: I see you, you see me, you are my doctor.
All she focused on, she says, was how to save her life. No one was listening, so she had to do it herself.
A Fountain Turned to Blood
One winter day, when her daughter was a year and a half or two, Stephanie was pushing her in a stroller across a park. She was explaining how beautiful the fountain is when it flows. Then, in her mind’s eye, the fountain turned to blood and began rushing, and she says she felt it as a visceral reaction to a hemorrhage in her own body.
She grabbed the stroller and called her husband to meet her in the emergency room. At triage they asked if she was okay. She said no, she was bleeding. Everything was fine, they told her. Her husband was relieved: a false alarm.
Thirty-Six Weeks to the Day
At 36 weeks to the day, her husband was on a business trip and she was giving her daughter breakfast when she started bleeding on the kitchen floor. She knew that today was the day, and she texted him that they were going to deliver. He left his meeting and got on a plane, joining by video chat.
At the hospital, the doctor said the ORs were very quiet and suggested getting Jacob out. A song was playing, and she says she kissed her daughter a million times because she was convinced it was the last time she would see her. In the OR she told her doctor something was wrong and asked to be put under general anesthesia. The doctor said no: if she put Stephanie to sleep, she put the baby to sleep, and that was not good. “I’m here for you,” she said.
During a C-section your arms are out in a T and a curtain is in front of your face. The room was bone-chilling cold, she says, and the fear was palpable. She knew that the minute the baby was delivered, no one else would see what she saw coming. Everyone was looking at the clock, doing their jobs.
Seconds After Delivery
Jacob was delivered happy and healthy. Seconds later, she says, she went into cardiac arrest. She had a very rare complication called an amniotic fluid embolism, which she describes as a one-in-40,000 risk in which amniotic cells get into the mother’s bloodstream. She says she was the first to survive a full-blown case at that time.
She says there was one thing in the operating room she had not predicted: a crash cart and extra blood were there, and she needed both. She says she flatlined for 37 seconds. They got her back, intubated her and taped her eyes shut. The second part of the condition, she says, is the body’s inability to clot, and she was given 60 units of blood and blood product, where a normal body has about 20.
She was put on life support and into a medically induced coma. Seven hours later, she was still bleeding, and the gynecologist she had met was called in to perform the hysterectomy. Pathology afterward showed, she says, that an accreta had started to form. On day six she had kidney failure. She was in the hospital for a month. We share this as Stephanie’s account, not as medical information.
Hypnosis, Videotape and Hours of Memory
Home again, Stephanie says she was in shell shock. A friend suggested a regression therapist who uses hypnotherapy to take people back into moments of trauma, with the hope that you can be the observer and the pain will not be as severe as the first time. Stephanie wanted to understand what had happened in those missing months, so she videotaped her therapy over video chat, in split screens. She had never been hypnotized before and wanted to document everything.
It took well over 30 hours of therapy to get back into the operating room. When she did, she says, her body convulsed, and then she began describing a complete out-of-body experience. She named which nurse hit the button for the code and which jumped on her chest to give CPR. She described what her doctor and the anesthesiologist were doing by her feet, what her daughter was doing down the hall, what her husband was wearing when he got off the plane, and what her mother was doing on the third day of her coma.
When the session ended she felt relieved. For a short definition of the sense of leaving the body, see our glossary entry on astral projection, though Stephanie describes her experience in her own terms.
A Shooting Star and Hundreds of Spirits
At the moment of the flatline, she says, someone later asked, did you see the light? She says she was an observer. She saw her body on the table and her spirit perpendicular. As she flatlined, she saw a shooting star. Maybe, she says, if she had been looking through the eyes of spirit she would have seen a tunnel of light, but that is not what she saw.
She went to a heavenly place. She did not see God or buildings. But she says she saw “hundreds of spirits,” arranged two steps up, almost like a congregation. Some she knew, and that was lovely. Some she did not, including her husband’s late father, who she says had a message.
She described a tweed jacket and a particular foreign coin. Her husband’s father, she explains, had been a Foreign Service officer and diplomat. When she shared the details, she says her husband told her his father never had a tweed jacket, and that he did not know what she meant about the coin. She is candid about that. She says it is possible she made details up in her head, and that is part of why she kept everything documented. If you want a plain-language overview of what people often describe, see our complete guide to near-death experiences.
What the Doctors Said
Stephanie took the tapes to her doctors. They told her, “You shouldn’t know any of this.” She says it was accurate down to where they were standing and what they were doing. Her doctor admitted thinking, this can’t be happening, but only in her head, in her mask, while chaos and screaming filled the room.
At a later visit, a nurse she did not know came up to her and said, “it’s really nice to see you walking again.” Stephanie said, you broke my ribs. The nurse said she would do it again to save her life. She was later told the nurse went back to her office and cried for a long time, because Stephanie should not have known she was the one who gave her CPR. Stephanie also said there were two crash carts, not one; the nurse did not know, then went back, checked, and it was accurate.
What It Means to Her
To Stephanie, there is no question that consciousness exists, because the brain starts shutting down after 20 seconds. She says hearing is the last to go, but she could not have seen: her eyes were taped shut and she was on life support. People talk about astral travel and feeling things empathically around them, she says, and she continues to feel a pleasant vibration around her. She also describes the sadness many feel in fearing death: that they will never physically touch their loved ones again. “They do matter, and they do exist,” she says. “We go from a solid to a gas,” and still we are made of energy. “We just transition from one form to another.”
Stephanie says it has taken a process to accept all of this as real. She asks what would have happened if she had not spoken up, or had decided she was crazy because the tests were negative. That scares her periodically. She was intuitive enough to feel it, and to listen. Her background in reality TV, where the world is enhanced, made her doubt it all, so she documented everything: the goodbye letters, the social media posts, the tapes. “I have to keep myself so honest about every single process,” she says, and “no one will let me get away with that.” As always, we share this as her experience. It is not medical advice, and what it means is still debated.
Questions to Sit With
- Stephanie says she kept speaking up even when the tests said she was fine. When have you trusted a feeling that others did not share?
- She says the fear of death is often about never touching loved ones again. What helps you feel connected to someone you cannot touch?
- She documented everything to stay honest. What would you want to write down so you do not talk yourself out of what you know?
This week, notice one gut feeling and write it down with the date. Do not judge it. Simply see what you learn from it later.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Stephanie says intuition can arrive as a feeling, an image or a body sensation.
- She says consciousness exists, and she saw and heard things while her body was on life support.
- She describes hundreds of spirits gathered, including loved ones.
- She says we do not end, we transition from one form of energy to another.
- She says staying honest and documenting her experience helped her accept it.
Please enjoy my conversation with Stephanie Arnold.
Guest Links: Connect With Stephanie Arnold
- Stephanie Arnold’s official site
- Stephanie Arnold on Facebook
- Stephanie Arnold on Instagram
- Full NDE story with Stephanie Arnold
Listen to the Episode
- Watch this episode ad-free on Next Level Soul TV
- Download the MP3
- More episodes: Divine Encounters
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Stephanie Arnold?
Stephanie Arnold is a reality TV producer who says she predicted her own cardiac arrest during a C-section. She shares her story with Alex Ferrari in this Divine Encounters episode.
What did Stephanie predict?
She says after a 20-week ultrasound found placenta previa, she felt certain she would die on the operating table while her baby would be fine. She says she told her husband, nurses and doctors.
What happened in the operating room?
Stephanie says her son was born healthy, and seconds later she went into cardiac arrest from a rare complication called an amniotic fluid embolism. She says she flatlined for 37 seconds.
How did Stephanie remember what happened?
She says that during more than 30 hours of hypnotherapy, which she videotaped, she described a complete out-of-body experience, including details of the staff and her family.
Did the doctors confirm her account?
She says her doctors told her she should not have known what she described, and that it was accurate down to where they stood. A nurse she had never met told her she was the one who gave her CPR.
What did Stephanie see on the other side?
She says she saw her body and her spirit, a shooting star, and a heavenly place with hundreds of spirits, some she knew and some she did not.
What about her husband’s father?
Stephanie says she saw her husband’s late father among the spirits and that he had a message. She says she described a tweed jacket and a foreign coin, and her husband did not recognize either detail. She is candid about that.
What does Stephanie believe now?
She believes consciousness exists, that we do not end, and that we transition from one form of energy to another.
Why did Stephanie document everything?
She says her work in reality TV made her question whether she was inventing it, so she kept tapes, letters and posts to keep herself honest.
What does Stephanie say about intuition?
She says she was intuitive enough to feel what was coming and to listen, and wonders what would have happened if she had ignored it.
Does Next Level Soul say a near-death experience is real?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the person’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
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Follow Along with the Transcript
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.
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