Lessons From The Worst Night of My Life

One thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six days. Forty-five thousand, five hundred and four hours. Two million, seven hundred thirty thousand and two hundred forty minutes. One hundred sixty-three million, eight hundred fourteen thousand and four hundred seconds. Four ways to break down the time that has passed since the night that changed my life forever.

I’ve always said that you should be grateful for each and every second that you are granted on this Earth. If you live long enough, you’ll experience milestones that both affirm your humanity (positively and negatively) and serve as mile markers on your journey through life. Live a bit longer and you’ll start to recognize those events as ones to remember in real time. An accomplishment that you’ve worked hard for. The birth of a child. The night that you met your life partner. The death of someone close to you.

There’s a popular belief among many that bad things come in threes. In my life, that’s been true a few times, often preceded by an increasing feeling of dread. In the years leading up to the worst night of my life, the common denominator of the bad things was the age of 47. The first was in 2011 when my husband’s oldest sister was violently murdered by our brother-in-law. She was 47 years old. Three years later, a family friend and former co-worker of my husband died under suspicious circumstances at the age of 47. Needless to say, I was very relieved when my husband, who is two years older than me, turned 48 years old in 2016!

In early 2018 (at the age of 47), I began experiencing increasing pain in the middle right side of my abdomen; it reminded me of the pain that I’d experienced at that site several years before that resulted in back to back hernia surgeries. After consulting my regular doctors, I visited a general surgeon’s office for help. I was never allowed to actually meet with the surgeon himself; instead, I met with a nurse on his staff, who scheduled a series of MRIs and CT scans. Although the scans didn’t identify the source of my pain, they showed a benign uterine fibroid, and the nurse suggested that I see an OB-Gyn surgeon, strongly recommending a doctor that she was affiliated with.

When my husband and I met with the surgeon, we immediately noticed that my blood pressure spiked significantly. We wrote it off as ‘white coat syndrome’ since I’ve been through a lot medically. When the surgeon mentioned the fibroid, I explained that I was actually there due to the pain in my abdomen and wanted to find out if it was related to my previous hernia surgeries. He suggested that, if I was done having kids, I should have a hysterectomy so he could use that as an excuse to take down the adhesions that he suspected had formed at the previous surgical site. I reluctantly agreed, telling him that I just wanted my quality of life back since I’d already been through so much.

Over the next several weeks, I became more and more anxious about the upcoming surgery. My stress level was through the roof, and I started telling my husband and anyone who would listen that I felt that I shouldn’t go through with it. My husband tried to calm me down, telling me that it was just nerves and that I should proceed so I could find out the source of my abdominal pain.

On the morning of Thursday, May 3rd 2018, I checked into Lovelace Women’s Hospital for surgery. My endocrinologist had given instructions that I should be kept overnight to make sure I didn’t have any adrenal issues related to my recovery from Cushing’s Disease. Nevertheless, the hospital staff acted like they had no idea that I would be staying overnight, and tried to convince me to go home after the procedure. My husband and I rejected this idea and insisted that I be kept overnight.

After the surgery was over, the surgeon told my husband that everything had gone off without a hitch and I was placed into a room for my overnight stay. They allowed my husband to stay in the room with me and I slept for several hours, waking for meds and nurse shift changes.

At about 2:00am (now May 4th), the night nurse came in to check my vitals and was alarmed to see that my blood pressure had plummeted to 70/30 and was decreasing rapidly. She called the doctor covering the floor that evening, who rushed to my room. The doctor on call was Dr. Lucille Martinez, who happened to be one of the few Black female doctors here in New Mexico.

Dr. Martinez looked at my vitals, reviewed my chart, and stood at the end of my bed looking thoroughly confused. After a couple of beats, she turned to the nurse and said, “I think we need to move her to the ICU; I can’t figure out what’s causing this.” She turned back toward me, looking at my husband and I, and we both saw it in her eyes: I was going to die. I was immediately stricken with a fear and panic that I hadn’t known up until then, and I had two distinct thoughts: The first was, “My boys think I’m coming home tomorrow and I’m never going home.” The second was, “Is this it?!? I haven’t done enough!”

Dr. Martinez continued to stare at me, and she asked me a question. I don’t recall what she asked, but when I answered her, she turned to my husband and said, “She shouldn’t be able to talk.” Apparently, her question was to assess my level of consciousness, and I remember looking at her and thinking, “Don’t you know who I am?” A feeling that God was in control washed over me as I saw a look of determination appear in her eyes. In that moment, she resolved to do whatever it took to try and save my life.

The next couple of hours were a whirlwind. I lost control of my bodily functions, vomiting profusely, then losing consciousness. In my next moment of lucidity, my husband was yelling at the nurses to stop poking me – they had tried to draw blood from any vein that they could find and were now trying to find blood in the veins of my feet to no avail. My husband made them settle for the few squirts that they were able to glean from my rapidly collapsing veins. Dr. Martinez sent the sample off for testing, and I lost consciousness again.

Next, I woke up in a haze in an unfamiliar room and heard voices asking me if I thought I could move from the gurney that I found myself on to the CT machine next to me: I slurred the word, “no” and passed out, waking up back in my hospital bed. Dr. Martinez appeared at the end of the bed and gave us the CT results: I had been bleeding internally since the surgery and had already lost almost half of my blood, which was actively pooling in my abdominal cavity. She had ordered blood and they were preparing to hook me up for a blood transfusion, followed by emergency surgery to find the source of the bleeding and stop it. They would prepare the operating room while I received the transfusion to try to stabilize my vitals.

Time seemed to drag on as they prepared the room for surgery and I continued to drift in and out of consciousness. As my husband tells it, they took me off to the operating room and put him in a tiny, empty room to sit alone and wait to see if I’d make it. A few minutes afterward, he saw the original surgeon saunter in nonchalantly, holding a paper coffee cup with no sense of urgency; Dr. Martinez had called him to notify him of her plan and he’d shown up to watch her try to save me.

Several hours passed before I woke up back in my hospital room. The original surgeon* came by and mumbled something about me staying at the hospital for a few more days and left us with photos that he’d taken of my adhesions inside my abdomen during the original surgery the day before.

It wasn’t until after he left that I was able to learn the story of what had actually happened. When Dr. Martinez opened me up that morning, she found my uterine artery pumping out blood steadily, because the original surgeon had failed to seal it off. Had I gone home after the surgery as suggested by the hospital staff, my husband would have woken up to my lifeless body. It is truly and only by the grace of God that I am here to write this today.

It is now more than five years later, and I am still trying to process the whole experience. As someone who survived an incredibly abusive childhood, a near death experience while delivering my first child, a rare disease that almost killed me, and the brain surgery that saved my life, it’s a strange feeling to have experienced something so utterly traumatic that it eclipses all of that and continues to haunt me.

That one moment when Dr. Martinez felt that I would die and conveyed that to my husband and I remains seared in my brain and the fear is palpable with each breath that I take. The funny thing is that I saw a therapist for a few months after surviving that night five years ago, and she told me that, while I have symptoms of PTSD, she couldn’t diagnose me with it because my coping skills are too advanced, presumably due to the necessity of coping with everything else I’ve been through. My primary care provider has since given me the official PTSD diagnosis.

As with all experiences I’ve had, I have dissected the experience of the worst night of my life and extracted some life lessons that I will think of every day moving forward. I would never say that I am happy that I went through this, but I can honestly say that I’m grateful for what it’s taught me:

• On my literal deathbed, my first thought was of my children, not of myself. As someone who never had a role model of how to be a good parent, this is extremely validating. It shows me that my nature, or who I truly am, has been untouched by the lack of nurture that I was given as a child.

• Live each day with a deep sense of gratitude. No matter what I’m doing and no matter where I am, I thank God for allowing me to see another day. In life, we have a tendency to just get through our days and not really pay attention to each moment and appreciate it for the gift that it is. I no longer do that, and I find myself saying how thankful that I am for the grace I’ve been shown multiple times each day.

• Identify what’s missing in your life and act upon it now to avoid regrets later. When I considered the panic that I felt as I (literally) felt the life draining from me, I realized that one of my biggest regrets was not seeing more of the world. Since I survived the worst night of my life, my husband and I have taken our sons on trips of a lifetime (one of our sons deemed the last one “bombastic”) and we have decided to make travel a priority moving forward. I’ve even started authoring a series of travel themed coloring books to inspire others to see more of the world.

• Each of us is born with a pre-installed internal security system called intuition – trust it. When your spidey-sense starts tingling and you feel that a situation isn’t right for you, listen to your gut. Even though I’ve always regretted it when I haven’t followed my initial inclination about something, I allowed outside influences to override the alarm bells that my body was sounding. That decision almost cost me my life, and my husband and I have vowed to follow my intuition religiously from now on. Trust your gut in any and all circumstances.

• Time is your only non-renewable commodity; guard it fiercely. If a situation or circumstance isn’t worth your time and energy, skip it. My husband and I used to start watching a movie that turned out to be horrible and stick with it through the end because we’d already invested time in it. We no longer do that, and have applied the same principle to more important things in our lives as well. Time spent doing things you hate is time you’ll never get back.

• On the flip side of that, don’t be afraid to try new things. Some people use the phrase YOLO (i.e., You Only Live Once) to justify doing stupid things, often activities that are contrary to common sense. I’m not saying to do that, but if you’re presented with the opportunity to do something cool, do it! If you’ve always wanted to start a business, do it! If you don’t like where you live, move (or set things in motion so you can move in the future)!

While I’ll never be happy that the worst night of my life (and for those who know most of my life story, that’s saying a lot) happened, I’m incredibly blessed to have survived it and learned vital, valuable lessons. In a flash, the preciousness and fragility of life was instilled deeply within my psyche, and I gained a frightening sense of urgency that will remain with me for the rest of my days.

If you’ve never been faced with a life and death situation like this, my hope is that you will take the lessons that I’ve learned to heart and embrace each day ahead of you with the realization of what a blessing it is and how incredibly precious you are. If you, like me, have been in a similar situation, I’m so happy that you’re here and I hope you never lose the sense of urgency that survival has given you and that you continue to approach each day with the sense of wonder that it deserves.

One thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six days. Forty-five thousand, five hundred and four hours. Two million, seven hundred thirty thousand and two hundred forty minutes. One hundred sixty-three million, eight hundred fourteen thousand and four hundred seconds. Time that, in one look, and the blink of an eye, I didn’t think I’d ever have, and that I’m beyond grateful for. With each and every day that we have left on this planet, may we all travel far, leave no dream unfulfilled and, as the great Tim McGraw so eloquently put it, live like we were dying.

*Following this ordeal, I learned that, at the time of my surgery, the original surgeon (Joel Teicher with Lovelace Hospital) was in the middle of two lawsuits from deaths that had occurred the year before. He also had restrictions placed on his medical practice by the New Mexico Medical Board in July 2017 for offenses related to the prescription of controlled substances and the restrictions had been lifted after he petioned for their removal in February 2018. He has since been named in several other lawsuits, which can be looked up at http://www.nmcourts.gov. He is still actively practicing here in New Mexico.

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