“If I go to sleep, I won’t wake up,” she told him.
It’s an October 2021 night, and Deiner is fighting for her life, and the life of her 24-week-old baby. She was in the intensive care unit of a Delaware hospital after being diagnosed with Covid. She lost 30 pounds in 12 days after being put on a ventilator. A doctor later told her that at one point he estimated she had a 5% chance of survival.
Deiner was trying to calm her nerves when the doctor entered her room. She played Celtic music on her iPhone and watched “Peppa Pig”, an animated children’s show, on TV. But each breath turned into a painful hoarse voice, and she couldn’t make the beeps from the monitor when the doctor urged her to listen.
“You have to sleep,” the doctor told her. “If you don’t go to sleep, you die. You can’t heal yourself if your brain can’t sleep.”
Deiner resisted the panic and closed his eyes. She thought that was the end. Her world is in darkness.
But her story has only just begun.
A new kind of near-death experience
Drop drift through a tunnel to a light in the distance. Listen to heavenly music. Hello loved ones who died many years ago. This is the kind of story people tell in bestsellers like “90 Minutes in Heaven” and “Proof of Heaven.”
Each near-death experience survivor shares stories of being spiritually transformed by what they saw in the afterlife.
But in the two years since it began, the Covid pandemic has created a new kind of near-death experience – narrated by the likes of Deiner, who have returned to see the magic in the normal rhythms of everyday life. : Can taste and smell coffee. , hug a child again and see the sunrise after fearing that you will never hear the birdsong again in the morning.
They have been spiritually transformed not by a glimpse of the afterlife but by what they see in this life, as they are struggling to survive after being hit by Covid.
Stories like that don’t tend to get book or movie deals. However, people like Deiner, 41, have these incredible survival stories that can help all of us.
Start with the power of gratitude. That’s a cliché for some, but not for many Covid survivors.
“I often think about the extent to which we take for granted, from the ability to walk or swallow to breathe,” Deiner wrote in a Facebook post shortly after she was discharged from the hospital in December.
Angels around us
Before she got sick, Deiner was an orb full of energy. She is doing a PhD in Oriental Medicine after earning her undergraduate degree in international relations. She is a mother, former journalist, massage therapist living in Lincoln, Delaware, and a Reiki master. She once hiked through Central America with nothing more than a backpack.
“I was on top of my A-game,” she said.
Covid changed all of that. She must learn what many of the greatest spiritual traditions say: We come to a helpless world; We leave it the same way. We need each other.
“When you’re really sick, you’re in a position of helplessness,” she said. “You depend on people and strangers to keep you alive.”
Like many near-death survivors, Deiner met angels. But they are not the glowing winged creatures described in books and movies.
There was a nurse who patiently cleaned her up after she was covered in vomit and blood.
The pastor went to the ICU, said the Our Father with her, and cried with her even though she had never seen him before.
The doctor urged her to sleep. When she opened her eyes eight hours later, “He’s still there,” she said.
Prayer for the living
When she was taken off the ventilator, she lost all feeling in her body and found herself floating overhead, looking down at the doctors caring for her. She could see her body covered in bruises and tubes dangling from her arms.
“I couldn’t feel the baby move anymore because I couldn’t feel anything,” she said. “I thought I was dead.”
So Deiner did what any kid in the Internet age would do when stuck in limbo, not knowing if he was alive or dead. She texted a friend.
She doesn’t how she did it, but somehow she sent a message to a friend after she turned off the ventilator. At that point, she was so disoriented that she believed she was texting her friend through some form of telepathy.
That friend is Craig Maull, a texting therapist interested in alternative forms of spirituality who also repairs roads for Delaware’s Department of Transportation. He got the text from her after he hadn’t heard from Deiner for 12 days (“I have to check the obituary three or four times a day,” he said).
Her text is simple: “I thought I was dead. I couldn’t feel my body. I must be a ghost.”
“You’re alive. Trust me on this,” he wrote back. “You’ve been down for about 12 days.”
“I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
Deiner says meditation helped save her life. Its strength stems from its simplicity. She says it has helped “link my mind, body and spirit together.”
A question she can’t answer
Deiner recovered and gave birth to a 6-kilogram, 8-ounce son last December. She named him Soren and said he was “growing like a weed.” She said she only realized how close she was to death when a doctor told her later that he had initially given her a 5% chance of survival.
Hearing that prophecy terrified her. “It felt like a bucket of cold water, terror and panic,” she said.
But Deiner still faces huge challenges. She can’t cut her own food, tie her shoelaces, or change Soren’s clothes because her hands often hurt. She has trouble walking and needs therapy to learn to swallow again. Her sense of taste and smell were gone.
Nerve damage from her illness persists and she requires ongoing physical therapy. She depends on her daughter, 15-year-old Isabella, for help.
“It’s hard. I won’t lie,” Isabella said. “It’s hard to see someone struggling. It’s hard to constantly drop things and help her. But I’m so thankful she’s still alive to ask for help.”
For Deiner, there is still a mystery about her illness that she cannot solve: Why did she survive when so many others have died?
“What do I say? It wasn’t my moment. I had more people praying for me. I’m really lucky to have good medical care,” Deiner said. “I have no idea.”
But Deiner says she can answer that question in part by how she now chooses to live.
“I feel a deep sense of responsibility,” she said. “I have been given a second chance at life. I must live life in a way that is honorable for those who have no chance, and for those who never walk, talk or breathe on their own.”
