On Sunday December 10, 2017, I died on my kitchen floor.
It had been like any other Sunday in Buffalo – it was Buffalo Bills season, so I had gone to a bar with some friends to watch the game. When I got back home, I took a nap. I had a friend over that evening.
This is where my fight to live begins – apparently, I had started coughing hard and I fell to the floor. Though I can’t remember it, on the floor I started throwing up, and stopped breathing.
First responders responded, and by that time, I was no longer breathing. With compressions to my chest, they broke ribs in the process. That handy device – a defibrillator – SAVED MY LIFE. I began to breathe after the third shock. Both of my lungs had collapsed.
I was rushed to my community’s trauma center and they first checked my head for a stroke, but soon realized it was my heart. They put me under anesthesia and gave me a stent in my heart, as my entire right artery was blocked. Doctors contacted my family.
It was the middle of the night. I had slipped into a medically-induced coma.
I was in the hospital for ten days, and returned home to my family, just in time for Christmas. Thinking back on it, I don’t have an ounce of memory from that night, or while I was in the hospital – everything I know now was told to me by friends and family.
My career is working with cancer patients, so I know what it is like to have to ‘fight the fight!’. I fought that fight myself. I had so many angels here on earth praying for my recovery, along with all of my loved ones in Heaven, who didn’t let me join them. I have a different perspective on life now, and the things that were so important to me before don’t seem to matter anymore.
This incident allowed me to remember one thing – I LOVE ME! I am just so happy to be here, and have my second chance. I hope to do everything I can to give people HOPE, who may have lost it in their own journeys.
Special thanks to Krissy Morber for sharing her story with Hope Rises as a guest writer.
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