September 23, 2025 • 52 mins
At 18, Jessica Sanchez thought she was dealing with wisdom tooth pain. Instead, doctors found a tumor that would lead to 18 surgeries, chemotherapy, and a near-fatal bleedout. Years later, she faced another harrowing battle: an ectopic pregnancy and rupture that nearly killed her. Jessica’s journey was made even more perilous by political barriers to reproductive healthcare.
The repeated medical traumas—from cancer to miscarriage to near-drowning—stacked one on top of another until her nervous system froze, shutting her down in order to survive. Yet her breakthrough came when she realized her body was not her enemy but a messenger, urging her to pause, listen, and heal.
In this raw and unflinching conversation, Jessica shares how she learned to listen to her body, survive the freeze of PTSD, and find strength in compassion.
Story Producer: Nicholas Tecosky
Artist: Jeramy Muxworthy
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
My name is Jessica and the first time I died
was in two thousand and five, and I've gotten better
at it ever since. When there is something that is
a perceived danger, it will flood you with enough.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Fear to make you act.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Your brain has to keep flooding you with more fear
if you keep getting retraumatized, such as possibly near death
experiences that keep on happening.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:07):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
When I was eighteen, I was living with my dad.
We are very close. My dad is my best friend.
He raised me to be a strong willed, opinionated person
who will always chase after what she wants in the
(01:47):
spring semester of my senior year, I was having pain
in my jaw and I thought it was my wisdom
teeth they were coming in. I was having wisdom teeth pain.
But when my dad took me in to the doctor
and they scanned my jaw, they found a giant black hole,
(02:10):
and that black hole made a nurse rush out of
the room, and eighteen year old me looked at my dad,
looked back at the scan and as they pulled my
dad out of the room, I knew something was wrong.
After that, I had a biopsy of my jaw. The
(02:30):
tumor was so big that it took up probably a
third of my jaw. When they did the biopsy, they
removed my Wisden teeth. They removed three teeth in the
back as well three molars, and that biopsy ended up
being three days of the worst pain of my life.
(02:57):
The tumor, they had not realized, was a tumor. It
ripped through my jawbone into my mouth over the course
of three days.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
It was like.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Uncorking a champagne bottle, and the tumor pushed through my
jaw into my mouth upward and shredded my gums through
the futures and essentially broke into my mouth in such
a way that it split the inside of my mouth,
(03:28):
and I could not get to a doctor fast enough. Honestly,
I believe my mother at the time gave me enough
VI could in some mady a horse pass out. They'd
given me painkillers, but I was screaming at home and
she wanted the pain to stop, and I ended up
(03:48):
back in the hospital to undergo another procedure to remove
what had pushed through and repair as much as they
could what was damaged. That was the first of eighteen
surgeries over the course of seven years after that, when
when the biopsy came back, it was a CGCG, a
(04:11):
central giant cell granulema that was essentially eating my face.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Those types of tumors.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
They bundle themselves into blood vessels and they feed on estrogen.
Then I was at the perfect age. It was in
the middle of the age range between the ages I
believe of twelve and twenty four, and that was a
time when I was still finding out who I was
as a person.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
I was still considering going to.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
College but not doing well in school. But I wanted
to go to college. But then I had to start chemo.
I was on interferre on alpha for a year, and
this was to pull the blood buscles away from the
tumor to make it operable. In that core of a year,
(05:01):
I had two major surgeries. The first one was an
emergency because the tumor, even though even though they had
tried to repair what it had burst through the first time,
that tumor was still growing. It was pushing out. I
finished my school year, but I did it from home,
(05:22):
and I walked across the field of my graduation to
teachers just crying, which was wild because I'd only been
there a year, really just one semester. But I think
everyone had known that something pretty terrible had happened, so
(05:43):
later on. I believe over the summer the tumor had
been growing so much that I was being choked. It
had started growing down into the back of my throat
and I would choke in the middle of the night
when I would fall asleep, and the fear was that
my throat would close up. So then this surgery, I
was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night.
(06:05):
My surgeon was woken up brought to the hospital because
essentially they needed to do a debulking of the tumor
in order for me to be able to close my mouth,
because it was growing so much that I couldn't close
my mouth for months. But then b also who didn't
want me choking in the middle of the night. So
when I got to the hospital, I was sitting in
(06:26):
the surgical bay waiting to be taken back, and my
parents get pulled away from surgery bay to talk with
my doctor, which I thought was a bit sus and
I'm watching them and they're looking at me a bit awkwardly,
and I'm like, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (06:45):
And they come over.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
My parents come over and they say we'll see you later,
We'll see you when you wake up, and they both
like kiss me on the forehead and essentially hurried out
of there. I get to this surgery bay in this moment,
and they strap my arms down and I'm like, well,
this is this is weird. Then they blindfold me and
(07:10):
I'm like this is not right. And then they say
you'll feel a pinch in your throat, and I remember
saying what, And then I feel a syringe go into
my throat and I start jerking and I was like,
that's why they've tied me down and then they sprayed
(07:30):
inside of my nostril and told me you are going
to feel a bit of pain, but it's going to
be over quickly. And that's when they shoved a tube
up my nose, down into my throat and into my airway.
And if you could hear the sound, it would have
been me screaming as hard as I could, thrashing on
the table until it was immediately cut, silent when the
(07:53):
tube hit my lungs. That is the surgery that told
me that this is way more serious. So in October
I was ready for the surgery to remove the tumor.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
I've been doing the chemo.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
The blood vessels are pulled away, very excited to finally
have this thing out of my face that has been
causing me to not be able to eat right, to
have pain in my job, bleeding in the middle of
the night. That chemo was so bad that it caused
me to have dyslexia. My hair was falling out. I
(08:36):
lost so much weight that I was down to ninety pounds.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I met the.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Surgery and they're removing all of the tumor. They only
have a little bit left. They're seeing some blood vessels,
but feel confident that they are able to cut around it.
But what ended up happening was as they were removing
the last bit, they hit a big blood vessel that
they couldn't see because it was under it, and I
(09:01):
bled out, and I bled out fast. There are still
people at the hospital today who, if you ask them,
they remember getting the page in the darkness of the
early early morning that they needed blood fast. Now I
(09:25):
had lost so much blood that I would be considered dead,
and so they had to pump it back into me
to bring me back. The experience I had and I
was out.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Was an interesting one.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I try to describe it to people who want to know, because,
of course you tell people this, the first thing they
ask you is do you remember?
Speaker 3 (09:54):
And I do.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
But the experience that I had was I would pull
it weightlessness if I had anything there to a contextual
thing to compare it to. There's no gravity, so how
can you be weightless if there's not if gravity doesn't exist.
I was aware of what was happening. What was wild
was it felt like I was expanding, but not my body,
(10:20):
but I as a concept was expanding, and I was
kind of being pulled away and seeing it's like when
you're on your phone and you and you pull it
to where it looks like a fish eye lens, and
everything kind of just starts to pull around you. And
I'm not seeing things because it's not my eyes. It's
just an awareness. I knew that people were panicking around me,
(10:44):
and I knew my parents were panicking, because how could
they not. They could tell something was wrong that everybody's
running to get to the room.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
As this is.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Happening, I'm feeling kind of this dissolving into something bigger,
in the same way that sugar dissolves into hot water.
The sugar's not gone, but it's now just part of
something else. And that's what I felt like, which for me,
I feel good about.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
It actually like looking at it after the fact, I'm like, oh,
I'm actually not so scared of dying at this point.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It's hard to.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Look back with the lens of now, because I think
at that time I was so eager. I went to
school and A I was not going to let anybody
tell me what major I was going to do. I
was going to be a theater in film major. But
B I was so determined that I think I became
(11:48):
a bit too forceful. The blunt Jessica now is blunt
with intention. Back then, the Jessica that had not been
the person who had the benefit of maturity through experience,
was the type of person who would just tell people
flat out no instead of trying to compromise. That was
(12:10):
a learning experience for me, for sure. I gobbled college
up I, where a lot of people were partying. I
didn't go to college U til I was twenty, so
I had a few years on everybody, and I was motivated.
I'd set in a chair for a year. I didn't
want to be still. I can't sit still because still
(12:31):
is danger. In twenty twenty one, I was working as
a graphic designer on a show here in Atlanta and
was working alongside somebody who eventually became my partner. We
were in a very loving relationship, both very excited about
(12:54):
where it was going. But early in the relationship I
got pregnant. It was an unintentional pregnancy.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
At that time, I had an ID because I was
not expecting to try and be getting pregnant anytime soon,
but also because my previous tumor feed off of estrogen,
and my doctors at the time had said they could
not guarantee that getting pregnant or having some sort of
(13:25):
hormonal shift wouldn't cause another tumor. I had grown afraid
over the years of accidental pregnancy and what that might do.
I know now since science has changed, that getting pregnant
would not have done that likely. My brother is a doctor,
(13:48):
and he told me it would be more likely that
a pregnancy would shield my body from that happening. But
in my head at the time, I had told myself,
don't get pregnant or you'll die the irony, right, So
(14:14):
this is when the conversation shifted to what do we do.
I was pregnant and I had an ID, and talking
to my doctor, I was made very aware that this
was a serious issue. I had already known that there's
a risk of ectopic pregnancies with people who have IEDs,
(14:37):
and my doctor told me, if the egg is in
your uterus, we still need to remove it because if
the baby grows and there's an IUD in there, that's
not good.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
You've got to take it out.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
However, taking it out put me at risk of miscarriage,
which is a natural occurrence, but because taking it out
traumatizes the lining of the uterus, when there's a pregnancy
and the walls are growing, it might cause me to
have a miscarriage anyway. I was afraid that I.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
Might rupture and potentially die if if that was the case. Now,
we took the IUD out and my doctor told me
that it was my choice, but because there was a
fear that it was a topic, he recommended that I
(15:37):
look into having an abortion.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
However, anybody feels about that. The procedure itself, as it
is performed, would maximize the potential that the egg would
be removed along with the contents of the uterus, even
if it was in the Philippian tube. There was that possibility,
(16:01):
and that was worth considering because in that frame of mind,
you want to be able to do everything you can
to ensure that you don't die. Because the id had
already been taken out and potentially there was damage to
the uterus, so continuing a pregnancy anyway is risky. I
(16:23):
looked into making an appointment for the procedure because my
home state of Georgia had pulled back because this state
has done a very good job of restricting access to abortions.
(16:45):
The amount of appointments that were available were slim, but
I made one regardless, and the time waiting to get one,
of course, there's that fear that it could rupture at
any second if it is atopic pregnancy. But it didn't
matter because the night before my appointment, I sat on.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
My toilet.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
As the entire contents of my uterus empty, and I
had a very painful miscarriage.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
This was about six weeks.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
In and before that I had been flooded with those
happy hormones that you get in the first trimester, the
very intensely euphoric feelings you have being in the beginning
of a pregnancy because you're supposed to write, you're you're
supposed to care for this baby, so you're very happy,
(17:48):
and so it means that the mother will fight for it.
And when the miscarriage happened, it shoots your body full
of cortisol. I went to my appointment the next day anyway,
as I'm on the table preparing myself because I'd had
an idea that it was a miscarriage, but I wanted
to go either way because it meant i'd get an ultrasound.
(18:09):
I want to see what's going on. I want to
know about my health. And when I got there and
they did the ultrasound and they said, we cannot perform
an abortion. There is no pregnancy here. And looking at
the screen, there was a void in my uterus.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
There was a little nugget sized void.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Now, having a miscarriage does not mean the egg is gone.
A miscarriage means that the lining of your uterus and
whatever the contents are with it are gone. An abortion
would have pulled more out, whereas this is just a
normal flushing of the lining and all those other contents
does not include whatever may or may not be in
(18:48):
the Philippian too. So the nurse who was speaking to
me looked at me nervously and said, okay, because you
had an ID, because this is how happened, you need
to know that you are at high risk of internal
bleeding if this or worder rupture. You need to do
(19:08):
some research on ectopic pregnancies. And she put the fear
into me at that point, and I went home and
I just started reading on it because now I am
a sea without a life fest I don't have the
assurance that I could have had the egg pulled out.
(19:29):
And it's at this point just a waiting game. And
the waiting game took two weeks. I'm very glad she
told me to do that because as I was researching,
I found out that if you're bleeding internally, it feels
like you have to go to the bathroom, but you'll
sit in the bathroom and you can't go to the bathroom.
(19:51):
It's painful, it's a pressure. And at that point my
fallopian too hit ruptured and I'm sitting on the toilet
at two am at my boyfriend's house, and in my mind,
I said, this much pain means something's wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
I need to get to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I sit in the waiting room.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
For four hours. I'm getting very dizzy. This was COVID time,
so my boyfriend's outside the window watching me as I'm
sitting in a wheelchair trying not to not off. It
was terrifying. When I was taken into the hospital. Finally,
(20:37):
it was another probably eight hours before I could actually
have surgery. They had to take me into a room
to get an ultrasound to show bleeding, which was so terrible,
and I screamed so much because they had to do
an internal ultrasound. It was actually it was actually kind
(20:59):
of funny. I'm I'm grabbing the sides of.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
The journey, screaming, bloody murder.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
But then the poor the poor woman who is what
I can only assume was a resident in the sort
of pregnancy wing is listening to me scream and.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Clearly like shaken up by it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
She's young, and I'm screaming, but I'm going don't worry,
don't worry, just keep going, just keep going.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's fine, it's fine.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
I just I just kept telling her to keep going,
and it was not reassuring her at all, So she
left and had to pull in a much more mature
nurse who's clearly gotten many years under her belt.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
This woman came in and did the thing, got it
done great, confirmed that I had internal bleeding, but I
still had to lay there for eight hours, slowly dying,
trying to get me into surgery. And this should have
been a red flag. My reaction to it was nothing.
(22:00):
The nurses even said, wow, you're handling this really well,
and I was just numb. I think at that point
was when my brain started to shield me from emotions.
It was forcing me to freeze because that was the
only way to keep me safe. Otherwise I'd go mad.
(22:20):
I would have to feel the pain, that I didn't
want to feel, which was I essentially lost a child
and I might die. Because whether or not I had
wanted to get pregnant, whether or not I wasn't ready,
whether or not I was prepared, it still happened. And
(22:43):
my body had already flooded me with that happy hormone
that when it shoved the cortisol into my body, it
just shut down the part that could have processed it.
And the added cortisol of almost I just completely.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Wiped my ability to.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Healthily process my emotions, and that's what started the decline
into what eventually became a mental breakdown. The surgery to
(23:26):
repair the damage that had caused when the egg ruptured
my Philippian tube was that I lost my left Philippian
tube as well as a majority of the left side
of my uterus. I lost a large part of my
reproductive system. Looking back now, I can confidently say that
(23:49):
what I was experiencing after this was postpartum. I should
have been given information leaving the hospital that would have
told me that I was at massive risk of mental
health issues. Because whether or not you've given birth to
a child, or lost a child early in your pregnancy,
(24:10):
or any time throughout your pregnancy, whether it is miscarriage, abortion,
ec topic pregnancy, however it happens, you have the same
chemical drop and flood with stress hormones that can cause
that massive state of depression. And again the signs that
(24:31):
I should have been looking for were numbness, because after
I was out of the hospital, my partner and I
both decided to try and move on from it and
not talk about it much more for us to be
able to have a time of rest and to focus
(24:52):
on my body healing.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
But it never got revisited.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
And because of that, my numbness turned down into hiding,
and I took job after job after job and worked
and worked and worked, and essentially just never let myself
sit in a sadness that I was refusing to feel
or even acknowledge. And then barely a month after that,
(25:22):
I was working on a show in Hawaii and my
partner was there with me, and we decided to visit
a beach on my last day before work started. At
this point, I had healed from my laparoscopic surgery and
thought that I was a okay to get in the ocean,
(25:42):
and we jumped in and as I was swimming, I
realized I'm getting fatigued very quickly, and what I thought
had healed in my abdomen was no longer working. My
abs were seizing, I was cramping, and I could not
keep myself above water. I started bobbing, and my partner
(26:05):
was looking at me and his face was instant panic
and that I cannot get myself upright to even get
on my back and float my way back. I see
my boyfriend look behind me and his eyes go wide
because as we're trying to figure out what to do,
a large wave is coming up behind me, and in
(26:25):
that split second, he grabs my arm. I see him
go under and he essentially flips me over his head
and into the wave so that.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It will push me to the shore. It did.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
It also tumbled me across some very sharp rocks, and
I bounced my way back to the sand. I am
coughing up water and I was very close to drowning.
And I think that essentially like sealed the deal on
my mental health decline, because I I had just almost died,
(27:01):
and now, after a month of healing and feeling like
I'm returning to normal, it happens again. And when that happened,
that was when I started getting more agitated, I could
tell that little things were starting to push my buttons
more than they would not so much at first, but
as time went on we were laughing about it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
At parties.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
He and I would tell the story about how he
saved my life and it was so wild and wow,
it was a close one.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
But making it a joke meant that I never re
examined the fact that I was out in the middle
of the ocean and could have just been lost.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Forever.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
After that, still taking job after job after job, my
sleep started to become erratic. My mood shifted. I would
at times, when presented with something that would bother me,
I would freeze and I didn't know why, and over
the course of six months it became more frequent I
(28:07):
would sit down and just start weeping over things that
were inconsequential, a change in the schedule, someone forgot to
call me little things. Now I know that this was
an anxiety cycle. My brain was pushing me into fight
flight freeze, and in those moments it was freeze and
(28:30):
staying still meant that nothing could get me. My partner
at the time was confused and concerned because this was
not like me. And I just could not connect the
dots because I had, I guess considered myself healed from
everything that happened before, So what was this that was
(28:50):
happening now. I already healed and got out of the hospital.
I've been saved from the ocean. There's no reason to
think that this has anything to do with them. And
then in February twenty twenty two, I was on a
trip with my partner and his family and the subject
of kids is brought up, and it got a bit
heated between my partner and his mom. Look, I get it,
(29:12):
they want grandkids. He wants kids.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Hey, I want kids.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We talked about adopting if I wasn't able to, but
she didn't know that, and she was pushing. He was pushing,
and eventually it got heated enough to the point where
he said she can't have kids, which essentially I had
told him, but it had been shown to me that
(29:36):
that wasn't true. I had told myself that, but then
I got pregnant. I could have had kids.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
And I could still, but it would be.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So much harder if I wanted. In those few words,
he was right, but it it broke something in me.
I wasn't in the room at the time, I could
hear all of this happening. I just started crying, and
it was the first time that I had cried about
that at all. I didn't cry at the hospital, I
(30:10):
didn't cry when I miscarried, I didn't cry anytime after that.
But when confronted with the reality, I broke. What happened
after that that full day of crying was that I believe,
at least my therapist and I both believe that my
(30:30):
brain did everything it could to hide that emotion from me,
and it got pushed down one more time. A month
after that, I found myself in the middle of a flashback,
and something so small just was a trip wire to
(30:54):
a mine. My brain did what it always does, what
it normally does for humans in general, is when there
is something that is a perceived danger, it will flood
you with enough fear to make you act. And unfortunately,
because your brain has to keep flooding you with more
(31:16):
fear if you keep getting retraumatized, such as possibly near
death experiences that keep on happening, I found myself flooded
with enough fear that I became essentially manic. It was
early morning at a time when humans are generally filled
(31:36):
with stress hormones, anyways to wake you up. He wakes
up to me grabbing all of my things to get
out of there because I am feeling like I'm in
danger though there is no danger. And as I'm packing
my things and I don't realize he's awake, he grabs
my arm. And when you're feeling those types of emotions
(32:00):
and that much sense of danger, your brain unfortunately wants
to attach it to something, and it attached it to him.
And I ripped my arm away and was immediately terrified
with somebody that I loved so much.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
And I ran out of the apartment.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I don't even remember driving home, And do you remember
giving home to a bunch of missed calls? I'm sure
it was confusing. I didn't know what was going on.
All I knew was I was in danger, and I
hid in my room with the lights off for two days.
I didn't sleep with that amount of fear running through
(32:48):
my body. And what I know now, which I just
still didn't know for a few months after, was that
forty percent of women who lose a pregnancy early on
will experience depression, anxiety, and those sorts of things. If
it's an a topic loss where the woman almost dies.
(33:10):
It was something like sixty to seventy percent will experience that,
and if you do not get help, it has a
high likelihood.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Of turning into PTSD. And I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Nobody said anything to me. I got discharged from the
hospital and was like, you're fine, go home. What a
disservice to women who just went through a terrible, horrible thing,
Whether or not they wanted the pregnancy, it still ravages
your body to then have no support, no help to
(33:45):
understand what's going on in their body, to understand that
those instances where I was freezing and didn't know why
I was a survival response that shouldn't have happened and
should have been another red flag at this point point,
the flashback happened, but it didn't stop after those two
days because I had to go back to work and
(34:08):
worked overnights. And one thing I didn't know about when
you are experiencing that level of stress, that level of
survival mode, my body felt as if I was in
danger and needed to run, but I wasn't running, and
so my heart rate is up. I'm having heart palpitations
but not only that I couldn't eat. My body was
(34:30):
telling me there's no time to eat, you have to run.
I tried to eat, I tried to force things into
I could not swallow. And this went on for two
weeks as I'm working. In that two weeks, I lost
fifteen pounds. I was having such bad heart palpitations that
(34:51):
my therapist, who I had immediately scheduled when the flashback
was happening. Thank goodness, I had the wherewithal at that
point to say something's wrong. And I think it was
actually my ex who said that. He said something is wrong,
and it clicked. It pulled me out of it for
a second to be like, oh, no, something is wrong.
(35:14):
And I didn't know it this whole time. And sadly
it was ravaging my body to a point that I
probably won't ever bounce back from.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Even from the.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Time that I was fighting the tumor, I was being
forced to freeze. I didn't want to. When I had
the miscarriage and needed to sit with it, I ran,
I went back to work, and when my body was
making me freeze. Later when I would shut down, it
(35:50):
was trying to tell me you need to.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Stop, you need to pause. You need to sit with this,
and so I did.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I took off work for four months. I stopped trying
to overanalyze what had happened, and I was journaling like
crazy because I wanted to figure it out. I wanted
to solve the problem. And then I told myself stop,
go to the beach. And my best friend took me.
We got in a car. She's a queen for telling
(36:21):
me if you have to cry, cry, if you want
to go have fun, let's go have fun. But I'll
cry with you. I'll have fun with you. And we
didn't even realize that we had scheduled that trip to
the beach on a week that ended in Mother's Day.
But I think that was perfect. I think that that
(36:43):
was the time that I realized that my body wasn't
my enemy. My body wasn't trying to kill me. My
body was trying to tell me how to take care
of it. And that was when I really understood that
we were a team.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
And yeah, that's where I am now.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
I mean, it's been a journey, it will continue to
be a journey. I'm not one hundred percent. I feel
so much happier, and I think that having gotten through
all of this all of these near death experiences. I'm
so proud of myself and I feel so much stronger,
(37:24):
and I feel like I'll be able to navigate some
of the harder things that I know that are coming
around the corner, and those milestones that I will hit
in my life, I'll be able to handle them healthily
and I'll be able to come out of them even stronger.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Welcome back. This is a live again Joining me for
a conversation about today's story are my other Alive Against
story producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Dye, And
I'm your host, Dan Bush. I don't know how to
begin with this.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
This is a tough one one.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, the story was extremely overwhelming. I know Jessica, I've
known her for years and I didn't know about this, and.
Speaker 6 (38:31):
This close to her chest she did.
Speaker 7 (38:34):
Let's talk about it. I mean, I think it's all
I think because I'm gonna I'm I mean, I was
telling Dan and Lauren in the car, like I'm sitting
here googling, like, what's an epic pregnancy?
Speaker 2 (38:44):
What?
Speaker 1 (38:44):
You know?
Speaker 7 (38:45):
I didn't understand any of it, you know. Yeah, I'm
fifty seven years old. Talk about her Oh yeah, and
and people who are even dumber than me are writing
the laws on this stuff. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I didn't know about freeze. I had never I've heard
of fight and fight or flight, but I didn't know
about the aspect of trauma that causes this freeze response.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
Yeah, it's fight, flight, freeze and fall. Yeah, because that's
the that's the other one.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
What's fun.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
The fawn is effectively like appealing to the source of danger.
Speaker 8 (39:16):
Fun is more like if the tiger is about to
eat you, you go like, oh, tiger, but your stripes
are real pretty today, and I can make the steak
for you just the way that you like it.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
Yeah, it's it's it's yeah, you know, it's the the
attack dog coming at you and picking up a stick
and going, hey, do you want to play? We can
play well this.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Jessica talks a lot about how she became frozen. She
created this narrative that everything was fine to protect herself
from this unbearable pain and grief, and it was heartbreaking
to hear. You know, it's a very hard story to
listen to. But her perspective, with like this numbness, it
helped me to understand in a way that I maybe
didn't understand before how ongoing trauma works. So not just
(39:59):
the singular trauma and the PTSD they might come from that,
but like time after time after time, she faced death
again and again and again, and the stacking of those
traumas over time resulted in this sort of eventual breakdown.
And it made me wonder about so many people who
again don't have the resources necessarily or they've had these
(40:21):
stacked traumas thing, you know, bad thing after bad thing
after bad thing keep happening. I talk to my son
Roman sometimes because he's somebody who bottles up his emotions
and he has trouble like finding ways to let them out,
and he'll snap, He'll he'll get to a point where
he'll have a breakdown, and so I use metaphors. I'm like,
you know, you blow up the balloon and it keeps
getting more full of air. You got to let some out,
(40:42):
You got to find a way to let some out,
or else it's going to pop eventually. But it just
dawn on me how somebody who you know very well,
who's right next to you, you don't even know how
much stuff they're carrying.
Speaker 7 (40:54):
Well, particularly like Jessica. She's always struck me as such
a strong person. You know that you would never her
know that she was dealing with this.
Speaker 6 (41:02):
Oh yeah, Jessica is. I mean, she's a fighter, she
really is. I mean she's just like a really strong
willed human being. Frequently, people who have, yeah, who have
been sort of forced through a number of traumas or
just like the you know, living in poverty, you know,
(41:24):
having to work like three jobs to feed the kids,
get in this like fighter mindset where it's like, this
is fine, I can do this. This is fine, Like,
you know, this is nothing the thing that I'm dealing
with right now. And I think that it's it's a
defense mechanism after a period of time of going through
(41:44):
it enough where it's like I'm just going to get
through the other end of this.
Speaker 8 (41:48):
I can't deal with this right now, so I'm putting
it over here and right and then over there. Right
does overflow?
Speaker 6 (41:55):
Yeah, And just because you're not paying attention, or just
because you're trying to like look past the problem or
get to the other side of it, doesn't mean that
the problem is not like, doesn't mean that the problem
is not beyond your control.
Speaker 7 (42:10):
Well, I think it was interesting how she was unaware
of it. You know, they're cracking jokes about the drowning incident,
and she said it was a long time after that
that She's like, the reason I'm having this breakdown is
because I have frozen myself in that moment.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
We should talk about the systemic failure here too.
Speaker 6 (42:30):
Yeah, we could.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Set up with a quote the Jessica said. Yeah, she
said that this is really shocking statistic, but she said
forty percent of women who lose a pregnancy early on
experienced depression and anxiety, and that number jumps to sixty
to seventy percent for ectopic losses. And if I'm treated,
it can easily turn into PTSD.
Speaker 8 (42:50):
Yeah, this is one of those really yeah, systemic failures
of our healthcare system where like, okay, so like I
cannot empathize with this story. I could sympathize with it,
but you know, I don't have kids. I don't want kids.
I've never been pregnant. I've never had a reproductive related
medical emergency. But I can tell you that the misinformation
(43:14):
and disinformation that you receive from the medical establishment, as
a person who can get pregnant, it is infuriating. It
would be infuriating if it were merely your health and
welfare on the line, But like the fact that this
miss and disinformation often exists because someone has either made
(43:40):
a judgment about you or politicized an issue that could
kill you. It is breathtaking. It takes my breath away,
how angry that makes me. It's a larger issue with healthcare,
certainly in the United States, probably a lot of places
where healthcare professionals are overloaded. They don't always have the
(44:02):
time to sit with the patient that they would like
and to explain what the possible outcomes of whatever is
going on with them could be. You know, they're very overworked.
But part of it is this separate issue where like
in the United States, your prognosis is worse if you
(44:23):
are a woman, or not white, or have a BMI
of all ridiculous, irrelevant things that is over a certain number,
one in five United States adults has experienced discrimination in
the healthcare system. And that discrimination can be anywhere from
like merely annoying, like merely an annoying part of part
(44:44):
of your day, to actually deadly and not knowing which
one it's going to be when you're having an issue.
You're just a human person with an issue in your body.
You're like, can you fix this? And they're like, well, technically,
because the problem is in your fallopian.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Tubes, no what.
Speaker 6 (45:02):
You know.
Speaker 7 (45:03):
This story was probably the hardest one for me to
listen to. It was just so graphically painful, and I
just found myself so unknowledgeable about what she was talking about.
I had to go look up so many of the terms,
so many things that she was going through. And I
(45:25):
don't know if it's because I'm a man. I don't
know if it's because my wife and I didn't experience
any of these things when we were pregnant. I was
assuming maybe it's like when somebody gets a kind of
cancer you're not familiar with, and you learn all the
medical terminology and all the processes. I know that Jessica
(45:45):
had to look some of the stuff up herself when
she was going.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Through it, but.
Speaker 7 (45:51):
It exposed really how informed I am as a citizen.
And you can't expect people to understand everything about every
medical practice. But I think it has been politicized, you know,
and and women's healthcare has been politicized, And I understand
(46:11):
the argument coming from the pro life movement. I understand
how if you think that that's a soul, you've got
to save that life.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
I get it.
Speaker 7 (46:20):
But Jessica has a soul too, and what she was
put through, and then the fear that her Filippian tube
could rupture at any time, and then the horror of
having the miscarriage at her home and having to witness that,
and just the psychological terror of going through something like that,
(46:40):
the images that are burned into your mind. I'm sure
to think that people as ill informed or less as
me are making these the laws.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
There's also this thing that struck me about Jessica's story
that is a bigger, even bigger systemic or cultural issue,
is that she didn't trust her own body. She kind
of at the end says, you know, it was this
huge realization that my body is not my enemy. My
body is trying to tell me something. My body's trying
to tell me how to take care of it. And
(47:11):
this separation between mind and body that's so pervasive throughout
our culture. It's like if we get sick, it's like
it's separate from us. Or if we have are we
try to train our bodies or medicate them or do
all of these external things as opposed to just listening
to our bodies. She had shut down, and she was
in this state of freeze, and she was overworked, and
(47:33):
god knows, the film industry on top of that. I
can't imagine, you know, the breakdowns that come just from
working in the film industry when you go to knights
and you're working crazy hours, and on top of all
the trauma she had experienced, there's that sleep deprivation and
the pressure of that job. I can't even imagine it.
But this sort of idea that her body was not
(47:54):
her enemy, it was not something to be put aside
or repressed or but something that she learned to listen to.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah, it was huge.
Speaker 8 (48:03):
Yeah, And it's really striking in this case because the
issues that she was describing are all literally herself. Cancer
is a part of you. Cancer is more personal than
a lot of other things.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
It is.
Speaker 8 (48:19):
It's not a foreign body, it's your own selves. A
pregnancy and a topic pregnancy is part of your natural body.
And it goes to show that we need to be
treating scientifically and politically health issues as health issues.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
And so much misinformation leading up to that of how
she was the idea that she couldn't have children, Yeah,
which was not true.
Speaker 6 (48:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
All of these people that we talked to that face
these adversities, that almost die and then find through the
resilience or whatever. It's always through the compassion of others,
and it's always a lesson about compassion. It seems like
the most extreme ones have found forgiveness in the most
extreme places where it seems like it would be impossible
(49:06):
to find. Not that they not that any of the
system needs forgiving. I'm not saying that at all. I'm
just saying that the overwhelming takeaway from all of these
stories that I keep hearing myself is that we need
each other, that we are not alone, and that the
only thing that makes us makes life worth living is
this compassion, and compassion is the saving grace. I don't
(49:27):
know how to spread that idea of compassion beyond this room.
I don't know how to spread it through this podcast.
I'm hoping that that is the function of this podcast,
that people go, fuck, we're all going to die. No,
none of us know when our time's up. In the meantime,
let's be kind to each other, Let's not be alone,
Let's hold each other and be there for each other
(49:49):
and anyway, that's my hope for this show is that
it actually is unifying.
Speaker 7 (49:54):
Find a place how we can be helpful rather than ideological.
Speaker 8 (49:58):
Yeah yeah, and giving grace instead of passing judgment on
you know, on yourself, as well as which is possibly
the hardest part of it, but right, like getting someone's
story and listening to why an issue is important to them.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Next time on Alive Again, we meet Nate dorm who
spent his early life unable to picture himself living past
the age of twenty five. Nita's missed it until a
violent storm at sea turned his worst fears into reality,
leaving him shipwrecked off the coast of Cuba.
Speaker 9 (50:29):
As soon as the boat hits the wave and dips down,
there's a small pause. And I cleaned the chain on
this the cleat right there and as fast as I could,
and the water hit me and caught two of my
fingers between the chain and the cleat.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Now the whole way to the boat.
Speaker 9 (50:45):
Is crushing my fingers, And then I realized that that
was the moment I've been dreaming about my entire life.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski and Lauren vogelbah music by Ben love It,
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. K
Ali and Noames Griffin. Today's episode was edited by Mike
(51:15):
w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm
your host Dan Bush. Special thanks to Jessica Sanchez for
sharing her story. Alive Again is a production of I
Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative
near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
(51:36):
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
That's a l I V E A g A I
N P R O j E C T at gmail
dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
My name is Jessica and the first time I died
was in two thousand and five, and I've gotten better
at it ever since. When there is something that is
a perceived danger, it will flood you with enough.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Fear to make you act.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Your brain has to keep flooding you with more fear
if you keep getting retraumatized, such as possibly near death
experiences that keep on happening.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:07):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
When I was eighteen, I was living with my dad.
We are very close. My dad is my best friend.
He raised me to be a strong willed, opinionated person
who will always chase after what she wants in the
(01:47):
spring semester of my senior year, I was having pain
in my jaw and I thought it was my wisdom
teeth they were coming in. I was having wisdom teeth pain.
But when my dad took me in to the doctor
and they scanned my jaw, they found a giant black hole,
(02:10):
and that black hole made a nurse rush out of
the room, and eighteen year old me looked at my dad,
looked back at the scan and as they pulled my
dad out of the room, I knew something was wrong.
After that, I had a biopsy of my jaw. The
(02:30):
tumor was so big that it took up probably a
third of my jaw. When they did the biopsy, they
removed my Wisden teeth. They removed three teeth in the
back as well three molars, and that biopsy ended up
being three days of the worst pain of my life.
(02:57):
The tumor, they had not realized, was a tumor. It
ripped through my jawbone into my mouth over the course
of three days.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
It was like.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Uncorking a champagne bottle, and the tumor pushed through my
jaw into my mouth upward and shredded my gums through
the futures and essentially broke into my mouth in such
a way that it split the inside of my mouth,
(03:28):
and I could not get to a doctor fast enough. Honestly,
I believe my mother at the time gave me enough
VI could in some mady a horse pass out. They'd
given me painkillers, but I was screaming at home and
she wanted the pain to stop, and I ended up
(03:48):
back in the hospital to undergo another procedure to remove
what had pushed through and repair as much as they
could what was damaged. That was the first of eighteen
surgeries over the course of seven years after that, when
when the biopsy came back, it was a CGCG, a
(04:11):
central giant cell granulema that was essentially eating my face.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Those types of tumors.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
They bundle themselves into blood vessels and they feed on estrogen.
Then I was at the perfect age. It was in
the middle of the age range between the ages I
believe of twelve and twenty four, and that was a
time when I was still finding out who I was
as a person.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
I was still considering going to.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
College but not doing well in school. But I wanted
to go to college. But then I had to start chemo.
I was on interferre on alpha for a year, and
this was to pull the blood buscles away from the
tumor to make it operable. In that core of a year,
(05:01):
I had two major surgeries. The first one was an
emergency because the tumor, even though even though they had
tried to repair what it had burst through the first time,
that tumor was still growing. It was pushing out. I
finished my school year, but I did it from home,
(05:22):
and I walked across the field of my graduation to
teachers just crying, which was wild because I'd only been
there a year, really just one semester. But I think
everyone had known that something pretty terrible had happened, so
(05:43):
later on. I believe over the summer the tumor had
been growing so much that I was being choked. It
had started growing down into the back of my throat
and I would choke in the middle of the night
when I would fall asleep, and the fear was that
my throat would close up. So then this surgery, I
was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night.
(06:05):
My surgeon was woken up brought to the hospital because
essentially they needed to do a debulking of the tumor
in order for me to be able to close my mouth,
because it was growing so much that I couldn't close
my mouth for months. But then b also who didn't
want me choking in the middle of the night. So
when I got to the hospital, I was sitting in
(06:26):
the surgical bay waiting to be taken back, and my
parents get pulled away from surgery bay to talk with
my doctor, which I thought was a bit sus and
I'm watching them and they're looking at me a bit awkwardly,
and I'm like, what's going on?
Speaker 3 (06:45):
And they come over.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
My parents come over and they say we'll see you later,
We'll see you when you wake up, and they both
like kiss me on the forehead and essentially hurried out
of there. I get to this surgery bay in this moment,
and they strap my arms down and I'm like, well,
this is this is weird. Then they blindfold me and
(07:10):
I'm like this is not right. And then they say
you'll feel a pinch in your throat, and I remember
saying what, And then I feel a syringe go into
my throat and I start jerking and I was like,
that's why they've tied me down and then they sprayed
(07:30):
inside of my nostril and told me you are going
to feel a bit of pain, but it's going to
be over quickly. And that's when they shoved a tube
up my nose, down into my throat and into my airway.
And if you could hear the sound, it would have
been me screaming as hard as I could, thrashing on
the table until it was immediately cut, silent when the
(07:53):
tube hit my lungs. That is the surgery that told
me that this is way more serious. So in October
I was ready for the surgery to remove the tumor.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
I've been doing the chemo.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
The blood vessels are pulled away, very excited to finally
have this thing out of my face that has been
causing me to not be able to eat right, to
have pain in my job, bleeding in the middle of
the night. That chemo was so bad that it caused
me to have dyslexia. My hair was falling out. I
(08:36):
lost so much weight that I was down to ninety pounds.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I met the.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Surgery and they're removing all of the tumor. They only
have a little bit left. They're seeing some blood vessels,
but feel confident that they are able to cut around it.
But what ended up happening was as they were removing
the last bit, they hit a big blood vessel that
they couldn't see because it was under it, and I
(09:01):
bled out, and I bled out fast. There are still
people at the hospital today who, if you ask them,
they remember getting the page in the darkness of the
early early morning that they needed blood fast. Now I
(09:25):
had lost so much blood that I would be considered dead,
and so they had to pump it back into me
to bring me back. The experience I had and I
was out.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Was an interesting one.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I try to describe it to people who want to know, because,
of course you tell people this, the first thing they
ask you is do you remember?
Speaker 3 (09:54):
And I do.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
But the experience that I had was I would pull
it weightlessness if I had anything there to a contextual
thing to compare it to. There's no gravity, so how
can you be weightless if there's not if gravity doesn't exist.
I was aware of what was happening. What was wild
was it felt like I was expanding, but not my body,
(10:20):
but I as a concept was expanding, and I was
kind of being pulled away and seeing it's like when
you're on your phone and you and you pull it
to where it looks like a fish eye lens, and
everything kind of just starts to pull around you. And
I'm not seeing things because it's not my eyes. It's
just an awareness. I knew that people were panicking around me,
(10:44):
and I knew my parents were panicking, because how could
they not. They could tell something was wrong that everybody's
running to get to the room.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
As this is.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Happening, I'm feeling kind of this dissolving into something bigger,
in the same way that sugar dissolves into hot water.
The sugar's not gone, but it's now just part of
something else. And that's what I felt like, which for me,
I feel good about.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
It actually like looking at it after the fact, I'm like, oh,
I'm actually not so scared of dying at this point.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It's hard to.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Look back with the lens of now, because I think
at that time I was so eager. I went to
school and A I was not going to let anybody
tell me what major I was going to do. I
was going to be a theater in film major. But
B I was so determined that I think I became
(11:48):
a bit too forceful. The blunt Jessica now is blunt
with intention. Back then, the Jessica that had not been
the person who had the benefit of maturity through experience,
was the type of person who would just tell people
flat out no instead of trying to compromise. That was
(12:10):
a learning experience for me, for sure. I gobbled college
up I, where a lot of people were partying. I
didn't go to college U til I was twenty, so
I had a few years on everybody, and I was motivated.
I'd set in a chair for a year. I didn't
want to be still. I can't sit still because still
(12:31):
is danger. In twenty twenty one, I was working as
a graphic designer on a show here in Atlanta and
was working alongside somebody who eventually became my partner. We
were in a very loving relationship, both very excited about
(12:54):
where it was going. But early in the relationship I
got pregnant. It was an unintentional pregnancy.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
At that time, I had an ID because I was
not expecting to try and be getting pregnant anytime soon,
but also because my previous tumor feed off of estrogen,
and my doctors at the time had said they could
not guarantee that getting pregnant or having some sort of
(13:25):
hormonal shift wouldn't cause another tumor. I had grown afraid
over the years of accidental pregnancy and what that might do.
I know now since science has changed, that getting pregnant
would not have done that likely. My brother is a doctor,
(13:48):
and he told me it would be more likely that
a pregnancy would shield my body from that happening. But
in my head at the time, I had told myself,
don't get pregnant or you'll die the irony, right, So
(14:14):
this is when the conversation shifted to what do we do.
I was pregnant and I had an ID, and talking
to my doctor, I was made very aware that this
was a serious issue. I had already known that there's
a risk of ectopic pregnancies with people who have IEDs,
(14:37):
and my doctor told me, if the egg is in
your uterus, we still need to remove it because if
the baby grows and there's an IUD in there, that's
not good.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
You've got to take it out.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
However, taking it out put me at risk of miscarriage,
which is a natural occurrence, but because taking it out
traumatizes the lining of the uterus, when there's a pregnancy
and the walls are growing, it might cause me to
have a miscarriage anyway. I was afraid that I.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
Might rupture and potentially die if if that was the case. Now,
we took the IUD out and my doctor told me
that it was my choice, but because there was a
fear that it was a topic, he recommended that I
(15:37):
look into having an abortion.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
However, anybody feels about that. The procedure itself, as it
is performed, would maximize the potential that the egg would
be removed along with the contents of the uterus, even
if it was in the Philippian tube. There was that possibility,
(16:01):
and that was worth considering because in that frame of mind,
you want to be able to do everything you can
to ensure that you don't die. Because the id had
already been taken out and potentially there was damage to
the uterus, so continuing a pregnancy anyway is risky. I
(16:23):
looked into making an appointment for the procedure because my
home state of Georgia had pulled back because this state
has done a very good job of restricting access to abortions.
(16:45):
The amount of appointments that were available were slim, but
I made one regardless, and the time waiting to get one,
of course, there's that fear that it could rupture at
any second if it is atopic pregnancy. But it didn't
matter because the night before my appointment, I sat on.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
My toilet.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
As the entire contents of my uterus empty, and I
had a very painful miscarriage.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
This was about six weeks.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
In and before that I had been flooded with those
happy hormones that you get in the first trimester, the
very intensely euphoric feelings you have being in the beginning
of a pregnancy because you're supposed to write, you're you're
supposed to care for this baby, so you're very happy,
(17:48):
and so it means that the mother will fight for it.
And when the miscarriage happened, it shoots your body full
of cortisol. I went to my appointment the next day anyway,
as I'm on the table preparing myself because I'd had
an idea that it was a miscarriage, but I wanted
to go either way because it meant i'd get an ultrasound.
(18:09):
I want to see what's going on. I want to
know about my health. And when I got there and
they did the ultrasound and they said, we cannot perform
an abortion. There is no pregnancy here. And looking at
the screen, there was a void in my uterus.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
There was a little nugget sized void.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Now, having a miscarriage does not mean the egg is gone.
A miscarriage means that the lining of your uterus and
whatever the contents are with it are gone. An abortion
would have pulled more out, whereas this is just a
normal flushing of the lining and all those other contents
does not include whatever may or may not be in
(18:48):
the Philippian too. So the nurse who was speaking to
me looked at me nervously and said, okay, because you
had an ID, because this is how happened, you need
to know that you are at high risk of internal
bleeding if this or worder rupture. You need to do
(19:08):
some research on ectopic pregnancies. And she put the fear
into me at that point, and I went home and
I just started reading on it because now I am
a sea without a life fest I don't have the
assurance that I could have had the egg pulled out.
(19:29):
And it's at this point just a waiting game. And
the waiting game took two weeks. I'm very glad she
told me to do that because as I was researching,
I found out that if you're bleeding internally, it feels
like you have to go to the bathroom, but you'll
sit in the bathroom and you can't go to the bathroom.
(19:51):
It's painful, it's a pressure. And at that point my
fallopian too hit ruptured and I'm sitting on the toilet
at two am at my boyfriend's house, and in my mind,
I said, this much pain means something's wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
I need to get to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I sit in the waiting room.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
For four hours. I'm getting very dizzy. This was COVID time,
so my boyfriend's outside the window watching me as I'm
sitting in a wheelchair trying not to not off. It
was terrifying. When I was taken into the hospital. Finally,
(20:37):
it was another probably eight hours before I could actually
have surgery. They had to take me into a room
to get an ultrasound to show bleeding, which was so terrible,
and I screamed so much because they had to do
an internal ultrasound. It was actually it was actually kind
(20:59):
of funny. I'm I'm grabbing the sides of.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
The journey, screaming, bloody murder.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
But then the poor the poor woman who is what
I can only assume was a resident in the sort
of pregnancy wing is listening to me scream and.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Clearly like shaken up by it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
She's young, and I'm screaming, but I'm going don't worry,
don't worry, just keep going, just keep going.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
It's fine, it's fine.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
I just I just kept telling her to keep going,
and it was not reassuring her at all, So she
left and had to pull in a much more mature
nurse who's clearly gotten many years under her belt.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
This woman came in and did the thing, got it
done great, confirmed that I had internal bleeding, but I
still had to lay there for eight hours, slowly dying,
trying to get me into surgery. And this should have
been a red flag. My reaction to it was nothing.
(22:00):
The nurses even said, wow, you're handling this really well,
and I was just numb. I think at that point
was when my brain started to shield me from emotions.
It was forcing me to freeze because that was the
only way to keep me safe. Otherwise I'd go mad.
(22:20):
I would have to feel the pain, that I didn't
want to feel, which was I essentially lost a child
and I might die. Because whether or not I had
wanted to get pregnant, whether or not I wasn't ready,
whether or not I was prepared, it still happened. And
(22:43):
my body had already flooded me with that happy hormone
that when it shoved the cortisol into my body, it
just shut down the part that could have processed it.
And the added cortisol of almost I just completely.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Wiped my ability to.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Healthily process my emotions, and that's what started the decline
into what eventually became a mental breakdown. The surgery to
(23:26):
repair the damage that had caused when the egg ruptured
my Philippian tube was that I lost my left Philippian
tube as well as a majority of the left side
of my uterus. I lost a large part of my
reproductive system. Looking back now, I can confidently say that
(23:49):
what I was experiencing after this was postpartum. I should
have been given information leaving the hospital that would have
told me that I was at massive risk of mental
health issues. Because whether or not you've given birth to
a child, or lost a child early in your pregnancy,
(24:10):
or any time throughout your pregnancy, whether it is miscarriage, abortion,
ec topic pregnancy, however it happens, you have the same
chemical drop and flood with stress hormones that can cause
that massive state of depression. And again the signs that
(24:31):
I should have been looking for were numbness, because after
I was out of the hospital, my partner and I
both decided to try and move on from it and
not talk about it much more for us to be
able to have a time of rest and to focus
(24:52):
on my body healing.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
But it never got revisited.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
And because of that, my numbness turned down into hiding,
and I took job after job after job and worked
and worked and worked, and essentially just never let myself
sit in a sadness that I was refusing to feel
or even acknowledge. And then barely a month after that,
(25:22):
I was working on a show in Hawaii and my
partner was there with me, and we decided to visit
a beach on my last day before work started. At
this point, I had healed from my laparoscopic surgery and
thought that I was a okay to get in the ocean,
(25:42):
and we jumped in and as I was swimming, I
realized I'm getting fatigued very quickly, and what I thought
had healed in my abdomen was no longer working. My
abs were seizing, I was cramping, and I could not
keep myself above water. I started bobbing, and my partner
(26:05):
was looking at me and his face was instant panic
and that I cannot get myself upright to even get
on my back and float my way back. I see
my boyfriend look behind me and his eyes go wide
because as we're trying to figure out what to do,
a large wave is coming up behind me, and in
(26:25):
that split second, he grabs my arm. I see him
go under and he essentially flips me over his head
and into the wave so that.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
It will push me to the shore. It did.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
It also tumbled me across some very sharp rocks, and
I bounced my way back to the sand. I am
coughing up water and I was very close to drowning.
And I think that essentially like sealed the deal on
my mental health decline, because I I had just almost died,
(27:01):
and now, after a month of healing and feeling like
I'm returning to normal, it happens again. And when that happened,
that was when I started getting more agitated, I could
tell that little things were starting to push my buttons
more than they would not so much at first, but
as time went on we were laughing about it.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
At parties.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
He and I would tell the story about how he
saved my life and it was so wild and wow,
it was a close one.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
But making it a joke meant that I never re
examined the fact that I was out in the middle
of the ocean and could have just been lost.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Forever.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
After that, still taking job after job after job, my
sleep started to become erratic. My mood shifted. I would
at times, when presented with something that would bother me,
I would freeze and I didn't know why, and over
the course of six months it became more frequent I
(28:07):
would sit down and just start weeping over things that
were inconsequential, a change in the schedule, someone forgot to
call me little things. Now I know that this was
an anxiety cycle. My brain was pushing me into fight
flight freeze, and in those moments it was freeze and
(28:30):
staying still meant that nothing could get me. My partner
at the time was confused and concerned because this was
not like me. And I just could not connect the
dots because I had, I guess considered myself healed from
everything that happened before, So what was this that was
(28:50):
happening now. I already healed and got out of the hospital.
I've been saved from the ocean. There's no reason to
think that this has anything to do with them. And
then in February twenty twenty two, I was on a
trip with my partner and his family and the subject
of kids is brought up, and it got a bit
heated between my partner and his mom. Look, I get it,
(29:12):
they want grandkids. He wants kids.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Hey, I want kids.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
We talked about adopting if I wasn't able to, but
she didn't know that, and she was pushing. He was pushing,
and eventually it got heated enough to the point where
he said she can't have kids, which essentially I had
told him, but it had been shown to me that
(29:36):
that wasn't true. I had told myself that, but then
I got pregnant. I could have had kids.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
And I could still, but it would be.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So much harder if I wanted. In those few words,
he was right, but it it broke something in me.
I wasn't in the room at the time, I could
hear all of this happening. I just started crying, and
it was the first time that I had cried about
that at all. I didn't cry at the hospital, I
(30:10):
didn't cry when I miscarried, I didn't cry anytime after that.
But when confronted with the reality, I broke. What happened
after that that full day of crying was that I believe,
at least my therapist and I both believe that my
(30:30):
brain did everything it could to hide that emotion from me,
and it got pushed down one more time. A month
after that, I found myself in the middle of a flashback,
and something so small just was a trip wire to
(30:54):
a mine. My brain did what it always does, what
it normally does for humans in general, is when there
is something that is a perceived danger, it will flood
you with enough fear to make you act. And unfortunately,
because your brain has to keep flooding you with more
(31:16):
fear if you keep getting retraumatized, such as possibly near
death experiences that keep on happening, I found myself flooded
with enough fear that I became essentially manic. It was
early morning at a time when humans are generally filled
(31:36):
with stress hormones, anyways to wake you up. He wakes
up to me grabbing all of my things to get
out of there because I am feeling like I'm in
danger though there is no danger. And as I'm packing
my things and I don't realize he's awake, he grabs
my arm. And when you're feeling those types of emotions
(32:00):
and that much sense of danger, your brain unfortunately wants
to attach it to something, and it attached it to him.
And I ripped my arm away and was immediately terrified
with somebody that I loved so much.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
And I ran out of the apartment.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
I don't even remember driving home, And do you remember
giving home to a bunch of missed calls? I'm sure
it was confusing. I didn't know what was going on.
All I knew was I was in danger, and I
hid in my room with the lights off for two days.
I didn't sleep with that amount of fear running through
(32:48):
my body. And what I know now, which I just
still didn't know for a few months after, was that
forty percent of women who lose a pregnancy early on
will experience depression, anxiety, and those sorts of things. If
it's an a topic loss where the woman almost dies.
(33:10):
It was something like sixty to seventy percent will experience that,
and if you do not get help, it has a
high likelihood.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Of turning into PTSD. And I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Nobody said anything to me. I got discharged from the
hospital and was like, you're fine, go home. What a
disservice to women who just went through a terrible, horrible thing,
Whether or not they wanted the pregnancy, it still ravages
your body to then have no support, no help to
(33:45):
understand what's going on in their body, to understand that
those instances where I was freezing and didn't know why
I was a survival response that shouldn't have happened and
should have been another red flag at this point point,
the flashback happened, but it didn't stop after those two
days because I had to go back to work and
(34:08):
worked overnights. And one thing I didn't know about when
you are experiencing that level of stress, that level of
survival mode, my body felt as if I was in
danger and needed to run, but I wasn't running, and
so my heart rate is up. I'm having heart palpitations
but not only that I couldn't eat. My body was
(34:30):
telling me there's no time to eat, you have to run.
I tried to eat, I tried to force things into
I could not swallow. And this went on for two
weeks as I'm working. In that two weeks, I lost
fifteen pounds. I was having such bad heart palpitations that
(34:51):
my therapist, who I had immediately scheduled when the flashback
was happening. Thank goodness, I had the wherewithal at that
point to say something's wrong. And I think it was
actually my ex who said that. He said something is wrong,
and it clicked. It pulled me out of it for
a second to be like, oh, no, something is wrong.
(35:14):
And I didn't know it this whole time. And sadly
it was ravaging my body to a point that I
probably won't ever bounce back from.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Even from the.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Time that I was fighting the tumor, I was being
forced to freeze. I didn't want to. When I had
the miscarriage and needed to sit with it, I ran,
I went back to work, and when my body was
making me freeze. Later when I would shut down, it
(35:50):
was trying to tell me you need to.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Stop, you need to pause. You need to sit with this,
and so I did.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I took off work for four months. I stopped trying
to overanalyze what had happened, and I was journaling like
crazy because I wanted to figure it out. I wanted
to solve the problem. And then I told myself stop,
go to the beach. And my best friend took me.
We got in a car. She's a queen for telling
(36:21):
me if you have to cry, cry, if you want
to go have fun, let's go have fun. But I'll
cry with you. I'll have fun with you. And we
didn't even realize that we had scheduled that trip to
the beach on a week that ended in Mother's Day.
But I think that was perfect. I think that that
(36:43):
was the time that I realized that my body wasn't
my enemy. My body wasn't trying to kill me. My
body was trying to tell me how to take care
of it. And that was when I really understood that
we were a team.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
And yeah, that's where I am now.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
I mean, it's been a journey, it will continue to
be a journey. I'm not one hundred percent. I feel
so much happier, and I think that having gotten through
all of this all of these near death experiences. I'm
so proud of myself and I feel so much stronger,
(37:24):
and I feel like I'll be able to navigate some
of the harder things that I know that are coming
around the corner, and those milestones that I will hit
in my life, I'll be able to handle them healthily
and I'll be able to come out of them even stronger.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Welcome back. This is a live again Joining me for
a conversation about today's story are my other Alive Against
story producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Dye, And
I'm your host, Dan Bush. I don't know how to
begin with this.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
This is a tough one one.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Yeah, the story was extremely overwhelming. I know Jessica, I've
known her for years and I didn't know about this, and.
Speaker 6 (38:31):
This close to her chest she did.
Speaker 7 (38:34):
Let's talk about it. I mean, I think it's all
I think because I'm gonna I'm I mean, I was
telling Dan and Lauren in the car, like I'm sitting
here googling, like, what's an epic pregnancy?
Speaker 2 (38:44):
What?
Speaker 1 (38:44):
You know?
Speaker 7 (38:45):
I didn't understand any of it, you know. Yeah, I'm
fifty seven years old. Talk about her Oh yeah, and
and people who are even dumber than me are writing
the laws on this stuff. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I didn't know about freeze. I had never I've heard
of fight and fight or flight, but I didn't know
about the aspect of trauma that causes this freeze response.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
Yeah, it's fight, flight, freeze and fall. Yeah, because that's
the that's the other one.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
What's fun.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
The fawn is effectively like appealing to the source of danger.
Speaker 8 (39:16):
Fun is more like if the tiger is about to
eat you, you go like, oh, tiger, but your stripes
are real pretty today, and I can make the steak
for you just the way that you like it.
Speaker 6 (39:27):
Yeah, it's it's it's yeah, you know, it's the the
attack dog coming at you and picking up a stick
and going, hey, do you want to play? We can
play well this.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Jessica talks a lot about how she became frozen. She
created this narrative that everything was fine to protect herself
from this unbearable pain and grief, and it was heartbreaking
to hear. You know, it's a very hard story to
listen to. But her perspective, with like this numbness, it
helped me to understand in a way that I maybe
didn't understand before how ongoing trauma works. So not just
(39:59):
the singular trauma and the PTSD they might come from that,
but like time after time after time, she faced death
again and again and again, and the stacking of those
traumas over time resulted in this sort of eventual breakdown.
And it made me wonder about so many people who
again don't have the resources necessarily or they've had these
(40:21):
stacked traumas thing, you know, bad thing after bad thing
after bad thing keep happening. I talk to my son
Roman sometimes because he's somebody who bottles up his emotions
and he has trouble like finding ways to let them out,
and he'll snap, He'll he'll get to a point where
he'll have a breakdown, and so I use metaphors. I'm like,
you know, you blow up the balloon and it keeps
getting more full of air. You got to let some out,
(40:42):
You got to find a way to let some out,
or else it's going to pop eventually. But it just
dawn on me how somebody who you know very well,
who's right next to you, you don't even know how
much stuff they're carrying.
Speaker 7 (40:54):
Well, particularly like Jessica. She's always struck me as such
a strong person. You know that you would never her
know that she was dealing with this.
Speaker 6 (41:02):
Oh yeah, Jessica is. I mean, she's a fighter, she
really is. I mean she's just like a really strong
willed human being. Frequently, people who have, yeah, who have
been sort of forced through a number of traumas or
just like the you know, living in poverty, you know,
(41:24):
having to work like three jobs to feed the kids,
get in this like fighter mindset where it's like, this
is fine, I can do this. This is fine, Like,
you know, this is nothing the thing that I'm dealing
with right now. And I think that it's it's a
defense mechanism after a period of time of going through
(41:44):
it enough where it's like I'm just going to get
through the other end of this.
Speaker 8 (41:48):
I can't deal with this right now, so I'm putting
it over here and right and then over there. Right
does overflow?
Speaker 6 (41:55):
Yeah, And just because you're not paying attention, or just
because you're trying to like look past the problem or
get to the other side of it, doesn't mean that
the problem is not like, doesn't mean that the problem
is not beyond your control.
Speaker 7 (42:10):
Well, I think it was interesting how she was unaware
of it. You know, they're cracking jokes about the drowning incident,
and she said it was a long time after that
that She's like, the reason I'm having this breakdown is
because I have frozen myself in that moment.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
We should talk about the systemic failure here too.
Speaker 6 (42:30):
Yeah, we could.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
Set up with a quote the Jessica said. Yeah, she
said that this is really shocking statistic, but she said
forty percent of women who lose a pregnancy early on
experienced depression and anxiety, and that number jumps to sixty
to seventy percent for ectopic losses. And if I'm treated,
it can easily turn into PTSD.
Speaker 8 (42:50):
Yeah, this is one of those really yeah, systemic failures
of our healthcare system where like, okay, so like I
cannot empathize with this story. I could sympathize with it,
but you know, I don't have kids. I don't want kids.
I've never been pregnant. I've never had a reproductive related
medical emergency. But I can tell you that the misinformation
(43:14):
and disinformation that you receive from the medical establishment, as
a person who can get pregnant, it is infuriating. It
would be infuriating if it were merely your health and
welfare on the line, But like the fact that this
miss and disinformation often exists because someone has either made
(43:40):
a judgment about you or politicized an issue that could
kill you. It is breathtaking. It takes my breath away,
how angry that makes me. It's a larger issue with healthcare,
certainly in the United States, probably a lot of places
where healthcare professionals are overloaded. They don't always have the
(44:02):
time to sit with the patient that they would like
and to explain what the possible outcomes of whatever is
going on with them could be. You know, they're very overworked.
But part of it is this separate issue where like
in the United States, your prognosis is worse if you
(44:23):
are a woman, or not white, or have a BMI
of all ridiculous, irrelevant things that is over a certain number,
one in five United States adults has experienced discrimination in
the healthcare system. And that discrimination can be anywhere from
like merely annoying, like merely an annoying part of part
(44:44):
of your day, to actually deadly and not knowing which
one it's going to be when you're having an issue.
You're just a human person with an issue in your body.
You're like, can you fix this? And they're like, well, technically,
because the problem is in your fallopian.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Tubes, no what.
Speaker 6 (45:02):
You know.
Speaker 7 (45:03):
This story was probably the hardest one for me to
listen to. It was just so graphically painful, and I
just found myself so unknowledgeable about what she was talking about.
I had to go look up so many of the terms,
so many things that she was going through. And I
(45:25):
don't know if it's because I'm a man. I don't
know if it's because my wife and I didn't experience
any of these things when we were pregnant. I was
assuming maybe it's like when somebody gets a kind of
cancer you're not familiar with, and you learn all the
medical terminology and all the processes. I know that Jessica
(45:45):
had to look some of the stuff up herself when
she was going.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Through it, but.
Speaker 7 (45:51):
It exposed really how informed I am as a citizen.
And you can't expect people to understand everything about every
medical practice. But I think it has been politicized, you know,
and and women's healthcare has been politicized, And I understand
(46:11):
the argument coming from the pro life movement. I understand
how if you think that that's a soul, you've got
to save that life.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
I get it.
Speaker 7 (46:20):
But Jessica has a soul too, and what she was
put through, and then the fear that her Filippian tube
could rupture at any time, and then the horror of
having the miscarriage at her home and having to witness that,
and just the psychological terror of going through something like that,
(46:40):
the images that are burned into your mind. I'm sure
to think that people as ill informed or less as
me are making these the laws.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
There's also this thing that struck me about Jessica's story
that is a bigger, even bigger systemic or cultural issue,
is that she didn't trust her own body. She kind
of at the end says, you know, it was this
huge realization that my body is not my enemy. My
body is trying to tell me something. My body's trying
to tell me how to take care of it. And
(47:11):
this separation between mind and body that's so pervasive throughout
our culture. It's like if we get sick, it's like
it's separate from us. Or if we have are we
try to train our bodies or medicate them or do
all of these external things as opposed to just listening
to our bodies. She had shut down, and she was
in this state of freeze, and she was overworked, and
(47:33):
god knows, the film industry on top of that. I
can't imagine, you know, the breakdowns that come just from
working in the film industry when you go to knights
and you're working crazy hours, and on top of all
the trauma she had experienced, there's that sleep deprivation and
the pressure of that job. I can't even imagine it.
But this sort of idea that her body was not
(47:54):
her enemy, it was not something to be put aside
or repressed or but something that she learned to listen to.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah, it was huge.
Speaker 8 (48:03):
Yeah, And it's really striking in this case because the
issues that she was describing are all literally herself. Cancer
is a part of you. Cancer is more personal than
a lot of other things.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
It is.
Speaker 8 (48:19):
It's not a foreign body, it's your own selves. A
pregnancy and a topic pregnancy is part of your natural body.
And it goes to show that we need to be
treating scientifically and politically health issues as health issues.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
And so much misinformation leading up to that of how
she was the idea that she couldn't have children, Yeah,
which was not true.
Speaker 6 (48:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:44):
All of these people that we talked to that face
these adversities, that almost die and then find through the
resilience or whatever. It's always through the compassion of others,
and it's always a lesson about compassion. It seems like
the most extreme ones have found forgiveness in the most
extreme places where it seems like it would be impossible
(49:06):
to find. Not that they not that any of the
system needs forgiving. I'm not saying that at all. I'm
just saying that the overwhelming takeaway from all of these
stories that I keep hearing myself is that we need
each other, that we are not alone, and that the
only thing that makes us makes life worth living is
this compassion, and compassion is the saving grace. I don't
(49:27):
know how to spread that idea of compassion beyond this room.
I don't know how to spread it through this podcast.
I'm hoping that that is the function of this podcast,
that people go, fuck, we're all going to die. No,
none of us know when our time's up. In the meantime,
let's be kind to each other, Let's not be alone,
Let's hold each other and be there for each other
(49:49):
and anyway, that's my hope for this show is that
it actually is unifying.
Speaker 7 (49:54):
Find a place how we can be helpful rather than ideological.
Speaker 8 (49:58):
Yeah yeah, and giving grace instead of passing judgment on
you know, on yourself, as well as which is possibly
the hardest part of it, but right, like getting someone's
story and listening to why an issue is important to them.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
Next time on Alive Again, we meet Nate dorm who
spent his early life unable to picture himself living past
the age of twenty five. Nita's missed it until a
violent storm at sea turned his worst fears into reality,
leaving him shipwrecked off the coast of Cuba.
Speaker 9 (50:29):
As soon as the boat hits the wave and dips down,
there's a small pause. And I cleaned the chain on
this the cleat right there and as fast as I could,
and the water hit me and caught two of my
fingers between the chain and the cleat.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Now the whole way to the boat.
Speaker 9 (50:45):
Is crushing my fingers, And then I realized that that
was the moment I've been dreaming about my entire life.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski and Lauren vogelbah music by Ben love It,
additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew
Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for
additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. K
Ali and Noames Griffin. Today's episode was edited by Mike
(51:15):
w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm
your host Dan Bush. Special thanks to Jessica Sanchez for
sharing her story. Alive Again is a production of I
Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative
near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
(51:36):
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
That's a l I V E A g A I
N P R O j E C T at gmail
dot com.
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