December 30, 2025 • 53 mins
When a falling rock shattered Rhesa Bailey’s pelvis at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, survival became immediate and bodily— improvised splints, a perilous raft run to the remote ranger station, a turbulent helicopter through weather.
In the year leading up to the accident, Rhesa had begun to doubt her beliefs—beliefs that had defined her—beliefs that once seemed unshakable—about God, safety, and certainty. These were stripped down to questions.
In this riveting episode, Rhesa talks about the Grand Canyon accident that almost killed her, her crisis of faith, the ache of doubt, the humility of not knowing, and how her experience of almost dying helped reshaped her identity. Eventually she re-imagined faith— not as answers to the mysteries of the universe, but as a practice: presence, honesty, and love enacted in small, daily choices. What emerged was a renewed understanding of herself and her place in the grand universe.
This is a story of faith transformed by experience, moving from borrowed conviction to a grounded, personal belief that can hold both mystery and joy.
Contains traumatic injury, blood loss, and medical/ICU details. Listener discretion advised.
Story Producer: Brent Dey
If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story! Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com We’d love to hear your story!
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 (00:16):
My name is Reesa Bailey. My name is Reesa Collins.
At the time of this story, when I almost died
at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I have a
story about faith, doubt and self discovery and having adventures
outside of your comfort zone.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
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
(01:01):
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 as advised.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I was raised in Winsusalem, which is in North Carolina.
I had a wonderful childhood. Was surrounded by huge amounts
of extended family and a church. Family. Church was always
important to me. I was raised as a mainline Methodist
and a small church. And then when I got to
(01:39):
be a teenager, I got involved in young life and
that led me in a more evangelical direction. Young Life
is a Christian outreach to high school students, and it's
meant to be lots of fun so that high school
students will enjoy it. And I took a lot of
trips with Young Life, and on my way to a
(01:59):
Young Life camp in Colorado one summer, we stopped at
a place called Noah's Ar Rafting Company. They took us
rafting for a half day, and I loved the rafting,
(02:20):
even though I'd never done anything like that before. I
was just blown away by the natural beauty and by
how much fun rafting looked like to do every day.
I was like, I want to do this full time
for my job, you know. That's what sounded so fun
(02:41):
to me and so amazing. I'd spent a lot of
time growing up outside a lot of time, but I
had never done like official outdoor activities really like rafting
or a lot of hiking or so it was. It
(03:04):
was just thrilling to take that one step further and
think that, like I could see all these beautiful things
all day long. And so my sophomore year of college,
I decided I would apply for a summer job at
Noah's Arc. Didn't think I would get it because I
had no outdoor experience, but I had ministry experience and
that's part of what they were looking for. And so
(03:27):
I was offered the position to work there, and I
was trained in rafting and backpacking and rock climbing and
leading trips. It was a whole new world. It was
a big challenge. I mean, I literally had never set
up a tent before. So I had to tell my
parents that I wanted to do this job and that
I had the job. And my mom was really concerned
(03:51):
about my safety and going so far away, because that
is not what my family did at all. I mean,
most of my family lives right in Winston Salem. But
in the end she was supportive, and I think my
dad was secretly really excited and proud about me working
out there. I think he thought that was really exciting
(04:12):
and neat, you know. I picked up all the stuff
I had they had sent me a list of all
the stuff I needed, and then flew out there. Here.
I am literally out in the middle of nowhere in
central Colorado, and I am a long way from home,
(04:37):
and it was pretty wild, so no was Our crafting
was in the Univista Colorado in the very central part
of Colorado. It's a beautiful little town, little western town,
and a lot of rough guides lived there, and we
hung out together on our time off, and we had
(04:59):
so so much fun, just all these young people with
sort of the same interest and values, and it was
just a blast. The Arkansas River that I worked on
ran straight through the town. The rapids were challenging, you know,
whitewater is always dangerous, but I had to learn how
to row and pretty much handle the whole thing myself.
(05:23):
I wasn't getting help from passengers. They're just holding on.
So you have these big oars, and we would go
through tight sections where you had to like tuck your
oars in so they didn't like pop out and hit you,
which did happen. I remember being just horribly sore, being
uncomfortable in every way possible. I would get like three
(05:44):
days into the week, and then I would start saying
to myself for the next trip, I'm just gonna tell
them I can't do this. And then that's what I
would tell myself until I got to the next trip,
and then I would just do the next trip. And
then the whole time I was doing that trip, I
would say the next I'm gonna tell them I can't
do it. I just can't do it. And I literally
worked my way through a whole week that way, just
(06:06):
telling myself I didn't have to do it next, but
then I would actually do it and get through it somehow.
I think it's really painful at first, and till your
body got used to it and you had to become
more efficient as a wrath guide. It's not as hard
once your skill level goes up. That was a good
(06:28):
life lesson, Right, I can persevere through really hard things,
and you really just have to stay kind of one
moment at a time, right, just sometimes you're just making
it and that's okay, but you can get all the
way through, you know, just trying to persevere. It was
very challenging, but wonderful and neat, you know. I really
(06:48):
I loved it. It was worth it for me for sure.
The community is just really supportive and made some of
the best friends of my life there and still keeping
with some of them. We had so much fun. So
I spent these amazing summers, you know, in the Rockies,
going up to high altitude backpacking and rafting down gorgeous rivers,
(07:16):
so a typical week working at Noah's Arc as a
guide would mean you might spend your week running river
trips for groups that come in for a half day
or for a full day wrath, and then if they
wanted to do like all of our activities, we might
take them rock climbing, and then we might take them
out on a backpack trip for three days or five
(07:37):
days and spend the whole week with that group of
young people and their leaders. I remember one day we
were pretty deep in because we were on a multi
day backpack and we were kind of hiking over maybe
some ridges and like some screen fields, like some rock fields,
and we came over the ridge and then you had
(07:57):
a view of like a football field full of wildflowers.
It was amazing, and you just thought, not many people
are seeing this, but it's just out here, this incredible beauty,
you know, surrounded by all the mountains, and it's kind
of it was pretty breathtaking. So I think that prior
(08:26):
to seeing this, I had a way of thinking about
God was I had to do some work and then
God would bless me, which I think was kind of
a narrow perspective. And then when I saw this amazing sight,
(08:50):
I was just really overwhelmed with God's goodness and over
abundance of beauty. I think I realized that this incredible,
beautiful scene was just there, even if human eye saw
(09:10):
it or not. I went to college at wake Forest University,
which is in Winston Salem at the time that I
grew up. So that's kind of funny, right, I mean,
most people go away to college. You're excited to go
(09:32):
away to college after high school. I had applied to
a few different places, but I really loved rick Forest,
even though I was in my hometown. It was known
for liberal arts, which is definitely what I wanted to study.
When I was at wake Forest, I wasn't sure at
first what I wanted to study, but I quickly realized
that I likely wanted to go into the ministry in
(09:53):
some way. Wasn't sure exactly how, but I decided to
study religion. So I had good advice that just said,
you should really study what you love and you'll figure
it out from there. So I majored in religion. Prior
to my study of religion in college, I had just
been involved in like devotional study. I got to college
(10:19):
classes in religion, some of them Christian studies and some
of them other religions, and that is a much more
skeptical viewpoint. You know, it's like, how can you be
sure this happened? Or you know, why was this book
accepted into the canon, or how do we know who
wrote that book? Or you know, what does the cultural
(10:40):
context mean? You really get pushed. And I loved it.
I love these classes, I love studying it, but it
also raised a lot of questions in my mind. So
now maybe you can see why it was so nice
for me to get away to Colorado, so, you know,
(11:01):
away from these heavy questions of school and into the
natural beauty and this physical work that was so fun
and tiring and used just a totally different part of me.
So it was wonderful when I had this you know
(11:22):
break where I finished my exams and I could head
out west to do this outdoor job that had no
studies involved and it was very you know, physical, and
it was just wonderful to get away. It was just
an amazing idyllic life where three seasons on campus with friends,
(11:42):
having a great time, studying hard, and then I got
to leave and miss all the humidity of North Carolina
and go out west and the beautiful weather and be
in nature all summer to this other amazing group of friends.
I did this for three years, studying really and doing
summer ministry at Noah's Ark, and then one day in
(12:05):
my senior year of college, I just realized, oh, I'm
not sure what I believe anymore, and it was really scary.
So I studied other religions and understood for the first
time that there are huge amounts of people who devote
their life to these other religions and had to get
(12:25):
confronted with the idea that like, where does salvation come from?
And it? You know, are we all worshiping the same God?
I think I understood that there's truth in all of it.
That just helped me understand some of the mysteries are okay,
you know that we're really here to ponder and to
(12:48):
discuss and to not understand fully. So I had this
crisis of faith, and I was doubting all of the
basic tenets of Christianity. I think it was just the
(13:10):
first time, after all the studies that I had been
doing in my religion major, that I fully allowed myself
to say, like, really, like is that really what I believe?
Do I believe that Jesus died, Do I believe Jesus
rose again? Do I believe any of it? That really
(13:35):
pulled the rug out from under me. It was very
disorienting and confusing. I had been really identifying with these
Christian groups. Then I think I was reaching the point
in my senior year in college when I was becoming
an individual right individuating and had to figure it out
(13:59):
more on my own and not identify with the group
so strongly. And that was hard. Not that anybody cut
me off, but I felt cut off because I wasn't
sure anymore. In these groups, it's important that we all
believe the same thing. I realized I could sort of
lose everything I had built, and it got complicated because
(14:24):
you start to kind of tell people like, yeah, I'm
just not sure. I'm not sure what I believe right now,
and it's really hard. And a lot of my friends
were supportive and wonderful about that, but I also certainly
got some like, you know, i'll pray for you maybe
(14:45):
in ways that didn't feel so great. It felt very
much like sometimes I was I guess judged. It was
basically like, you need to come back to this belief
and we'll pray and hope that you'll come back instead
of your own your own journey, and you'll get there
(15:05):
wherever you're supposed to be. God is big enough for this.
I'm sure I heard some of that, but I definitely
heard some. You know, there's something wrong with you, is
what it felt like. It felt very much like, we'll
pray for you to come back to your exact same
faith that sort of fits you into this mold. It
(15:26):
was not always embraced. It was not always like, oh yeah,
this is a great growth opportunity. So I go back
out to the camp in Colorado with all of these doubts,
and that is a little bit of a problem, I'm thinking,
because you know, I led all this ministry and that
(15:47):
was sort of my specialty in the company. But I
remember thinking, you know, I really want to be out
there and be with everybody and do that job, but
I'm going to have to be honest with them. So
I had a discussion with owner of the company, and
she was great, She understood, and she just said, will
have you just lead the trips and that'll be fine.
(16:09):
Somebody else can lead to ministry. So I was present
for the ministry, but I didn't have to kind of
teach something I wasn't sure about at all, which was
a good thing. This crisis of faith really lasted for
a while. It was over a year where I felt
(16:31):
really confused about what I believe. I had often previously
felt the presence of God, and I just wasn't feeling
that anymore. I thought I was going to do ministry.
Now what am I going to do? So I head
back out to Nozark with all of these doubts for
(16:53):
my final summer and it's one of the best summers.
Towards the end of the summer, started dating a guy
out there. His name was Lee, and I'm just having
a great time. Even though I'm not sure what's coming
in the future. I'm really savoring this last time at
Noah's Ark. And when the season ended, the Noazark river
Runners had an opportunity to do an epic eighteen day
(17:16):
trip down the Green Canyon, rafting amazing, beautiful, huge rapids,
you know, gorgeous scenery. Trip of a lifetime. People will
sign up for Green Canyon trips and get these permits
to be on the trip, like years in advance. We
put ourselves in to fill in where a group couldn't
(17:37):
come at the last minute, and we were just waiting
for our slot. So I think we had like two
weeks notice when we got our actual dates and that
we were going to do this, So then we had
to really put it in gear and get ready. We
packed everything up in multiple cars and we were all
(17:59):
going out there. There was I think sixteen of us total,
primarily coach gendents from people right out of college. We
road tripped. I remember going through the Four Corners where
you can put one foot in one state on one
foot and another state. That was fun. And you have
a specific like day you can enter your river because
the permit is very specific. So you get there and
(18:22):
you sort of mobilize and then you're waiting for your
time and you're watching other groups get on the river
ahead of you with enormous amounts of beer. It's our group,
not a lot of beer. Other groups like we would
count up like you know, okay, they have enough beer
for twelve beers a day per person. Hilarious. So the
(18:44):
other big thing was people would like raft the Grand
Canyon naked. Again, not our group at all, but definitely
saw some you know groups naked rafting. That was funny.
Our rafts are smaller than the typical Grand Canyon raft
because they are like, I think maybe eighteen foot rafts
or something like that. We took the biggest ones that
(19:06):
knows arcad and I think a typical Grand Canyon raft
is bigger. You start out not very much in the canyon,
and you increasingly go deeper and deeper. The scenes get
more and more beautiful. It's absolutely breathtaking. The rock cliffs
are incredibly high and sheer. I mean, I'd already spent
(19:28):
my summer seeing amazing views, right, beautiful, beautiful things. But
the Green Canyon was really different from the views I
had gotten used to in Colorado. Really majestic, so deep,
so gorgeous. You know you're in the canyon, so it's
like throwing shadows differently in a way, I enjoyed the
(19:50):
serene times on the river. If it wasn't your turn
to row, you could sit at the back of the
boat and enjoy the scenery and read your interesting book
you were reading, and that was awesome. We would go
through smaller rapids and we would all go stand at
the back of the boat if you weren't rowing, and like,
hold our book up in the air so it wouldn't
(20:11):
get wet and then get back to chilling out. But yeah,
it was. It was gorgeous, and there was usually like
maybe just three of us in a boat at a time,
so you were getting to know different people and just
having a great time together. And the big rapids are
still coming. And the really cool thing that happened was
(20:35):
that I started feeling God's presence again and I knew
what I believed again, and it kind of came back
in the same way it left pretty quickly. And it
was really all about the natural wonder. It was sort
(20:55):
of like, how could there not be a good God
with seeing all this, you know, being immersed in this
amazing natural scene. I think on the eighth day of
this eighteen day trip, we got to a little beach.
(21:16):
It was a little bit smaller than some of the
other beach we've been to. It was just upstream from
Zora Astor Canyon, about two miles above the Grand Canyon's
famous Nantum Ranch. We're right beside this enormous cliff and
we're setting up camp and had our normal campfire and
dinner together and all that. And I've always been kind
(21:39):
of a night out so I usually stayed up later
the most. The nights there were just really lovely. The
moonlight is gorgeous on the water, and you always had
the sound of the river in the background. It's just
(22:01):
pretty incredible. My two friends I was sharing a tent
with had left me a space in between them, and
I decided to put my head at their feet because
I didn't want to shine the flashlight in their eyes
when they were sleeping, and as is typical for me,
I read until I dropped the book and fell asleep,
(22:22):
and then woke up to chaos. I woke up to
myself screaming, and what I was screaming was I can't
move my legs. Overnight a major storm had come through.
Up up high on the top of the canyon walls
(22:44):
at the rim, there was I think a foot of
snow had fallen, and down where we were deep in
the canyon. It was a heavy rain. So there was
the sound of the storm, of the rain and the wind,
and these rocks that had been dysloidged falling and hitting
(23:05):
our beach, and the sound of all the people riding
around and trying to figure out what's happening and trying
to be safe. And there was also the sound of screaming,
and that was me. I got hit by a rock
(23:26):
that must have fallen from a couple hundred feet. It
wasn't a huge rock, but it had fallen for a
long way, so it must have had a lot of velocity,
and when it hit me it did a lot of damage.
I had a crushed pelvis injury. Fortunately, I was sleeping
(23:46):
on my stomach and the rock hit me in the butt.
The butt is the best place to get hit because
I have patting there, and you know, if it had
been higher, it would have hit my spine. I could
have easily been paralleled. If it had hit my head,
I could have been killed. Beginning, hitting the bot was
by far the best outcome, but still it was a
(24:08):
very serious injury of having a crushed pelvis with massive
blood loss. There had been this rock slide and there
was a maybe seven or eight inch wide hole in
(24:30):
the tent, and what we had come to realize is
that a rock about that size must have fallen and
hit me. They scoured the scene afterwards and could never
find the rock. Our beach was just littered with rocks,
(24:50):
and it was kind of amazing that only four people
got hit, but I think everybody heard the commotion and
got up and got moving and that got them out
of arms. After I was hit, I couldn't move. To
my horror, I realized I couldn't move the lower part
of my body at all. So I had to rely
(25:11):
on my boyfriend Lee, who was the EMT, to get
me onto this table that they used as a backboard
to put my body weight onto my injuries on my
butt and hope to stop the bleeding from the pressure
of my body. It was kind of a bory scene.
(25:33):
It was night in October, so I was in like
fleecepans and a flee shirt, sleeping and in a big
sleeping bag. And you know, I was told after the
fact that the sleeping bag was just completely saturated with blood.
I was bleeding to death. I was in a lot
of pain. But I think in those situations, your body
(25:54):
produces huge amounts of adrenaline and that kind of helps
you through that situation. All of us had been trained.
It really is the whole group's collective knowledge of what
to do in a crisis situation and how to help somebody.
That saved my life. Certainly, they got me stabilized on
(26:17):
a table and they were able able to get you know,
carry me to a raft to begin to get me
out of there. But all the while they're having to
be hypervigilant about what's going on. It's still raining, rocks
are still falling. I have external bleeding. I have massive
(26:37):
internal bleeding. I'm losing a lot of blood. It's very dangerous.
So you know, they've got me onto this raft, on
this table, and they've put people on who are really
strong raft guides to row us really fast to get
me to help. And all the white rocks are still
(27:01):
falling into the river, and they're falling ahead of where
we're going. They're falling behind where we've been in the river.
So still a very dangerous scene. And I remember it like, Lee,
could you put my hood up over where it's not
I'm not getting ringed on? And then he would do that,
and then I would feel like I couldn't breathe, so
(27:21):
I'd be like, okay, okay, I can't breathe. Can you
just put my hood back? And I think I think
we kind of spent a lot of the raft ride
doing that. Liked, could you put the hood over my face?
Could you put it back? Thankfully? And pretty amazingly, we
were just three miles above the only ranger station we
(27:43):
would pass on this river trip, and it was the
ranger station at the end of the Bright Angel trail
down on the river. You know, if we had been
below that ranger station, I don't think I would have
come out of the canyon alive. And by the way,
like they've strap me to the raft. You never want
to be strapped to a raft in a river, right,
(28:04):
because if something happens and the raft goes over, you're
gonna drown, right. You can't get out. So that's not
a great situation. But that's all they could do. They
had to do that. I think we went through a
couple of rabbits like that, and you know, it's still raining,
rocks are still falling, water levels up. They're scared for
(28:26):
my life. Imagine being that guide who's rafting the river's
rowing that boat with me in it so injured. It
was a bad scene. I remember we're rafting up. I
remember seeing the ranger standing right by the river waiting
with these real anticipatory kind of body stances. They started
(28:50):
to take me off, and they were four or so
of them were carrying my whatever I was on table
or backboard. I remember saying over and over like, hey,
I'm going to fall off the right side, can you
straighten me up? And they kept on saying, honey, we
were holding you straight. You're not going to fall, you know.
(29:14):
And it was just because I was so broken it
felt like I was going to fall. They took me
straight to the ranger Patty Thompson, right to her bed.
They put me in her bed, so God bless her.
She you know, gave me her bed covered in blood.
(29:35):
The pain is starting to kick in more. At this point,
she was what I think it's called an EMTI, and
that means they can do an IV. So she got
me settled in her bed, She gave me an IV,
she gave me fluids. They definitely knew this is bad.
This girl could die. My experience of Patty was she
was just the best, right She was my lifeline. She
(29:58):
was calm and and wonderful. My friend said she would
walk out of the room I was in her bedroom,
go to the phone, call the helicopter pilot who happened
to be her significant other in life, and say you've
got to get down here. This girl is going to
die on me. And cuss him out. She was asking
(30:22):
him to go out in weather that he shouldn't be
flying in because the weather had not broken full yet
and it really wasn't safe for him to get down
into the canyon in a helicopter. Yet. I think it
(30:42):
was six to eight hours before anybody could get me
out of there, so I was in Patty's bed. I'm
sure for six hours I easily could have bled to death.
I lost very close to fifty percent of my blood volume.
(31:04):
At the end of that six hours, they were getting
very concerned that I was going to bleed out right
there and die, and they started to put on me
this life saving treatment, and I think they're called like
masked pants or massed trousers, something like that, where they
pull these things up on your legs that will squeeze
(31:27):
your legs so much so that the blood goes to
your core of your body so that you had more
blood up at your heart so that you can live.
And it's a life saving thing that they do. But
the problem is that if they do it for long enough,
you're going to lose your legs because you don't have
blood in your legs anymore. So they had this horrible
(31:51):
decision to make you know, when do we inflate these
things to save her life. Then the weather begins to break,
thankfully and miraculously, you know, at the right time, and
Patty's significant other is able to come bring his helicopter
(32:12):
down into the canyon. And so then they put me
back on a backboard and moved me onto the helicopter
and Lee got in and rode out of the canyon
with me on the helicopter as kind of my support
person there. And I remember the helicopter ride. I remember
seeing us rise out of the canyon and go all
(32:34):
the way up. So I was airlifted out of the
canyon and taken to a medical clinic on the rim
of the canyon. There I found out I had was
called a crushed pelvis injuries. I had multiple pelvic fractures
(32:54):
and I had lost more than half of my blood volume.
And I was not the only injury. There were three
other people injured. There was like a broken arm and
crushed feet in like a really bad bone bruise, But
my injury was the worst. After I was out of
the canyon and in the hospital, they had to contact
(33:16):
my parents, who you know, again were not always excited
about all of the adventures that I was doing and
tell them that I had this very serious, life threatening injury.
And you know, they're in North Carolina. I'm in Arizona
and Flagstaff, Arizona in the hospital, they decide that my mom,
(33:39):
who was terrified a flying, had to take a commercial
flight out to join me in the hospital to take
care of me. When my mom arrived, the doctor told
her that there was such a long list of ways
I could die from my injuries, from loss of blood,
from various infections, that they may as well throw on
(34:00):
the list that the hospital could burn down tonight. It
was that serious. I ended up developing a lung infection
that postponed my surgery to put my bones back together
in my pelvist by several days. And it started out
as pneumonia in both lungs and it developed into adult
(34:20):
respiratory distress syndrome, which is quite serious and dangerous, and
so we had to fight that before they could do
the big surgery on me to put me back together.
That almost killed me. So the rock fall happened on
(34:45):
the ninth day of the trip, and then I was
airlifted out, but all the uninjured people went on with
their raft trip. You know, rafting was the only way
out of the canyon, and they had another nine days
to go on that trip, so they had no way
of knowing if I was a ive, are dead and
because we have no way to communicate from the bottom
of the Grand Canyon. So when their trip was ending,
(35:07):
I was toward the end of my hospital stay and
they came to visit me. On the way home. I
remember they all gathered around my hospital bed and we
sang the doxology praise God from whom all blessings flow.
It was so good to see them, you know, they
had saved my life. My story made the national news,
(35:33):
and so I got lots of mail. One day, they said,
I literally got all of the mail that was received
in the hospital that day. People just poured out their
support and their love with.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Cards and encouraging letters, and I know tons of people
were praying for me. The letters and the encouragement and
support that I received really got me. For a lot
of the time, I didn't get out of the bed
because I couldn't. Once they got my bones repaired, then
(36:09):
I started a little physical therapy.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
But yeah, it was really hard, you know, that's really
hard work. It was painful. The letters and the support
and the love got me through. After three weeks in
the hospital at Arizona, they were ready to release me,
(36:33):
but I needed to get back to North Carolina and
I wasn't stable enough to fly commercially. I couldn't sit
that long. So a medical flight was arranged for me,
and my mom was going to fly on it with me.
So it's this tiny little plane, two pilots, two flight nurses,
and me and my mom. Blessed her heart because that was,
(36:54):
you know, much worse than a big commercial plane to
fly homeline. We landed and went and say, I'm at
a small airport. They were getting me on a stretcher
out of this plane and taking me to the ambulance.
There was a huge crowd of family and friends who
had come to meet me. They all cheered and I
got to wave to them briefly as they took me
(37:15):
to the ambulance. But that was a really touching, a
touching moment. So I went home in a wheelchair and
was in a wheelchair for a month, and then I
was on crutches for about six more months and did
a lot of physical therapy. By the end of the
next summer, I was doing pretty well and back to normal.
(37:45):
During my recovery, people would say, Wow, God must have
big plans for you because you were saved from death.
I know that what they were saying was meant from
a kind perspective. They were trying to encourage me. But
I had to really think about that because it didn't
strike true that God caused my injury. Was that a
(38:12):
part of God's plant? And I just came to realize that, no,
I don't believe that. I believe that things just happened,
and it's our faith it gets us through. Looking back
on all of this, I see how important it was
(38:34):
to be stretched, you know, by my academic studies of
religion and by my having a big adventure out west,
and even through this injury that happened, I got a
much broader view of who God is. But at the
same time, it's almost like my faith was distilled down
(38:57):
to just the essentials. God's ad fast love, God's goodness.
But there's a lot of theological details that I might
struggle with still, And that's okay. It's kay to doubt.
(39:18):
You don't have to be scared about other faiths, about
other beliefs. We're all just trying to figure it out.
Can we just be open to what other people can
teach us? You know, maybe being open we're gonna find
something out that we never knew before. When I finished college,
(39:42):
I was still struggling on what am I going to
do because I thought I was going to do ministry
and I was still in this doubting time. But then
by the time I was recovering from my Grand Canyon accident,
I really lies that what I can do is therapy,
(40:03):
and that's sort of my ministry. I've been able to
use my experience of trauma to help other people with trauma.
I believe so strongly in the concept of grace that
we're given and in therapy, grace is empathy. It's the
(40:26):
psychological version, but I believe that they're really the same thing.
You know, that offering empathy to people in understanding is
offering them grace like I'm offered do in my faith.
I'm very thankful with this severe injury that I experienced
(40:47):
that I'm still able to do the things I love
to do, to do outdoor adventure. I'm able to do
the things I love to ski and to paddle board,
and to hike, and I'm able to share my love
of the outdoors with my family.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
Welcome back. This is a Live Again joining me for
a conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive Again
story producers Lauren Vogelbaum and Brent Die And I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Brent, can you tell us a little bit
about how you found this story? What attracted you to
this story?
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Yeah, recently as a friend of my wife's, and I
didn't know her story until my wife and I went
out to the Grand Canyon and she said, well, by
the way, my friend almost died here. And I said, well,
I'll be giving her a call. She wants to be
on the show.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I think the biggest thing for me here, I mean,
other than just the spectacle, which is what I call it,
but the graphic nature of the incident and everything that
she described about the ordeal of them having to sort
of prop her up and several times and put her
on a raft, so that and just there's there's so
(42:24):
much that she had to do and go through with
the help of so many people to get out of there.
It's it's kind of miraculous that she made it out
at all, and I just listening to that story. I
was one of the few stories where I just was like,
couldna was not listening to listen to it. I was
just cringing left and right, and I was sort of like,
(42:45):
I don't know, it just got in me in a
way that it was disturbed. It was disturbing, like I
can't imagine going through that. Do you know, is she
like walking normally now? Is she like she's totally normal?
Speaker 5 (42:56):
She enjoys doing all of her hiking with her family
at some that she's been able to. Really she's really
proud of passing that love on to her kids. So yeah,
it's it's a real miracle. Way what she was I
accomplished from that.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Well, the the big just to jump right in. The
big takeaway from me was just she had been stretched,
as she said, the academics had challenged her her sort
of point of view, and then and then the outdoor
activities stretched her even more into a sort of seeing
maybe that God is bigger than what she thought, to
(43:34):
the point where when she's in recovery and she's surrounded
by her loved ones and friends and a lot of
them are saying God must have saved you for a reason,
and that didn't ring true to her and it didn't
resonate with her, and then instead it raised this sort
of more complicated question of like, well, okay, if God
saved me, then what was the rock slide part of
that too? Like did you know, yeah, how much how
(43:57):
much are God's fingers in on the experiences that I'm that,
I'm that I'm well, that I'm walking through in life?
But yeah, I don't know. Brenton, you have a pretty
firm faith and to love to hear your your understanding
of that.
Speaker 5 (44:12):
What I love about her is her honesty through the
entire experience. You know that she was willing to go
to her community, which was her whole world at the time,
and not only was it her social group, but it
was her future. She had decided to pursue a career
in the ministry, and she was not sure what she believed,
and she was honest with herself and honest with the
(44:34):
camp and called them and said, I don't know if
you want me to come back out here because I'm
dealing with these questions. And I thought it was really
spoke well of the camp too, that they're like, we
still want you to come out but we just are
going to take you out of the ministry position. And
I like that she was coming back to her relationship
with God before the rock fall. So it wasn't as
(44:55):
if the rock hit her and brought her back to Christ.
She was rebuilt that connection just through the restorative power
of nature, you know, just the awe and one what
of nature?
Speaker 6 (45:05):
What a place to have a crisis of faith, the
Grand Canyon. Are you kidding, like like, okay, yeah, sure,
that's beautiful. It's impossible not to feel awe and feel
like the universe is a lot bigger than you in
a place like that.
Speaker 5 (45:20):
Well, I think what she might have been battling with
was she started in a mainline church. It was kind
of like your traditional and what you would think of
as like an early twentieth century Methodist church or a
Lutheran church. I grew up in that kind of church.
It wasn't such an emphasis on defining things. So clearly
there was a little more room for mystery and more
of the mainline experience, and she moved into more of
(45:41):
an evangelical experience in her college years.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
The evangelical is just more dogmatic or more what.
Speaker 5 (45:49):
Is Yeah, I wouldn't really want to use that term
because I don't think it's respectful to people who believe
that way. But I just think it's I think it's
more of a your interpreter of scripture is the correct interpretation.
And I understand the desire to want to share that
with people if you feel like you have the answer.
I understand the desire to want to share that. But
(46:11):
for me, I think it takes away some of the
wonder and mystery that is the joy of living, you know,
And I think that's what she was wrestling with. The
moment that really struck me in her story was when
she was at her camp and they did that like
seven day hike or whatever, and she comes over this
hill and sees this valley of wildflowers and realizes that
(46:34):
this beauty is here, whether a human eye ever sees it,
and for her that's an encapsulation that it's not transactional.
The beauty and goodness is there regardless.
Speaker 6 (46:49):
I feel like she also talked about that in terms
of her interactions with all of the people during her
rescue and recovery as well. You know, like their goodness
was just there, it was just part of them. They
stepped up and helped her do whatever it was that
needed to get done in order to get her to
a place where should she she could receive medical care
(47:10):
and she could recover from from this weirdly horrific aid
inch roc accident.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you imagine an eight inch
roc like a cannon.
Speaker 6 (47:20):
Oh sure, yeah, fast enough, fast enough. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
I love how she eventually she seemed like this is
a This is also a story of liminality, like her
liminal state between two threst thresholds of her sort of
understanding and her identity. So she had to kind of
like there was a death of the previous identity of
(47:45):
her from the evangelical and from the you know, and
there was an expansion and there was a confusion. But
she eventually found a way to make peace with this questions,
and that's crossing the other threshold of sort of coming
to a new understand and finding herself in a new form,
not by finding all the answers, but by letting go
(48:07):
of the need to find them. She talks about how
her belief in God was distilled down to the essentials,
to what actually mattered to her, rather than some rigid
doctrine or some certainty. She found something that was more expansive,
and she was okay with the expansiveness of it.
Speaker 5 (48:22):
I think that's one reason extremely conservative cultures don't want
their kids to go away to college, because they may
be exposed to ideas that are different than what are
being taught in the tribe. And Reesa needed to go
through that to have the spiritual growth that gave her
a stronger relationship with God. And I think we're all
(48:46):
on our own path. And I think that it's good
to have guidance from your pastor or your rabbi or
whoever is your spiritual leader, but you got to be
on that path on your own if it's going to
be an authentic path. And I think that's what Reesa's
stories about.
Speaker 4 (49:01):
Yeah, it connects with these the themes that we have
in the show that like there's a recurring theme that like,
survival isn't always about crafting the perfect story where everything
makes sense, you know. Sometimes it's about embracing the mystery,
accepting that life is unpredictable, and understanding that meaning isn't
something just handed to us. You know, we are participants
(49:23):
in the story. So it's not just about like regaining
some certainty that was lost. It's about learning to learning
to live with uncertainty in a way that still allows
for what Because she says love, grace, and connection. Yeah,
it's the same thing that all of our stories people
who suffer these adversities or near death experiences. You know,
(49:45):
it's not just why they survived, but how to carry on,
you know, without needing all the answers.
Speaker 6 (49:52):
Right, And I'm not a religious person, that that does
really strike a chord with me. The concept of personal
responsibility and the idea that we should all have free
will and we should exercise it, and if we're not
exercising it, then what does it mean anyway? You know?
Is is it meaningful if we don't come to a
(50:15):
personal concept of our relationship with religion or with the
universe in a larger sense, or even just with ourselves.
Speaker 5 (50:25):
Part of her growth was realizing that she still had
a relationship with God. She's still very active in her church,
but ministry wasn't in the cards for her.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
But she's able to.
Speaker 5 (50:37):
Take her theology and her experience of trauma and use
that as a therapist.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Didn't she say something about grace and the same grace
that she feels that is extended to her in her
relationship with God. She feels like that's something that we
all must do with empathy. Yeah, I just thought it
was cool between the idea of grace and the idea
of empathy as being parallel.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
Well, I think it goes to what she discovered in
her story was the universalness of these concepts. You know,
empathy is the same concept as grace. You know, whether
you're belong to church or not, most people are capable
of empathy, and most people are capable of receiving and
giving grace.
Speaker 4 (51:23):
But empathy is the greatest weakness of Western civilization. You
didn't know that.
Speaker 5 (51:30):
That's why you need to drive a cyber truck where
you're safe from empathy.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh, is that what it's for?
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Okay, Yeah, you got to be safe from all the empathy.
Speaker 7 (51:42):
Next week on the Live Again, when Robert was poisoned,
he had a profound and unexpected near death experience, one
that reshaped his entire understanding of karma, morality, and what
it truly means to live a good life.
Speaker 8 (51:54):
Probably Kitchen Keema Wuls was I think the concisus at
the time. It was meant for me to just get
poisoned againstick knowing that you did a lot of things
that were not the right thing on purpose versus like
the value or the weight on that on I guess
your soul will call it.
Speaker 4 (52:10):
It's a lot.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, 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 Lkli and Noames Griffin.
(52:35):
Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson, mixing by
Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host Dan Bush.
Special thanks to Reesa Bailey for sharing her story.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
Alive Again is a production of I.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative
near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
Speaker 4 (53:00):
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 (00:16):
My name is Reesa Bailey. My name is Reesa Collins.
At the time of this story, when I almost died
at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I have a
story about faith, doubt and self discovery and having adventures
outside of your comfort zone.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
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
(01:01):
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 as advised.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I was raised in Winsusalem, which is in North Carolina.
I had a wonderful childhood. Was surrounded by huge amounts
of extended family and a church. Family. Church was always
important to me. I was raised as a mainline Methodist
and a small church. And then when I got to
(01:39):
be a teenager, I got involved in young life and
that led me in a more evangelical direction. Young Life
is a Christian outreach to high school students, and it's
meant to be lots of fun so that high school
students will enjoy it. And I took a lot of
trips with Young Life, and on my way to a
(01:59):
Young Life camp in Colorado one summer, we stopped at
a place called Noah's Ar Rafting Company. They took us
rafting for a half day, and I loved the rafting,
(02:20):
even though I'd never done anything like that before. I
was just blown away by the natural beauty and by
how much fun rafting looked like to do every day.
I was like, I want to do this full time
for my job, you know. That's what sounded so fun
(02:41):
to me and so amazing. I'd spent a lot of
time growing up outside a lot of time, but I
had never done like official outdoor activities really like rafting
or a lot of hiking or so it was. It
(03:04):
was just thrilling to take that one step further and
think that, like I could see all these beautiful things
all day long. And so my sophomore year of college,
I decided I would apply for a summer job at
Noah's Arc. Didn't think I would get it because I
had no outdoor experience, but I had ministry experience and
that's part of what they were looking for. And so
(03:27):
I was offered the position to work there, and I
was trained in rafting and backpacking and rock climbing and
leading trips. It was a whole new world. It was
a big challenge. I mean, I literally had never set
up a tent before. So I had to tell my
parents that I wanted to do this job and that
I had the job. And my mom was really concerned
(03:51):
about my safety and going so far away, because that
is not what my family did at all. I mean,
most of my family lives right in Winston Salem. But
in the end she was supportive, and I think my
dad was secretly really excited and proud about me working
out there. I think he thought that was really exciting
(04:12):
and neat, you know. I picked up all the stuff
I had they had sent me a list of all
the stuff I needed, and then flew out there. Here.
I am literally out in the middle of nowhere in
central Colorado, and I am a long way from home,
(04:37):
and it was pretty wild, so no was Our crafting
was in the Univista Colorado in the very central part
of Colorado. It's a beautiful little town, little western town,
and a lot of rough guides lived there, and we
hung out together on our time off, and we had
(04:59):
so so much fun, just all these young people with
sort of the same interest and values, and it was
just a blast. The Arkansas River that I worked on
ran straight through the town. The rapids were challenging, you know,
whitewater is always dangerous, but I had to learn how
to row and pretty much handle the whole thing myself.
(05:23):
I wasn't getting help from passengers. They're just holding on.
So you have these big oars, and we would go
through tight sections where you had to like tuck your
oars in so they didn't like pop out and hit you,
which did happen. I remember being just horribly sore, being
uncomfortable in every way possible. I would get like three
(05:44):
days into the week, and then I would start saying
to myself for the next trip, I'm just gonna tell
them I can't do this. And then that's what I
would tell myself until I got to the next trip,
and then I would just do the next trip. And
then the whole time I was doing that trip, I
would say the next I'm gonna tell them I can't
do it. I just can't do it. And I literally
worked my way through a whole week that way, just
(06:06):
telling myself I didn't have to do it next, but
then I would actually do it and get through it somehow.
I think it's really painful at first, and till your
body got used to it and you had to become
more efficient as a wrath guide. It's not as hard
once your skill level goes up. That was a good
(06:28):
life lesson, Right, I can persevere through really hard things,
and you really just have to stay kind of one
moment at a time, right, just sometimes you're just making
it and that's okay, but you can get all the
way through, you know, just trying to persevere. It was
very challenging, but wonderful and neat, you know. I really
(06:48):
I loved it. It was worth it for me for sure.
The community is just really supportive and made some of
the best friends of my life there and still keeping
with some of them. We had so much fun. So
I spent these amazing summers, you know, in the Rockies,
going up to high altitude backpacking and rafting down gorgeous rivers,
(07:16):
so a typical week working at Noah's Arc as a
guide would mean you might spend your week running river
trips for groups that come in for a half day
or for a full day wrath, and then if they
wanted to do like all of our activities, we might
take them rock climbing, and then we might take them
out on a backpack trip for three days or five
(07:37):
days and spend the whole week with that group of
young people and their leaders. I remember one day we
were pretty deep in because we were on a multi
day backpack and we were kind of hiking over maybe
some ridges and like some screen fields, like some rock fields,
and we came over the ridge and then you had
(07:57):
a view of like a football field full of wildflowers.
It was amazing, and you just thought, not many people
are seeing this, but it's just out here, this incredible beauty,
you know, surrounded by all the mountains, and it's kind
of it was pretty breathtaking. So I think that prior
(08:26):
to seeing this, I had a way of thinking about
God was I had to do some work and then
God would bless me, which I think was kind of
a narrow perspective. And then when I saw this amazing sight,
(08:50):
I was just really overwhelmed with God's goodness and over
abundance of beauty. I think I realized that this incredible,
beautiful scene was just there, even if human eye saw
(09:10):
it or not. I went to college at wake Forest University,
which is in Winston Salem at the time that I
grew up. So that's kind of funny, right, I mean,
most people go away to college. You're excited to go
(09:32):
away to college after high school. I had applied to
a few different places, but I really loved rick Forest,
even though I was in my hometown. It was known
for liberal arts, which is definitely what I wanted to study.
When I was at wake Forest, I wasn't sure at
first what I wanted to study, but I quickly realized
that I likely wanted to go into the ministry in
(09:53):
some way. Wasn't sure exactly how, but I decided to
study religion. So I had good advice that just said,
you should really study what you love and you'll figure
it out from there. So I majored in religion. Prior
to my study of religion in college, I had just
been involved in like devotional study. I got to college
(10:19):
classes in religion, some of them Christian studies and some
of them other religions, and that is a much more
skeptical viewpoint. You know, it's like, how can you be
sure this happened? Or you know, why was this book
accepted into the canon, or how do we know who
wrote that book? Or you know, what does the cultural
(10:40):
context mean? You really get pushed. And I loved it.
I love these classes, I love studying it, but it
also raised a lot of questions in my mind. So
now maybe you can see why it was so nice
for me to get away to Colorado, so, you know,
(11:01):
away from these heavy questions of school and into the
natural beauty and this physical work that was so fun
and tiring and used just a totally different part of me.
So it was wonderful when I had this you know
(11:22):
break where I finished my exams and I could head
out west to do this outdoor job that had no
studies involved and it was very you know, physical, and
it was just wonderful to get away. It was just
an amazing idyllic life where three seasons on campus with friends,
(11:42):
having a great time, studying hard, and then I got
to leave and miss all the humidity of North Carolina
and go out west and the beautiful weather and be
in nature all summer to this other amazing group of friends.
I did this for three years, studying really and doing
summer ministry at Noah's Ark, and then one day in
(12:05):
my senior year of college, I just realized, oh, I'm
not sure what I believe anymore, and it was really scary.
So I studied other religions and understood for the first
time that there are huge amounts of people who devote
their life to these other religions and had to get
(12:25):
confronted with the idea that like, where does salvation come from?
And it? You know, are we all worshiping the same God?
I think I understood that there's truth in all of it.
That just helped me understand some of the mysteries are okay,
you know that we're really here to ponder and to
(12:48):
discuss and to not understand fully. So I had this
crisis of faith, and I was doubting all of the
basic tenets of Christianity. I think it was just the
(13:10):
first time, after all the studies that I had been
doing in my religion major, that I fully allowed myself
to say, like, really, like is that really what I believe?
Do I believe that Jesus died, Do I believe Jesus
rose again? Do I believe any of it? That really
(13:35):
pulled the rug out from under me. It was very
disorienting and confusing. I had been really identifying with these
Christian groups. Then I think I was reaching the point
in my senior year in college when I was becoming
an individual right individuating and had to figure it out
(13:59):
more on my own and not identify with the group
so strongly. And that was hard. Not that anybody cut
me off, but I felt cut off because I wasn't
sure anymore. In these groups, it's important that we all
believe the same thing. I realized I could sort of
lose everything I had built, and it got complicated because
(14:24):
you start to kind of tell people like, yeah, I'm
just not sure. I'm not sure what I believe right now,
and it's really hard. And a lot of my friends
were supportive and wonderful about that, but I also certainly
got some like, you know, i'll pray for you maybe
(14:45):
in ways that didn't feel so great. It felt very
much like sometimes I was I guess judged. It was
basically like, you need to come back to this belief
and we'll pray and hope that you'll come back instead
of your own your own journey, and you'll get there
(15:05):
wherever you're supposed to be. God is big enough for this.
I'm sure I heard some of that, but I definitely
heard some. You know, there's something wrong with you, is
what it felt like. It felt very much like, we'll
pray for you to come back to your exact same
faith that sort of fits you into this mold. It
(15:26):
was not always embraced. It was not always like, oh yeah,
this is a great growth opportunity. So I go back
out to the camp in Colorado with all of these doubts,
and that is a little bit of a problem, I'm thinking,
because you know, I led all this ministry and that
(15:47):
was sort of my specialty in the company. But I
remember thinking, you know, I really want to be out
there and be with everybody and do that job, but
I'm going to have to be honest with them. So
I had a discussion with owner of the company, and
she was great, She understood, and she just said, will
have you just lead the trips and that'll be fine.
(16:09):
Somebody else can lead to ministry. So I was present
for the ministry, but I didn't have to kind of
teach something I wasn't sure about at all, which was
a good thing. This crisis of faith really lasted for
a while. It was over a year where I felt
(16:31):
really confused about what I believe. I had often previously
felt the presence of God, and I just wasn't feeling
that anymore. I thought I was going to do ministry.
Now what am I going to do? So I head
back out to Nozark with all of these doubts for
(16:53):
my final summer and it's one of the best summers.
Towards the end of the summer, started dating a guy
out there. His name was Lee, and I'm just having
a great time. Even though I'm not sure what's coming
in the future. I'm really savoring this last time at
Noah's Ark. And when the season ended, the Noazark river
Runners had an opportunity to do an epic eighteen day
(17:16):
trip down the Green Canyon, rafting amazing, beautiful, huge rapids,
you know, gorgeous scenery. Trip of a lifetime. People will
sign up for Green Canyon trips and get these permits
to be on the trip, like years in advance. We
put ourselves in to fill in where a group couldn't
(17:37):
come at the last minute, and we were just waiting
for our slot. So I think we had like two
weeks notice when we got our actual dates and that
we were going to do this, So then we had
to really put it in gear and get ready. We
packed everything up in multiple cars and we were all
(17:59):
going out there. There was I think sixteen of us total,
primarily coach gendents from people right out of college. We
road tripped. I remember going through the Four Corners where
you can put one foot in one state on one
foot and another state. That was fun. And you have
a specific like day you can enter your river because
the permit is very specific. So you get there and
(18:22):
you sort of mobilize and then you're waiting for your
time and you're watching other groups get on the river
ahead of you with enormous amounts of beer. It's our group,
not a lot of beer. Other groups like we would
count up like you know, okay, they have enough beer
for twelve beers a day per person. Hilarious. So the
(18:44):
other big thing was people would like raft the Grand
Canyon naked. Again, not our group at all, but definitely
saw some you know groups naked rafting. That was funny.
Our rafts are smaller than the typical Grand Canyon raft
because they are like, I think maybe eighteen foot rafts
or something like that. We took the biggest ones that
(19:06):
knows arcad and I think a typical Grand Canyon raft
is bigger. You start out not very much in the canyon,
and you increasingly go deeper and deeper. The scenes get
more and more beautiful. It's absolutely breathtaking. The rock cliffs
are incredibly high and sheer. I mean, I'd already spent
(19:28):
my summer seeing amazing views, right, beautiful, beautiful things. But
the Green Canyon was really different from the views I
had gotten used to in Colorado. Really majestic, so deep,
so gorgeous. You know you're in the canyon, so it's
like throwing shadows differently in a way, I enjoyed the
(19:50):
serene times on the river. If it wasn't your turn
to row, you could sit at the back of the
boat and enjoy the scenery and read your interesting book
you were reading, and that was awesome. We would go
through smaller rapids and we would all go stand at
the back of the boat if you weren't rowing, and like,
hold our book up in the air so it wouldn't
(20:11):
get wet and then get back to chilling out. But yeah,
it was. It was gorgeous, and there was usually like
maybe just three of us in a boat at a time,
so you were getting to know different people and just
having a great time together. And the big rapids are
still coming. And the really cool thing that happened was
(20:35):
that I started feeling God's presence again and I knew
what I believed again, and it kind of came back
in the same way it left pretty quickly. And it
was really all about the natural wonder. It was sort
(20:55):
of like, how could there not be a good God
with seeing all this, you know, being immersed in this
amazing natural scene. I think on the eighth day of
this eighteen day trip, we got to a little beach.
(21:16):
It was a little bit smaller than some of the
other beach we've been to. It was just upstream from
Zora Astor Canyon, about two miles above the Grand Canyon's
famous Nantum Ranch. We're right beside this enormous cliff and
we're setting up camp and had our normal campfire and
dinner together and all that. And I've always been kind
(21:39):
of a night out so I usually stayed up later
the most. The nights there were just really lovely. The
moonlight is gorgeous on the water, and you always had
the sound of the river in the background. It's just
(22:01):
pretty incredible. My two friends I was sharing a tent
with had left me a space in between them, and
I decided to put my head at their feet because
I didn't want to shine the flashlight in their eyes
when they were sleeping, and as is typical for me,
I read until I dropped the book and fell asleep,
(22:22):
and then woke up to chaos. I woke up to
myself screaming, and what I was screaming was I can't
move my legs. Overnight a major storm had come through.
Up up high on the top of the canyon walls
(22:44):
at the rim, there was I think a foot of
snow had fallen, and down where we were deep in
the canyon. It was a heavy rain. So there was
the sound of the storm, of the rain and the wind,
and these rocks that had been dysloidged falling and hitting
(23:05):
our beach, and the sound of all the people riding
around and trying to figure out what's happening and trying
to be safe. And there was also the sound of screaming,
and that was me. I got hit by a rock
(23:26):
that must have fallen from a couple hundred feet. It
wasn't a huge rock, but it had fallen for a
long way, so it must have had a lot of velocity,
and when it hit me it did a lot of damage.
I had a crushed pelvis injury. Fortunately, I was sleeping
(23:46):
on my stomach and the rock hit me in the butt.
The butt is the best place to get hit because
I have patting there, and you know, if it had
been higher, it would have hit my spine. I could
have easily been paralleled. If it had hit my head,
I could have been killed. Beginning, hitting the bot was
by far the best outcome, but still it was a
(24:08):
very serious injury of having a crushed pelvis with massive
blood loss. There had been this rock slide and there
was a maybe seven or eight inch wide hole in
(24:30):
the tent, and what we had come to realize is
that a rock about that size must have fallen and
hit me. They scoured the scene afterwards and could never
find the rock. Our beach was just littered with rocks,
(24:50):
and it was kind of amazing that only four people
got hit, but I think everybody heard the commotion and
got up and got moving and that got them out
of arms. After I was hit, I couldn't move. To
my horror, I realized I couldn't move the lower part
of my body at all. So I had to rely
(25:11):
on my boyfriend Lee, who was the EMT, to get
me onto this table that they used as a backboard
to put my body weight onto my injuries on my
butt and hope to stop the bleeding from the pressure
of my body. It was kind of a bory scene.
(25:33):
It was night in October, so I was in like
fleecepans and a flee shirt, sleeping and in a big
sleeping bag. And you know, I was told after the
fact that the sleeping bag was just completely saturated with blood.
I was bleeding to death. I was in a lot
of pain. But I think in those situations, your body
(25:54):
produces huge amounts of adrenaline and that kind of helps
you through that situation. All of us had been trained.
It really is the whole group's collective knowledge of what
to do in a crisis situation and how to help somebody.
That saved my life. Certainly, they got me stabilized on
(26:17):
a table and they were able able to get you know,
carry me to a raft to begin to get me
out of there. But all the while they're having to
be hypervigilant about what's going on. It's still raining, rocks
are still falling. I have external bleeding. I have massive
(26:37):
internal bleeding. I'm losing a lot of blood. It's very dangerous.
So you know, they've got me onto this raft, on
this table, and they've put people on who are really
strong raft guides to row us really fast to get
me to help. And all the white rocks are still
(27:01):
falling into the river, and they're falling ahead of where
we're going. They're falling behind where we've been in the river.
So still a very dangerous scene. And I remember it like, Lee,
could you put my hood up over where it's not
I'm not getting ringed on? And then he would do that,
and then I would feel like I couldn't breathe, so
(27:21):
I'd be like, okay, okay, I can't breathe. Can you
just put my hood back? And I think I think
we kind of spent a lot of the raft ride
doing that. Liked, could you put the hood over my face?
Could you put it back? Thankfully? And pretty amazingly, we
were just three miles above the only ranger station we
(27:43):
would pass on this river trip, and it was the
ranger station at the end of the Bright Angel trail
down on the river. You know, if we had been
below that ranger station, I don't think I would have
come out of the canyon alive. And by the way,
like they've strap me to the raft. You never want
to be strapped to a raft in a river, right,
(28:04):
because if something happens and the raft goes over, you're
gonna drown, right. You can't get out. So that's not
a great situation. But that's all they could do. They
had to do that. I think we went through a
couple of rabbits like that, and you know, it's still raining,
rocks are still falling, water levels up. They're scared for
(28:26):
my life. Imagine being that guide who's rafting the river's
rowing that boat with me in it so injured. It
was a bad scene. I remember we're rafting up. I
remember seeing the ranger standing right by the river waiting
with these real anticipatory kind of body stances. They started
(28:50):
to take me off, and they were four or so
of them were carrying my whatever I was on table
or backboard. I remember saying over and over like, hey,
I'm going to fall off the right side, can you
straighten me up? And they kept on saying, honey, we
were holding you straight. You're not going to fall, you know.
(29:14):
And it was just because I was so broken it
felt like I was going to fall. They took me
straight to the ranger Patty Thompson, right to her bed.
They put me in her bed, so God bless her.
She you know, gave me her bed covered in blood.
(29:35):
The pain is starting to kick in more. At this point,
she was what I think it's called an EMTI, and
that means they can do an IV. So she got
me settled in her bed, She gave me an IV,
she gave me fluids. They definitely knew this is bad.
This girl could die. My experience of Patty was she
was just the best, right She was my lifeline. She
(29:58):
was calm and and wonderful. My friend said she would
walk out of the room I was in her bedroom,
go to the phone, call the helicopter pilot who happened
to be her significant other in life, and say you've
got to get down here. This girl is going to
die on me. And cuss him out. She was asking
(30:22):
him to go out in weather that he shouldn't be
flying in because the weather had not broken full yet
and it really wasn't safe for him to get down
into the canyon in a helicopter. Yet. I think it
(30:42):
was six to eight hours before anybody could get me
out of there, so I was in Patty's bed. I'm
sure for six hours I easily could have bled to death.
I lost very close to fifty percent of my blood volume.
(31:04):
At the end of that six hours, they were getting
very concerned that I was going to bleed out right
there and die, and they started to put on me
this life saving treatment, and I think they're called like
masked pants or massed trousers, something like that, where they
pull these things up on your legs that will squeeze
(31:27):
your legs so much so that the blood goes to
your core of your body so that you had more
blood up at your heart so that you can live.
And it's a life saving thing that they do. But
the problem is that if they do it for long enough,
you're going to lose your legs because you don't have
blood in your legs anymore. So they had this horrible
(31:51):
decision to make you know, when do we inflate these
things to save her life. Then the weather begins to break,
thankfully and miraculously, you know, at the right time, and
Patty's significant other is able to come bring his helicopter
(32:12):
down into the canyon. And so then they put me
back on a backboard and moved me onto the helicopter
and Lee got in and rode out of the canyon
with me on the helicopter as kind of my support
person there. And I remember the helicopter ride. I remember
seeing us rise out of the canyon and go all
(32:34):
the way up. So I was airlifted out of the
canyon and taken to a medical clinic on the rim
of the canyon. There I found out I had was
called a crushed pelvis injuries. I had multiple pelvic fractures
(32:54):
and I had lost more than half of my blood volume.
And I was not the only injury. There were three
other people injured. There was like a broken arm and
crushed feet in like a really bad bone bruise, But
my injury was the worst. After I was out of
the canyon and in the hospital, they had to contact
(33:16):
my parents, who you know, again were not always excited
about all of the adventures that I was doing and
tell them that I had this very serious, life threatening injury.
And you know, they're in North Carolina. I'm in Arizona
and Flagstaff, Arizona in the hospital, they decide that my mom,
(33:39):
who was terrified a flying, had to take a commercial
flight out to join me in the hospital to take
care of me. When my mom arrived, the doctor told
her that there was such a long list of ways
I could die from my injuries, from loss of blood,
from various infections, that they may as well throw on
(34:00):
the list that the hospital could burn down tonight. It
was that serious. I ended up developing a lung infection
that postponed my surgery to put my bones back together
in my pelvist by several days. And it started out
as pneumonia in both lungs and it developed into adult
(34:20):
respiratory distress syndrome, which is quite serious and dangerous, and
so we had to fight that before they could do
the big surgery on me to put me back together.
That almost killed me. So the rock fall happened on
(34:45):
the ninth day of the trip, and then I was
airlifted out, but all the uninjured people went on with
their raft trip. You know, rafting was the only way
out of the canyon, and they had another nine days
to go on that trip, so they had no way
of knowing if I was a ive, are dead and
because we have no way to communicate from the bottom
of the Grand Canyon. So when their trip was ending,
(35:07):
I was toward the end of my hospital stay and
they came to visit me. On the way home. I
remember they all gathered around my hospital bed and we
sang the doxology praise God from whom all blessings flow.
It was so good to see them, you know, they
had saved my life. My story made the national news,
(35:33):
and so I got lots of mail. One day, they said,
I literally got all of the mail that was received
in the hospital that day. People just poured out their
support and their love with.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Cards and encouraging letters, and I know tons of people
were praying for me. The letters and the encouragement and
support that I received really got me. For a lot
of the time, I didn't get out of the bed
because I couldn't. Once they got my bones repaired, then
(36:09):
I started a little physical therapy.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
But yeah, it was really hard, you know, that's really
hard work. It was painful. The letters and the support
and the love got me through. After three weeks in
the hospital at Arizona, they were ready to release me,
(36:33):
but I needed to get back to North Carolina and
I wasn't stable enough to fly commercially. I couldn't sit
that long. So a medical flight was arranged for me,
and my mom was going to fly on it with me.
So it's this tiny little plane, two pilots, two flight nurses,
and me and my mom. Blessed her heart because that was,
(36:54):
you know, much worse than a big commercial plane to
fly homeline. We landed and went and say, I'm at
a small airport. They were getting me on a stretcher
out of this plane and taking me to the ambulance.
There was a huge crowd of family and friends who
had come to meet me. They all cheered and I
got to wave to them briefly as they took me
(37:15):
to the ambulance. But that was a really touching, a
touching moment. So I went home in a wheelchair and
was in a wheelchair for a month, and then I
was on crutches for about six more months and did
a lot of physical therapy. By the end of the
next summer, I was doing pretty well and back to normal.
(37:45):
During my recovery, people would say, Wow, God must have
big plans for you because you were saved from death.
I know that what they were saying was meant from
a kind perspective. They were trying to encourage me. But
I had to really think about that because it didn't
strike true that God caused my injury. Was that a
(38:12):
part of God's plant? And I just came to realize that, no,
I don't believe that. I believe that things just happened,
and it's our faith it gets us through. Looking back
on all of this, I see how important it was
(38:34):
to be stretched, you know, by my academic studies of
religion and by my having a big adventure out west,
and even through this injury that happened, I got a
much broader view of who God is. But at the
same time, it's almost like my faith was distilled down
(38:57):
to just the essentials. God's ad fast love, God's goodness.
But there's a lot of theological details that I might
struggle with still, And that's okay. It's kay to doubt.
(39:18):
You don't have to be scared about other faiths, about
other beliefs. We're all just trying to figure it out.
Can we just be open to what other people can
teach us? You know, maybe being open we're gonna find
something out that we never knew before. When I finished college,
(39:42):
I was still struggling on what am I going to
do because I thought I was going to do ministry
and I was still in this doubting time. But then
by the time I was recovering from my Grand Canyon accident,
I really lies that what I can do is therapy,
(40:03):
and that's sort of my ministry. I've been able to
use my experience of trauma to help other people with trauma.
I believe so strongly in the concept of grace that
we're given and in therapy, grace is empathy. It's the
(40:26):
psychological version, but I believe that they're really the same thing.
You know, that offering empathy to people in understanding is
offering them grace like I'm offered do in my faith.
I'm very thankful with this severe injury that I experienced
(40:47):
that I'm still able to do the things I love
to do, to do outdoor adventure. I'm able to do
the things I love to ski and to paddle board,
and to hike, and I'm able to share my love
of the outdoors with my family.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
Welcome back. This is a Live Again joining me for
a conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive Again
story producers Lauren Vogelbaum and Brent Die And I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Brent, can you tell us a little bit
about how you found this story? What attracted you to
this story?
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Yeah, recently as a friend of my wife's, and I
didn't know her story until my wife and I went
out to the Grand Canyon and she said, well, by
the way, my friend almost died here. And I said, well,
I'll be giving her a call. She wants to be
on the show.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I think the biggest thing for me here, I mean,
other than just the spectacle, which is what I call it,
but the graphic nature of the incident and everything that
she described about the ordeal of them having to sort
of prop her up and several times and put her
on a raft, so that and just there's there's so
(42:24):
much that she had to do and go through with
the help of so many people to get out of there.
It's it's kind of miraculous that she made it out
at all, and I just listening to that story. I
was one of the few stories where I just was like,
couldna was not listening to listen to it. I was
just cringing left and right, and I was sort of like,
(42:45):
I don't know, it just got in me in a
way that it was disturbed. It was disturbing, like I
can't imagine going through that. Do you know, is she
like walking normally now? Is she like she's totally normal?
Speaker 5 (42:56):
She enjoys doing all of her hiking with her family
at some that she's been able to. Really she's really
proud of passing that love on to her kids. So yeah,
it's it's a real miracle. Way what she was I
accomplished from that.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Well, the the big just to jump right in. The
big takeaway from me was just she had been stretched,
as she said, the academics had challenged her her sort
of point of view, and then and then the outdoor
activities stretched her even more into a sort of seeing
maybe that God is bigger than what she thought, to
(43:34):
the point where when she's in recovery and she's surrounded
by her loved ones and friends and a lot of
them are saying God must have saved you for a reason,
and that didn't ring true to her and it didn't
resonate with her, and then instead it raised this sort
of more complicated question of like, well, okay, if God
saved me, then what was the rock slide part of
that too? Like did you know, yeah, how much how
(43:57):
much are God's fingers in on the experiences that I'm that,
I'm that I'm well, that I'm walking through in life?
But yeah, I don't know. Brenton, you have a pretty
firm faith and to love to hear your your understanding
of that.
Speaker 5 (44:12):
What I love about her is her honesty through the
entire experience. You know that she was willing to go
to her community, which was her whole world at the time,
and not only was it her social group, but it
was her future. She had decided to pursue a career
in the ministry, and she was not sure what she believed,
and she was honest with herself and honest with the
(44:34):
camp and called them and said, I don't know if
you want me to come back out here because I'm
dealing with these questions. And I thought it was really
spoke well of the camp too, that they're like, we
still want you to come out but we just are
going to take you out of the ministry position. And
I like that she was coming back to her relationship
with God before the rock fall. So it wasn't as
(44:55):
if the rock hit her and brought her back to Christ.
She was rebuilt that connection just through the restorative power
of nature, you know, just the awe and one what
of nature?
Speaker 6 (45:05):
What a place to have a crisis of faith, the
Grand Canyon. Are you kidding, like like, okay, yeah, sure,
that's beautiful. It's impossible not to feel awe and feel
like the universe is a lot bigger than you in
a place like that.
Speaker 5 (45:20):
Well, I think what she might have been battling with
was she started in a mainline church. It was kind
of like your traditional and what you would think of
as like an early twentieth century Methodist church or a
Lutheran church. I grew up in that kind of church.
It wasn't such an emphasis on defining things. So clearly
there was a little more room for mystery and more
of the mainline experience, and she moved into more of
(45:41):
an evangelical experience in her college years.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
The evangelical is just more dogmatic or more what.
Speaker 5 (45:49):
Is Yeah, I wouldn't really want to use that term
because I don't think it's respectful to people who believe
that way. But I just think it's I think it's
more of a your interpreter of scripture is the correct interpretation.
And I understand the desire to want to share that
with people if you feel like you have the answer.
I understand the desire to want to share that. But
(46:11):
for me, I think it takes away some of the
wonder and mystery that is the joy of living, you know,
And I think that's what she was wrestling with. The
moment that really struck me in her story was when
she was at her camp and they did that like
seven day hike or whatever, and she comes over this
hill and sees this valley of wildflowers and realizes that
(46:34):
this beauty is here, whether a human eye ever sees it,
and for her that's an encapsulation that it's not transactional.
The beauty and goodness is there regardless.
Speaker 6 (46:49):
I feel like she also talked about that in terms
of her interactions with all of the people during her
rescue and recovery as well. You know, like their goodness
was just there, it was just part of them. They
stepped up and helped her do whatever it was that
needed to get done in order to get her to
a place where should she she could receive medical care
(47:10):
and she could recover from from this weirdly horrific aid
inch roc accident.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you imagine an eight inch
roc like a cannon.
Speaker 6 (47:20):
Oh sure, yeah, fast enough, fast enough. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
I love how she eventually she seemed like this is
a This is also a story of liminality, like her
liminal state between two threst thresholds of her sort of
understanding and her identity. So she had to kind of
like there was a death of the previous identity of
(47:45):
her from the evangelical and from the you know, and
there was an expansion and there was a confusion. But
she eventually found a way to make peace with this questions,
and that's crossing the other threshold of sort of coming
to a new understand and finding herself in a new form,
not by finding all the answers, but by letting go
(48:07):
of the need to find them. She talks about how
her belief in God was distilled down to the essentials,
to what actually mattered to her, rather than some rigid
doctrine or some certainty. She found something that was more expansive,
and she was okay with the expansiveness of it.
Speaker 5 (48:22):
I think that's one reason extremely conservative cultures don't want
their kids to go away to college, because they may
be exposed to ideas that are different than what are
being taught in the tribe. And Reesa needed to go
through that to have the spiritual growth that gave her
a stronger relationship with God. And I think we're all
(48:46):
on our own path. And I think that it's good
to have guidance from your pastor or your rabbi or
whoever is your spiritual leader, but you got to be
on that path on your own if it's going to
be an authentic path. And I think that's what Reesa's
stories about.
Speaker 4 (49:01):
Yeah, it connects with these the themes that we have
in the show that like there's a recurring theme that like,
survival isn't always about crafting the perfect story where everything
makes sense, you know. Sometimes it's about embracing the mystery,
accepting that life is unpredictable, and understanding that meaning isn't
something just handed to us. You know, we are participants
(49:23):
in the story. So it's not just about like regaining
some certainty that was lost. It's about learning to learning
to live with uncertainty in a way that still allows
for what Because she says love, grace, and connection. Yeah,
it's the same thing that all of our stories people
who suffer these adversities or near death experiences. You know,
(49:45):
it's not just why they survived, but how to carry on,
you know, without needing all the answers.
Speaker 6 (49:52):
Right, And I'm not a religious person, that that does
really strike a chord with me. The concept of personal
responsibility and the idea that we should all have free
will and we should exercise it, and if we're not
exercising it, then what does it mean anyway? You know?
Is is it meaningful if we don't come to a
(50:15):
personal concept of our relationship with religion or with the
universe in a larger sense, or even just with ourselves.
Speaker 5 (50:25):
Part of her growth was realizing that she still had
a relationship with God. She's still very active in her church,
but ministry wasn't in the cards for her.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
But she's able to.
Speaker 5 (50:37):
Take her theology and her experience of trauma and use
that as a therapist.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Didn't she say something about grace and the same grace
that she feels that is extended to her in her
relationship with God. She feels like that's something that we
all must do with empathy. Yeah, I just thought it
was cool between the idea of grace and the idea
of empathy as being parallel.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
Well, I think it goes to what she discovered in
her story was the universalness of these concepts. You know,
empathy is the same concept as grace. You know, whether
you're belong to church or not, most people are capable
of empathy, and most people are capable of receiving and
giving grace.
Speaker 4 (51:23):
But empathy is the greatest weakness of Western civilization. You
didn't know that.
Speaker 5 (51:30):
That's why you need to drive a cyber truck where
you're safe from empathy.
Speaker 4 (51:33):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh, is that what it's for?
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Okay, Yeah, you got to be safe from all the empathy.
Speaker 7 (51:42):
Next week on the Live Again, when Robert was poisoned,
he had a profound and unexpected near death experience, one
that reshaped his entire understanding of karma, morality, and what
it truly means to live a good life.
Speaker 8 (51:54):
Probably Kitchen Keema Wuls was I think the concisus at
the time. It was meant for me to just get
poisoned againstick knowing that you did a lot of things
that were not the right thing on purpose versus like
the value or the weight on that on I guess
your soul will call it.
Speaker 4 (52:10):
It's a lot.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, 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 Lkli and Noames Griffin.
(52:35):
Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson, mixing by
Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host Dan Bush.
Special thanks to Reesa Bailey for sharing her story.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
Alive Again is a production of I.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative
near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
Speaker 4 (53:00):
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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