When Stephanie was pregnant, she had premonitions of her own dad.
She told everyone her husband, her friends, her doctor, but no one believed her.
Still, she knew that when she got to the delivery room, she was going to die. From step-to-step to underground land, it was thing to spout, stay to him. I remember picking up the phone, before even rang. Where are you? I mean, tell me where you are.
I didn't have the lips. Tell me where you are.
“The phone went dead, and I think that sometimes you just know.”
Maybe you know when your child needs you before they call her. Maybe you know not to make that left turn, maybe you feel like it's better if you wait for the next bus. You don't know how you know, but you know, from step-to-step to underground land, my name is come Washington, know this, however you know, you believe you.
Step-to-step was pregnant with her second child, and she couldn't have been more excited.
The pregnancy started off easy, step-to-step had no complaints, until she reached her 20th week, spooked.
“I was walking through Tribeca Park in the middle of winter with my daughter in the”
stroller, and I was explaining how this fountain is so beautiful when it's flowing, and then all of a sudden in my mind's eye, the fountain turned to blood and started gushing blood. And I grabbed onto the stroller, I felt the blood hemorrhage in my body, like all the blood was rushing out.
Stephanie stood in the park, clutching her daughter's stroller.
She was doing a few months, and this was not a good sign. So she rushed to the emergency room, and once she got there, she realized she wasn't actually hemorrhaging. There wasn't even any blood.
“The doctor said, whatever she felt was just a false alarm, and I'm like it's not a false”
alarm. So warning, because just the night before, Stephanie was sitting at her desk when she got a vision. I saw my body flat dead on the operating table. I saw my body cut from sternum to pelvis and across the pelvic area, almost in a tea, just
cut wide open and dead. Stephanie was starting to feel like what happened at the fountain and her vision from the night before were somehow related. I had seen it all happening like flash before my eyes. Stephanie had recently found out that she had placenta previous, but her doctor told her
that the risk of death was pretty low. Still, the vision to her was more like a premonition. I'd be grocery shopping, and I'd be in the aisle getting the flower, because I was making bread that night, and all of a sudden I would see the Sabbath dinner table, and the mother seat would be empty.
The next day, I'd be walking, and I'd have a flash of my burial. Stephanie lay dead in a shiny, coffee-colored casket, wearing her husband Jonathan's Air Force dog tags. Right next to the casket, Jonathan stood crying with her daughters, and his arms was their
Newborn son, Jacob.
There's flashes of life continuing without me.
“I was looking at a ticking time bomb that was going to go off the day I gave birth.”
I was in Starbucks getting, you know, hot chocolate or something, the barista was pregnant also in New York. And she's like, she said, "Oh, how's it pregnancy going?" I'm like, "I'm going to die." So people would stop talking to me.
I'd have ultrasounds. Baby's fine. I'd have blood tests.
I'd meet with the psychologist.
I am trying to figure out what I need to do and who needs to be in an operating room in order to save my life.
“With only five weeks until her C-section, Stephanie had gone to every doctor she could”
think of. The only one left was the anesthesiologist. So I pick up the phone and I call, and then I say, "Well, what happens in the event that my placenta previous turns into an acrita?" And I need a hysterectomy.
And she was startled by it, she was quiet, and she says, "Mr. Arnold, you're in a teaching hospital, and you're in very good hands, and we're aware of your condition, and I hope you, I made you feel better."
And I sat there for a moment, and I finally, you know, let out a sigh, and I said, "It
is what it is." I felt alone through the process, nobody was believing me during this time, and so it was up to me to do something, and I just felt very, very alone. Stephanie's husband commuted from their home in Chicago to his office in New York. So most week nights, Stephanie was by herself.
After she put the kids to bed, she would sit in the rocking chair in the living room on her laptop. I took to Facebook, I posted, "If anybody has my blood type, I'm going to need it. I wrote Kabay letters." Every time I started to write something to John at them, I would break down crying, because
I knew that whatever letters I would write would be something that he would be holding on for the rest of his life and continue to read, and I wasn't being poetic. I was scared, I tried to write letters to each one of my children, including my unborn child, and thought, "You know, where do I even start?" It's the pain of not being there to kiss a booboo better.
It's the pain of not cooking a family dinner and having Thanksgiving around the table. One week before her C-section, Stephanie wakes up and walks downstairs to prepare breakfast for her youngest daughter. All of a sudden, a rush of blood comes out of me and lands on the kitchen floor. My daughter looks up and says, "Mom, why are you paying red?"
You know, I'm smiling and I said, "You know, we're just going to have your brother today, so you're going to get to meet him." Stephanie strapped her daughter in the car and drove herself to the hospital, as soon she arrived. The nurse has hooked her up to the monitors and told her to relax.
But Stephanie knew that once the doctor's wheel turned to that operating room and delivered baby Jacob, she wouldn't come back out. I was focused on what the heck is going to happen in the next few hours. Is Jonathan going to get here on time? What are the last words I'm going to say?
“What does one say as they're running out of breath?”
If you're being buried alive and that last bit of dirt is hitting your face, what do your last words going to be? Stephanie's doctor came in and told her, "It's time." So I start texting Jonathan and I said, "You know, you've made me the happiest woman in the world and please take care of this baby and be a great father like you are, but
not just to who are two girls, but to Jacob as well." And he still wasn't getting it, so he said, "Honey, where do I meet you?" And I said, "Athe floor recovery, hopefully."
I close the computer and you know, Adina's there and I had a smile on my face...
doctor's like, "You know, we'll be back with mommy and your brother soon."
“And I kissed her a million times as soon as the gurney turned the corner out of the room,”
I broke down crime because I knew I wasn't going to see Adina again. I get into the operating room. The noise on my head felt like it was just a pulsating of my heartbeat, ringing in my head, like you know, I felt this bomb getting louder and louder and louder. The nurses strapped Stephanie's arms on the bed and put a curtain in front of her face.
So at that point I was done, there's no word of run, there's no word of high, I can't, I can't escape this." The doctors began the sea section and they delivered baby Jacob. Then, Stephanie started gagging. Seconds later, she flatlined.
The doctors called the code blue, they scrambled to revive her, bringing in a crash cart with extra monitors and extra blood.
The first one didn't work, and time was running out, Stephanie was losing blood fast,
so they brought in the second crash cart. She had been gone for 37 seconds. Finally, the monitor picked up a pulse, and Stephanie came back to life. The doctors put her into a medically induced coma, and during that time, Stephanie's placenta previa turned into an acrita, just like she saw in the visions.
She started to hemorrhage, and the doctors performed a his direct to me. On the sixth day of her coma, Stephanie finally woke up.
Her body had swollen up to 200 pounds from the kidney failure, and the first thing she saw
was her big swollen belly, and she was confused. She thought she was still pregnant. Now I'm terrified I haven't gone through it yet, like I was on pause. That my husband was present in my ear, sweet heart, you know, no, you're not pregnant anymore. You gave birth six days ago, and that blew my mind.
So when they transferred back to the maternity ward and they got me settled in, Jonathan with the head nurse at wheeled Jacob in, like as a surprise, and I just broke down crying
“and I'm like you need to get a man of here.”
Her husband Jonathan thought it would be healing to have the baby there. I could tell he was disappointed immediately. He went and he held Jacob, and he put him on his chest to be perfectly honest with you. I was scared of Jacob, because of the fear that he was going to kill me. I thought I was going to die and stay dead.
I'm alive now on the other side of it, and it's not the bliss and the gratitude. I was afraid of being. I was afraid of any kind of emotions that would lead to another fear of foreboding. Stephanie visited therapist after therapist, but no one could explain how she got those premonitions or what happened in the 37 seconds that she died before she came back to life.
A friend suggested hypnotherapy, Stephanie figured she'd try it, it was online and she could do it from the comfort of her own home. But when she told her husband, he was like, "Why would you ever want to do that?" And I want to go into the fire, rip the band-aid off, and then come out of it on the
“other side, because what if I, you know, am crazy with my children?”
What if I get divorced with my husband? I didn't want the anger to grow into something else, and then take its toll. The hypnotherapy has told Stephanie that she could take her into deep meditative states. I would allow her to observe what happened in those 37 seconds when she flatlined in the O'R.
I had never been hypnotized before, and I didn't know if it would work.
I didn't know whether I'd remember anything, or whether somebody was tamperin...
mind.
“She decided to add video tape herself, while she was in her deep meditative states.”
There was something about the therapist voice, so she's a Cuban Jew, and this woman's voice
sounded almost identical to my grandmother. We were just starting, she's like, "Do you think you're ready to go into the O'R?" And I said, "Well, let's try it." The next thing she knew, Stephanie was back in the O'R. Back to the moment when her heart was beating loudly in her ears.
And I'm laying flat on the operating table, and I'm alive, and my arms are out and attached
to the gurney I have a curtain in front of my face.
I am completely catatonic. They were talking to me and saying things to me, "Are you cold, Mrs. Arnold? You need a blanket. Your husband should be here soon. I wasn't acknowledging it."
And it was like a muted conversation, like it was just noise. The nurses put the soap on her belly, and they wait, Stephanie begins to slip under. And then what I saw was spirit Stephanie perpendicular to my body.
“The only thing I could hear was the beat of the machine and the tapping of my finger on top”
of the machine. My heart's getting louder, the beat is getting louder and louder in my head. I am tapping my spirit as tapping physically on the monitor, counting down, slower, as slower, and slower until they were going to take the baby out of me. When they returned, spooked, 37 seconds episode continues, stay tuned.
When we left Stephanie, she was deep in the middle of hipnal therapy. And she was going back, back to the moment she died on the operating table, spooked. The only thing I could hear was the beat of the machine and the tapping, my spirit is tapping, physically on the monitor, counting down, slower, and slower until they were going to take the baby out of me.
The doctors delivered Jacob and the minute that Jacob was removed and they were delivering the placenta, and Stephanie's body begins to seize and convuls. You hear the flat line beep, and you see my spirit's shoot up like a shooting star, this bright white light shoot up. A nurse jumps on her chest, breaks her ribs, and begins to give her CPR.
My doctor kept saying, "This can't be happening." I see my uncle Marvin, I see my grandmother, I see people that I know that had passed. So my uncle was standing right there, and if you look at it like there's three steps going up to whatever platform all these spirits were at, I was three steps below, and
as I'm walking in my uncle is standing there, and he's saying, "You always knew what
to do.
“You told the doctors what was going on, you need to go back."”
I physically feel that scalpel hitting my skin, and I could feel the cutting and the incisions and hacking away at my stomach, and the feel of an embilical cord being pulled from a high above me down into my body. I can't breathe. Stephanie was in her living room, clutching her stomach, and at that moment, the therapist
Voice came in.
Okay, we're going to come down, we're going to take you past this moment, we're going
“to go to the moment where you held Jacob for the first time, and five, four, three, two,”
one, when I got done with that therapy session, I felt a sense of relief, just a lot of pain released from my chest, and Jonathan came upstairs, and he said, you know, I was everything okay, because he had heard me screaming, and I said, "I need to take a look at this." And so I showed him about, I don't know, five seconds. He slammed down the computers, and I want you to stop the therapy, it's hurting you.
It's really, it's traumatic, and you're retraumatizing yourself, and I said, "I feel better." Like, I feel a little more connected, like I'm connecting the dots of what happened, and he looks at me, he says, "How do you know any of what you just said was true?" It could be an episode of Grey's Anatomy in your head, and I looked at him, and I was
really pissed, but I looked at him, and I said, you know, it's a fair point.
So Stephanie called one of the anesthesiologists who was in the OR when she died on the table. She asked what it looked like when she went into cardiac arrest. And she said, you know, it wasn't like a normal cardiac arrest, it was like you were having a seizure in your gagging. Stephanie pulls up the video of her hypnotherapy session.
It's cut up to the part where she sees herself start to seize and convuls. And she looked in horror, and she said, it looked exactly like that. Then, the anesthesiologist told her, that back when she was pregnant, you said something that would haunt me forever, and she said, you said, it is what it is. Even though the anesthesiologist had told Stephanie not to worry, afterwards, she flagged
Stephanie's file for delivery day.
She made sure to have an extra crash cart with blood and medical supplies, just in case. And the only reason I am alive is because they had the blood and they had the crash cart available because she flagged the file. Stephanie felt she had enough validation, and she didn't need to be afraid of the premonitions anymore.
But the one person who still didn't seem convinced was her husband. After me trying to get him to talk several times in him saying, hi, I'm fine.
“I'm like, I know you're not, and he's like, I think you're just trying to get me to say”
something and be emotional about, but I'm okay, really, the crisis ofverted, now let's move on. Let's move on with our lives. And I'm like, I feel there's something else going on, and he's like, don't feel anything. It's what's happening.
The reality is I'm fine. And so it was very frustrating for me. So I'm just like, you know, keeping myself busy. So one evening, she was sitting at Jonathan's desk, tidying up, when she found a small prayer book.
A paperback version of the Torah. So it's just a little Bible and there were papers stuffed within it. So I opened the prayer book and I see a folded piece of paper with numbers on it. And it's only numbers. It's mathematical equations.
Stephanie's husband was an economist. And while she was in the coma and ICU, Jonathan was calculating how many amniotic fluid emblems happen in a year and how many are fatal on what the chances of Stephanie surviving could be. And then there was another piece of paper.
And then I opened the piece of paper and I started reading it. It was a letter written to Stephanie. So the letter read, my only love of my life, I am sitting here in the still of the night listening to the machines be around you. You look like an angel, which devastates me.
What am I to do if you're gone?
“How will I ever reconcile this to our children to myself?”
I should have listened to more, I should have been there. If for nothing else but to hold your hand, I should have prayed for you. Rabbi told me this is a test of faith. If I was being tested, why isn't this happening directly to me? Why to you?
What did all this mean? How did you know?
I can't lose you.
I would be a shell of a man if you die.
Please don't die. I don't. And then he stopped mid-satmists. So it came home later that day.
“I let him finish playing with the kids and putting him to bed and he was upstairs and he”
was watching TV.
I told him I found the letter and first he brushed it off and he was like, you know,
what letter were you talking about and I'm like the one in your prayer book. He's like, oh, he was watching television as phone was next to him and I sent him a few texts and I said to you, believe that I could see dead people. I was standing behind him.
“I had tried to have so many conversations and I think it was easier to have him answer”
in black and white without having a big emotional conversation just to ask straight questions to get a straight answer. Then to look into his eyes and have him answer me directly that way and he responded with yes and I said the last question, do you believe me? Tears rolling down his face, he said yes.
Big banks, the Stephanie Arnold for sharing her story, Stephanie losing Chicago with her husband
and three children, including baby Jacob, and finally the Stephanie's book on our website,
foodpodcast.org, the stoop, monster team includes mark listage and assessment. These are egan, Eliza Smith, Jodi Kali and Jasmine Eglera, the stoop theme music was by her own Patency Miller, original soundtrack by Patency Miller, Renzo Gorio, and Leon Mordimoto. There are more full episodes of spooked, download or stream the show right now where you got this one, spookedpodcast.org and we count down to all halos egan, be afraid and
if you like stories with heart and soul, remember to check out the magical snap just to podcast and if you feel time and space closing in on you from all sides, threatening to track your very soul, I have the remedy, the antidote, the back door, please remember and
“never forget to never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, turn out the lights.”
(dramatic music)
