27
A Matter of Life or Death
During the birth of her son, Mary Towns found herself transformed in ways she would never have imagined.
Mary Towns had waited long enough. She was ready to have this baby!
It was the morning of December 2, 1981. Mary was a nurse in St. Louis, pregnant with her first child. She’d learned via an ultrasound it was a boy. For what seemed like forever, she and her husband, Tom, had looked forward to the birth of their son.
But then the due date came and went. Now she was at the hospital, three weeks overdue. She suffered from what quickly would be diagnosed as toxemia, including swelling from excessive fluid. She had difficulty breathing. She’d been in labor with almost no medication nearly twenty-eight hours—one for each year of her life.
At this point the number in both cases felt closer to a hundred.
To complicate matters further, the baby was “sunny side up,” or face forward. The result was intense back pain with each contraction. It all added up to the most agony she’d ever endured.
As the clock in her room approached 11:00 AM, Mary was finally almost fully dilated. Then a nurse brought the discouraging news that the doctor was performing an emergency caesarean section and wasn’t available yet. She had to wait on her back, every contraction excruciating.
Mary was a woman of faith with an active prayer life. Too exhausted and hurting to form sentences or even thoughts, she uttered wordless prayers. God would understand.
Growing up in a home plagued by alcoholism, emotional abuse, and divorce had left her struggling with feelings of shame, worthlessness, and anxiety. She trusted God to help her yet also felt tied to the world and its problems. She feared a variety of illnesses and death. On this day in particular, she was keenly aware of all that can go wrong during childbirth.
She focused on the tiny dots on the ceiling tiles as she fought. Her body, and her faith, felt so feeble.
Suddenly the ceiling rippled and appeared to open. Incredibly she saw Jesus, arms outstretched on the cross, clouds and sky behind him. In a similar position on the bed, Mary felt herself slowly rising to meet him. She ascended until they were face-to-face—then kept rising until they’d somehow merged.
She’d never experienced anything like it. Her spirit was one with Jesus’ spirit. Filled with profound peace, she felt deeply and personally loved by God. Overwhelmed, tears of joy ran down her face.
A voice interrupted, and instantly she was back in the bed. “Your doctor is out of the operating room,” an anesthesiologist said. “We’re ready for you!”
Mary felt grief-stricken over the sudden loss of joy and peace. The staff sat her up to administer anesthesia, and her water broke. She felt disconnected from the earth, with no sense of gravity. “Don’t let me fall, Jesus!” she cried. “Don’t let me fall!”
Strong arms hoisted her onto a stretcher. Hospital staff rushed her down the hall to a delivery room, where she was placed on a table. Nurses lifted her legs into stirrups. The doctor arrived and lifted the blue drape covering her.
“Oh my God!” he said. “I’ve got a prolapsed umbilical cord here. I’m losing the pulse in the cord!”
He’s in trouble, Mary thought. My baby is in serious trouble. She knew that when the cord comes out first, the baby is cut off from its life-giving flow of oxygen and nutrients. It was too late for surgery—he’d already started to emerge. Her son had to be delivered in the next three minutes or he would die.
The overhead clock read 11:15.
The surrounding team went into action. The doctor made an incision to create more room for the baby’s exit. They enlisted Tom and a nurse to help push on her abdomen while the doctor pulled at the baby’s head with forceps.
She checked the clock: 11:16.
She held her breath. Is he going to make it? Is he going to make it?
11:17.
She heard the sickening crunch of breaking bone.
“That was either your tailbone or the baby’s collarbone,” the doctor said.
The anesthesiologist monitoring her vital signs said quietly, “I don’t have a blood pressure here.”
Then Mary felt a dramatic release. Her head began to swim.
Instantly, unaccountably, she separated from her physical self. She was spirit only, on the ceiling, looking down on the room. She saw a large puddle of red on and around the doctor’s feet. She saw the terrified look on Tom’s face. She saw her new baby lying on her own stomach, blue and limp.
She felt a crushing sadness. She didn’t know for certain if her son was dead, but she feared the worst. If I’ve just labored twenty-eight hours for a dead baby, she thought, I may as well die too.
Her spirit turned away from the scene below and toward a brilliant light above. She yearned for the sense of contentment and love she’d experienced just a few minutes before. She wanted to go back to what had felt like home.
In this state, truths that had been unattainable before now became clear. Mary realized she was an eternal, spiritual being, made for relationship with God. Shame and fear melted away. She recognized her body as a temporary covering, what the Bible describes as a “tent.”
As she processed this startling knowledge, a silent question emerged in her mind: Will you return?
In that moment she was filled with a hunger to find out if her son had survived. She had to know. Without speaking, she answered, Yes, Lord.
Immediately she was back in her body on the table. She labored to breathe and felt her heart surge into action again. She opened her eyes to the beautiful sight of her newborn, struggling to lift his head from her abdomen.
For an instant the head rose. His open eyes locked on to hers.
Mary sensed a powerful, spiritual link. It seemed her son was the only one in the room who knew she had “left.” Satisfied that his mother had returned, the baby laid his head back down and sighed.
With shaky hands the proud father cut his son’s umbilical cord. The doctor picked the baby up and examined him. “He has good muscle tone now,” he said. “His second Apgar score is going to be nine. That’s very good considering where he was when he first came out. That broken collarbone is a small price to pay to be alive.”
Mary, overcome with relief, turned and said, “I’m sorry about all the blood on your shoes.”
He raised his eyebrows. From her position she couldn’t possibly see his shoes.
Mary has no doubt she experienced two miracles that day. The first was the twin delivery room encounters; the second was when she easily might have slipped away into death. She now feels completely loved by God and transformed in her faith. She has lost her fear of dying and is far less plagued by everyday concerns. She embraces these words: “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).
Some ask her how she knows her encounters weren’t hallucinations, dreams, or chemical reactions to trauma. “I have experienced all those things before or since that day,” she answers. “None of those experiences had any positive or lasting effect. This is an experience that changed me for life.”
Mary changed so much that she took up pastoral counseling. Today she’s a nurse practitioner in Salt Lake City and is on the staff of Roi House of Prayer, a facility where anyone of faith can gather to worship and pray.
The other miracle from that day in St. Louis is the life of her son. Thomas Towns, the baby who almost didn’t survive his birth, has grown into a man of courage and compassion, a person who has touched many lives through his care for the disabled and for those suffering from cancer.
He now works, as an operating room technician, at the same hospital as his mother in Salt Lake City.