It all started with a panic attack.
I’d had panic attacks in the past, and I knew what it felt like to have my lungs suddenly fail me. But what I experienced in December 2009 was worse. This was me gasping and choking and fighting to take in any air at all. Me unable to catch a single breath for a minute or longer. And the more I couldn’t breathe, the more panicked I got, which made it even harder to catch my breath. It started happening more regularly, and a couple of times the attacks were so bad I had to be rushed to the hospital to get oxygen.
I went to see my doctor, and he sent me to an internal medicine specialist a couple of towns over from where I live in the dusty plains of southwest Oklahoma. I was thirty-three and in good health, though lately I’d been feeling stressed. The specialist took a chest X-ray and gave me an inhaler, but the attacks continued. The next step was an endoscopy, the little camera on a tube they slide down your throat to get a look at your esophagus and stomach. After that, they gave me something called an ERCP, which is a more serious test that pokes around in your bile ducts and pancreas.
The doctor discovered some kind of blockage in a duct between my pancreas and my liver and put in a stent – this little mesh tube – to fix it. It didn’t have anything to do with my trouble breathing, but it was no big deal to fix it so he did.
But when I woke up after the ERCP I was in terrible pain.
This was a sharp, constant, excruciating pain, so bad I couldn’t even move. The doctors ran a couple of quick tests and determined I had pancreatitis – an inflammation of the pancreas caused by the procedure to put in the stent. That, too, apparently, wasn’t uncommon; any time you mess around with the pancreas or gall bladder, you run the risk of triggering pancreatitis. It’s extremely painful, and the only way to treat it is to hydrate the patient and give them strong medicine for the pain.
The doctor told me I’d be in the hospital for a few days. Well, I’d had more than enough of hospitals – I’d recently spent ten weeks in one, the longest and hardest ten weeks of my life – so I told him, no, thanks, I’d be checking out. Whatever drugs he gave me worked well enough to make me think it was okay. Plus, I was stubborn as heck. I checked myself out against my doctor’s recommendations.
That night I doubled over in pain, and I was back in the ER by dawn.
The doctors hooked me up to a saline IV to keep me hydrated and wheeled in a PCA – Patient Assisted Analgesia – which was a pain pump I could administer myself. It was loaded with several doses of Dilaudid, a really powerful painkiller. Whenever my pain got too bad, all I had to do was push a button, though it would only give me a small number of doses every hour.
That first day back in the hospital, I started feeling sicker and sicker. I was throwing up a lot and felt like I had a 110-degree fever. My mother, Connie, was with me, and she patiently wiped beads of sweat off my forehead and rubbed my favorite lotion – Noel Vanilla Bean – on my legs. But the pain I was feeling just got worse. The doctors told me I was okay. They kept saying what I was feeling was routine.
Some time that afternoon, I got really groggy. I remember opening my eyes and seeing my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed watching TV. It was the Bonnie Hunt Show, which we both loved. Suddenly, I asked my mom, ‘What year is it?’
‘What year do you think it is?’ she said.
‘1984.’
My mother laughed. ‘Well, honey, I’m in 2009, so you better come on back here.’
Then I said, ‘I love you, Mom,’ and she said, ‘I love you, too.’ She went back to watching TV, and I closed my eyes to rest. As soon as I did, I felt an incredible heaviness, like I was sinking deeper and deeper into my pillow. I felt my pain go away, and I felt myself drift off into a bottomless sleep.
Down at the foot of the bed, my mother touched my leg and noticed it felt cold. She pulled my blanket over my feet, then got up to pull it tighter around my arms and shoulders. She saw that I was twitching, and she heard me let out a deep, unusual snore.
Then she glanced up at my face and saw my lips were blue.
My mother had trained as a nurse, so the first thing she did was listen for my breathing. When she couldn’t hear it, she put her finger on my carotid artery and felt for a pulse. She couldn’t find that, either. She screamed, ‘I need a nurse in here!’ and tried to lower the hospital bed so she could give me mouth-to-mouth, but she couldn’t make it go down. A nurse came in and started a sternum rub, firmly massaging my chest with her knuckles while asking me, ‘Crystal, are you okay? Can you hear me?’
By then my face was turning blue, too – a deep, dark blue that was almost black. That snore my mother heard wasn’t a snore at all – it was me taking my last breath.
‘Can you hear me, Crystal?’ the nurse kept asking. ‘Are you okay?’ Finally, my mother exploded.
‘You can do that ’til pigs fly; it’s not gonna work!’ she screamed. ‘She’s not breathing, and she has no pulse. She’s dying!’
A senior nurse rushed in, but when she looked at my blue face, she froze. Then a hospital clerk came in and nearly dropped her clipboard when she saw me.
‘My God, what’s going on?!’ she yelled.
‘We have to call a Code Blue,’ one of the nurses said, ‘but she has to be the one to call it’ – and she pointed at the senior nurse, who was still frozen.
‘Call the Code,’ the clerk screamed at her. ‘Call the bleeping code!’
The nurse finally called Code Blue – the most serious emergency code there is. Someone barreled in with a crash cart, and someone else came in with an AMBU bag, which is used to manually pump oxygen into the lungs. A doctor ran in, then another, then a priest and a social worker. More than ten people pressed around my body in that small room. A nurse roughly ripped open my hospital gown.
Someone pounded on my chest. Still no breathing; no pulse. A nurse put a mask on my face and started squeezing the AMBU bag. People ran in and out and back in again. Other patients clustered in the hallway, trying to see who was dying. My mother spoke to me above the commotion, saying the same thing over and over.
‘Please don’t go, Crystal,’ she said. ‘Please stay with us.’
I did not hear her say it. I didn’t feel the mask on my face or the pounding on my chest. I never saw all those doctors and nurses swarm into my room, never heard the frantic cry of ‘Code Blue’.
I don’t remember anything that happened in that room after I told my mother I loved her and closed my eyes and drifted off.
The next thing I remember is Waking Up in Heaven, with God.