“If I go to sleep, I’m not going to wake up,” she told him.
It was an October night in 2021, and Deiner was fighting for her life, and the life of her 24-week-old baby. She was in the intensive care unit of a Delaware hospital after being diagnosed with Covid. She had lost 30 pounds in 12 days after being put on a ventilator. A doctor later told her that at one point he estimated she had a 5% chance of survival.
Deiner was trying to calm her nerves when the doctor entered her room. She played Celtic music on her iPhone and watched “Peppa Pig,” an animated children’s television show, on a TV set. But each breath became a painful rasp, and she couldn’t tune out the beeping from the monitors as the doctor urged her to listen.
“You have to sleep,” the doctor told her. “If you don’t go to sleep, you’re going to die. You can’t heal yourself if your brain can’t sleep.”
Deiner fought back her panic and closed her eyes. She thought it was the end. Her world went dark.
But her story was just beginning.
A new kind of near-death experience
Floating through a tunnel to a light in the distance. Hearing celestial music. Greeting loved ones who died many years earlier. These are the type of stories people tell in bestselling books like “90 Minutes in Heaven” and “Proof of Heaven.”
Each survivor of a near-death experience shares stories of being spiritually transformed by what they glimpsed in the afterlife.
But in the two years since it began, the Covid pandemic has spawned a new category of near-death experiences — recounted by people like Deiner who returned to see the miraculous in the ordinary rhythms of daily life: Being able to taste and smell coffee, hug a child again and see the sun rise after fearing you’d never again hear birds singing in the morning.
They were spiritually transformed not by a glimpse of the afterlife but by what they saw in this life, when they were struggling to stay alive after being stricken by Covid.
Those type of stories don’t tend to get book or movie deals. Yet people like Deiner, 41, have these incredible stories of survival that can help all of us.
Start with the power of gratitude. It’s a cliché for some, but not for many Covid survivors.
“I think often of how much we take for granted,” Deiner wrote in a Facebook post not long after she was released from the hospital in December, “from the ability to walk or swallow to breathe.”
Angels all around us
Before she became ill, Deiner was a ball of energy. She was working on her doctorate in Oriental Medicine after getting an undergraduate degree in international relations. She was a mom, a former journalist, a massage therapist living in Lincoln, Delaware and a Reiki master. She once hiked through Central America with nothing more than a backpack.
“I was at the top of my A-game,” she says.
Covid changed all that. She had to learn what many of the greatest spiritual traditions say: We come into the world helpless; we leave it the same way. We need one another.
“When you’re really sick, you’re put in a position where you’re powerless,” she says. “You’re dependent on upon people and strangers to keep you alive.”
Like many near-death survivors, Deiner met angels. But they weren’t the glowing, winged creatures depicted in books and movies.
There was the nurse who patiently cleaned her up after she was covered in vomit and blood.
The pastor who came by the ICU, recited the Lord’s Prayer with her and cried with her even though she never met him before.
The doctor who urged her to go to sleep. When she opened her eyes eight hours later, “He was still there,” she says.
A prayer for the living
Read More: A near-death experience with Covid changed her whole life