Transforming Trauma into Triumph: How a Near-Death Experience Can Boost Creativity

Five years ago, I almost died. It was May of 2020. The hospitals were packed with those suffering from the Coronavirus. I had been sick nonstop for a year by this point. I had spent a fortune on vitamins and supplements: Chinese medicine, expensive colon cleansing products from the Netherlands, and weekly acupuncture visits did nothing to assuage my symptoms. I had developed gluten and dairy intolerance, so I could barely eat, my hair was falling out in chunks, and my body was in pain night and day.

I remember the week it culminated. I was in college, still working on my bachelor's degree, and had just started two accelerated summer courses. Due to COVID-19, they were being offered online, which turned out to be a huge blessing. At this point, I had finally caved in and gone to a doctor. Who sent me to a specialist, who then took a ton of labs and told me to come back in a month.

Many will ask why I hadn’t gone to a doctor months earlier. Up to this point, I had always been healthy. I had four babies in five years in my twenties, and suffering a broken ankle and surgery three years before was my only hospitalization. But I was raised poor, and we didn’t have health insurance growing up. I was taught to never go to the doctors. Tough it out. Mind over matter. They were a bunch of quacks anyway. But when I started puking up blood, I knew I had to. I had good health insurance by this point, so it was ridiculous that I didn’t use it. Just proves that habits are hard to break, even when they can kill you.

It was my oldest daughter who finally pushed me to go to the ER. I fought the whole time, even though I was so sick I couldn’t breathe and was passing out all over the place. My husband drove me, and the ER was like a quarantine zone. He left me at the door and wasn’t able to visit me during my entire stay.

Labs taken in the ER

Turned out, I had lost so much blood that they gave me multiple blood transfusions. They couldn’t understand why, nor why I couldn’t breathe. So, three days later, they sent me home with an oxygen tank. I felt awful, but they had pulled me back from the brink of death. Three days later, I saw my specialist and informed them what had happened. They took labs, and my blood count was already once again dangerously low. They told me to go straight to the ER, this time to the University of Utah, where they had an excellent Rheumatology department.

I was told I had lupus. And my current condition was due to a comorbidity of lupus:

DAH, diffuse alveolar hemorrhage, where the blood in your body starts hemorrhaging into your lungs. It’s a death sentence unless treated immediately. Ensconced in a new hospital, I was once again cut off from my family. I did my college work from the hospital when I was able to, and underwent some terrifying tests, then was placed on a ridiculously high level of steroids. I discovered that steroids are a life-saving drug used to treat just about everything. Pumped on steroids, I left the hospital. Due to poor aftercare, I was back in the hospital four months later, suffering from the same condition. The doctors finally started me on an infusion called Rituximab to put the lupus into remission, and I’ve taken it ever since.

In the months that followed, I felt constantly unwell, gained a significant amount of weight

In the hospital

from the steroids, managed to graduate from college, and found a job in my field of expertise—technical writing. Throughout this time, I would often find myself writing stories in the back of my head. It seemed I came up with story ideas every day, and each day, from the break of dawn to an unsettled sleep, I swore to myself that I would make my dream of becoming a published writer a reality. But it never happened.

It had been my deepest wish to be a writer since I was a child. However, due to numerous traumas and other issues, I couldn’t bring myself to take the step. I wrote a great deal, but I buried it all in notebooks, sublimating my love for words through songwriting, and lived vicariously through other writers who had already achieved success.

Almost dying does something to your creative soul. In my case, it supercharged it. However, I had buried myself under layers of self-doubt for so long that even a wake-up call from the grave couldn’t stir me out of my self-imposed prison. Instead, I threw myself into my new career, binged every foreign crime series ever created, and slowly died on the inside.

Eventually, I was able to stop taking the steroids, but the damage left behind was heartbreaking. One hundred pounds of extra weight, crippling asthma, and a heart condition now stood in the way of just about everything—from walking the dog to believing I could accomplish my dream. So, while almost dying had supercharged my creativity, I now felt like a hopeless cripple and descended into a deep depression.

Finally, at the beginning of 2024, I had an epiphany. I have always been close to some cosmic power. Some call it God, my therapist calls it "Source." One night, I felt that familiar voice inside me, and I did as I always do, I put the words to paper. I was wasting my second chance. I wasn’t letting my spirit express itself. This time, I was choosing to die. After working so hard to survive and getting my lupus under control, I still wasn’t giving myself the one thing I wanted.

I made a promise to myself that night, and I have kept it ever since. I have written nonstop since that point. All I need to do is focus on that terrible first time in the hospital where I was so dizzy, nauseous, feverish, and dehydrated I could barely move. And once I return to that moment, I am filled with the confidence to organize my ideas into stories.

Sometimes, we are saved. Other times we aren’t. But it is what we do with it that counts. I could still be sublimating my passion for fiction through TV, but I chose to finally, FINALLY listen to that suffering woman and grant her dying wish.

Creativity is like a beautiful pond in a magical garden where we can inexplicably find ourselves, and then moments later, never know how to get back to it again. It took almost dying to pave a pathway to that special place inside me. It has taken time in the years since to realize it isn’t enough to survive; you have to LIVE.

I am living now, and I visit that pool in the garden on a nearly daily basis. I write endlessly, confidently, and I don’t second-guess, erase, or edit my ideas into oblivion. I trust who I am now because I came back from the brink, and there’s no good reason not to believe in myself. I celebrate my triumph over trauma and enjoy everything I create. And now, finally, many years too late, I am sharing this with you.