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The Waiting Room

My NDE during open-heart surgery

22 July 2026

I've written before about the surgery that split my life into a before and after — the eight-hour operation on my aorta that I now call "the pivot." But I've never told you what happened during it. Not the medical part. The other part.

Let me back up first, because context matters here.

By the time I was wheeled into that operating room, my body had already been through more than most people go through in a decade. In 2019 and 2020 alone, I'd had a thermal ablation on my uterus, then a full hysterectomy after a uterine cancer diagnosis. I'd gone through a spinal cord operation that was supposed to relieve the chronic headaches caused by dural ectasia — it didn't work. And in the middle of all of it, an emergency surgery for a complete intestinal blockage. If you want the fuller picture of that stretch of my life, it's all in the archive.

So when the surgeons told me I needed an FET — a frozen elephant trunk operation — to repair my aorta, I wasn't afraid of the pain. I'd already lived through enough of that to know I could survive it. What I was afraid of was not waking up. My son was 9 years old. He needed his mother.

The last thing I said to my husband before the anesthesia took hold wasn't "I love you" to him. It was, "Tell (my son) that I love him."

Then nothing. Or — not nothing. Just not what I expected.

Somewhere in those eight hours

I can't tell you exactly when it happened. The surgery involved putting me on a heart-lung bypass machine and cooling my brain's temperature down significantly, and if I had to guess, that's when it happened — somewhere in that cooled, suspended stretch of the operation.

There was no light at the end of a tunnel. No conversation with God. No sense of floating above my body watching the surgeons work, the way people describe in so many of these stories. I didn't see anything at all.

What I had instead was awareness. Just awareness. No shape, no location, no point of view — nothing I could describe as "me" in any physical sense. No sense of time passing, no sense of space existing. If I try to describe the feeling, the closest word I can find is consciousness — pure and unadorned, with nothing attached to it.

And I was completely alone in it. Not lonely — just solitary. There was no one else there. No presence, no guide, no voice. Just this quiet, suspended awareness, existing.

The strangest part is that it wasn't disturbing. It wasn't frightening, and it wasn't peaceful either, exactly — it was neutral. Like sitting in a waiting room where nothing is wrong and nothing is expected of you yet. You're just there.

A few years later, I watched the Pixar film "Soul" for the first time, and when the souls appeared on the screen moving toward the Great Beyond, something in me sat up. That's it, I thought. That's the feeling. Except mine wasn't moving toward anything. I wasn't on a conveyor belt heading somewhere. I was just suspended — between one life and whatever comes before or after it. Between being Arinya, wife and mother, and returning to something larger. A pool of consciousness. Oneness. Whatever we were, before we became individual people at all.

I remember it feeling like a tipping point. Like I was balanced on the edge of two directions, and either one was equally possible. I could go back to my body, to my name, to my son. Or I could go back into the pool.

Coming back

The return wasn't one clean moment. It was both sudden and gradual at once — which sounds like a contradiction, but that's genuinely how it felt. I remember becoming conscious after surgery in a fog of confusion, though I can't fully separate how much of that was the anesthesia and pain medication wearing off versus something else. What I remember most clearly is the sensation of my soul settling back into my body — not instantly, but in a kind of loop, like I was replaying the same moments over and over before I fully landed. A Groundhog Day feeling, if that makes sense.

It took months — not days — for me to even begin putting language to what had happened. Somewhere in that stretch of recovery, I started noticing synchronicities. Small moments of contact with something I couldn't name. The veil between the human world and whatever I'd touched during surgery felt unbelievably thin for a long time afterward, like I was still living with a foot in both realms. Eventually I came to understand that maybe we're always able to drift between them — I'd just never noticed before.

One strange, lasting detail: ever since that surgery, I've felt like the rest of me — my soul, whatever that word even means — sits on the right side of my physical body. I don't have a tidy explanation for that. It's just something I carry with me now.

What I still don't know

Here's the honest part. I still don't know how much of what followed — the synchronicities, the sense of contact, the moments that felt like they came from outside myself — were other spirits reaching toward me, or whether it was simply my own spirit, expressing itself through that oneness I touched in the waiting room. I don't think I'll ever fully resolve that question. If anything, I suspect it's a question I'll keep sitting with for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be.

If you've had an experience like this — something that doesn't fit neatly into a near-death-experience checklist, without the light or the tunnel or the voice of God, just a strange, quiet suspension — I'd love to hear about it. You're not alone in it, whatever it was.

If a piece of you is craving a way to actually sit with these questions instead of just reading about them, that's exactly what I built the Awakened Journey Journal for — a guided space to process your own thin-veil moments, your own waiting rooms, whatever shape they take for you. It's available here.

And if you're looking for other people who understand this particular flavor of strange without needing an explanation first, that's what the Awakened Journey Collective is for. Come find us.