Nancy/AZ

God’s Beautiful Messenger

My name is Nancy. The story I am about to tell you happened in 2005.

I was critically, critically ill and almost died. I was in the hospital for forty-one days with an ulcerative colitis. I had had the ulcerative colitis for something like twenty years and it finally one night, just as I was wrestling with pneumonia, it decided to start bleeding, hemorrhaging and they could not stop it. I was rushed to the hospital and went into a coma. I was in the coma for 4 days.

When I woke up I expected things to be normal but what I found out was that while being out of it they had removed my large intestine, completely took out my spleen and had taken out part of my appendix. I was cut up the middle about 18 inches and to my horror there was a..,..colostomy bag. That was what I woke up to.

I was in this huge room in the hospital and all my family members and everybody were all in this room because they thought I was dying. But I was alive and I absolutely, absolutely, positively could not accept what had happened while unconscious. They had mutilated my body. The front of me was mutilated and I had this colostomy bag and I could not accept it because I did not have any say in it. I was told that they did what they had to do to keep me alive. But, I strongly said, “You’ve done this to me and I am not living with this bag for the rest of my life!”

The doctors would come in and they were trying to teach me how to take care of it and I’d say, “I am not taking care of this thing. I am not living with this thing!”

So they started having some psychiatrists come in and talk to me and I just was giving them a really really had time. So after 41 days they released me….with the bag. And I was not a happy person! Let me tell you! I was NOT happy!”

I went home and I lived with that bag for 9 months. Then they found me a surgeon who said that he thought he might be able to hook me back up with a j-pouch and get rid of that thing…the bag.

So, we had the surgery. He got in there and found that there was not enough material to do the j-pouch like they normally do. The doctor told the nurses, “If I don’t hook this woman back up then when she comes to she is going to kill me.”

So he built something in there out of what was left to work with. It wasn’t perfect because he didn’t have what was needed which meant that there was a little kink in the work that the doctor said might produce a problem in the future.

Well, several years later it did produce a problem. The intestinal area was backed-up and I went into another coma and rushed off to the hospital. I was laying on the bed, still in a coma state, and saw my little niece standing across the room. She had died several years earlier but there she was, dressed in her usual torn jeans and sweatshirt. It was her. My mother was also there, standing behind my niece. My niece wanted to let me know that I was going to be okay and that I would get through this.

I did survive it.

But several years later it occurred again. Again I went into a coma and as I was being carried to the ambulance on a gurney I remember how stressed I was over the sound of a dog barking and barking and barking. I looked up to see where the barking was coming from. (I was still in a coma at this time.) I looked across the street and there was my little niece again with her dog in her arms. That dog always had been yappy and still was. My mother was also faintly there with my niece.

The prognosis was that I would not make it through the incident this time but my niece reassured me that it would be okay. She wanted me to know that God had sent her to tell me that I would not be coming home to heaven quite yet.

My sister and I enjoy reliving this incident. My sister is the mother of my niece. She and I love to relive this story and laugh together as we savor each detail because everything my niece said and the way she said it and the way she was dressed and everything about her….was her. It was her. And God had sent her to me.

There is no question about that.