A man survived cardiac arrest at 24 and woke in a hospital unable to breathe on his own, seeing his friends as distorted shapes while doctors feared brain damage. His first clear memory was looking at the ceiling and telling God he'd been given a second chance. He believes his survival was purposeful, not luck.
When you realized you had almost died at 24, what was the first thing that went through your mind? When I woke up in the hospital, I was coming off all the drugs that was keeping me alive. All my friends looked like balloon animals, so that's like my first memory. I thought I was in a dream. When I finally came off the meds a couple hours later and they told me that I had a sudden cardiac arrest, like that whole day really is very, very blurry. They tried to bring me off of the ventilator 3 times, couldn't breathe under my own power. Dude, they didn't know What was going to happen when I woke up, if I was going to be a vegetable, if I was going to have brain damage. They had no idea. It took a while for my brain to actually snap back into it. And the first thing that I remember, like, actually coherently was I just looked up at the ceiling of the hospital. I just said, God, I don't know why you're giving me a second chance here, but I know that clearly you are not done using me. So I just knew in that moment that there was no coincidences. It wasn't luck. It wasn't an accident. That that had happened to me, I wasn't really shocked. I wasn't like, oh my gosh, why me? Why is this happening? It was kind of just like, okay, like, I don't know, I just had this peace about me that this was truly happening for me and not to me.
