I guess there had been an emergency call to these neurosurgeons in Santa Fe I don't think they were supposed to come back until Thursday but two of them came back if I recall that correctly they decided that they were going to do surgery on my brain they had done another angiogram they had been able to locate the aneurysm and they believed I was getting septic hello everyone welcome to Beyond the Veil today we hear from Mary Joe rapini as she shares her incredible near-death experience following a brain aneurysm in this powerful story she takes us
through a Divine encounter with God a Heavenly light and the life-changing lessons that transformed her outlook on love Faith and Healing my name is Mary jel rapini and I'm a licensed therapist and I prior to this incident what I'm calling now a blessing in my life I was very removed detached from an organized religion or feeling close to God in fact I felt quite estranged from him and some of the context of that was I was a psychologist and my husband and I had moved to leic Texas where it was a better job for him
and prior to going to leik I was in Houston Texas and I loved it there and I I was trained as a psychotherapist I did General marriage and family and then I went on for additional training to become a sex therapist so when I was moving to Leck you know a lot of people were saying oh my God you're going to you know you're going to be great because you won't have to worry about Job there's very few Sex Therapy therapists there and I got the idea that you know wow this is going to be
great for my career too but then when I got there I realized that the reason there weren't a lot of sex therapists there was because it's quite a conservative area and and it's very difficult to get established with a medical community there as a sex therapist at the time that I was there so to just give you backstory what my job was I was the head of a psychooncology unit at Texas Tech and University Medical Center and basically the reason I say I'm head is because I was the only one that was doing that and
I got into cancer quite backwards whereas a oncologist hired me to run support groups for his cancer patients because many times when you have cancer you also have intimacy issues with your family and also with your body you're aranged from it you go through treatments and you don't feel like the same woman or man many times so he brought me through a back door and I began running these groups and I found my Niche if you will with cancer patients so I was working with them and I worked in a pediatric flooor as well and
I saw a lot of terrible things kids getting cancer kids pain you know painful treatments and struggling and it just started deteriorating how I felt about a god a loving God especially so now on to my story I'm carrying that in my heart at the time I was going to Gold's Gym it was a Saturday morning the 19th of April which we call in you know I was raised as Roman Catholic it was Holy Saturday and the next day was Easter and I was having a big brunch at my house I had a lot of
things on my mind I went to the gym and I was working out and one of the machines I was working out on was when you when you push like I was building my body and I had this idea you know I can lift I can lift twice my body weight with my legs I should be able to do that with that with my arm arms so I had been really dedicated to working on my chest and my arms and with one of the machines you sit in a chair and then you push and I
was loading up on weights that day so when I pushed the first time I went oh my God like that's really heavy and and you know I don't know if I can do another one I had 98 pounds on it and I weigh 107 and so I thought I'm just going to do one more and I did did one more and as I pushed I felt a sharp jabbing pain in the back of my neck it felt like I had been stabbed or something so I got up and I was I was a little bit
disoriented because the pain was so intense I got off the machine I kind of stumbled to the side and I I was thinking what was that because in my in my back history I was a nurse prior to becoming a psychologist and I started going through my you know my whole nervous system like you know something in my neck something in my cerebral fluids something in my spine something's not right I can't walk well I walked over to the bubbler and when I pushed down on the lever to get a get water all of a
sudden this whole right side started jerking like like convulsing and I had no control and I was profusely sweating and my neck hurts so bad that I thought man I I've done something terrible like I'm really sick and I had been just recently diagnosed and treated for high blood pressure so and I had taken that pill that morning so I kept thinking maybe it was something you know associated with that anyway I laid down and the person one of the people working out who knew me there said hey muscle woman what's the matter and I
said said if you can go get help because I I think I need an ambulance I I hurt myself and so he was really scared CU my face was white and I'm laying down on the gym floor so we went to the front and this owner or woman watching the gym that morning came back and she started talking to me and just soothing me and called an ambulance and called my family and it was just lucky that my husband was in town for for Easter weekend because he had taken a job at MD Anderson this
was toward the end of our 8-year time in leic when this happened in fact we are getting prepared to move back to Houston which I was very excited about and I used to joke about it that I got to get out of leic before this town ends up killing me because everybody I had worked with eventually had succumbed to cancer was very sick and so anyway the ambulance took me to the hospital and there was you know they did CAT scans they did MRIs and they found out that I had had a bleed and there
was so much blood in my head that they didn't know if I would survive the night it so happened that all the neurosurgeons in Leck and I think there's like four of them that weekend had gone to a conference in Santa of Fai so the only one who was in town was this retired one and he was a friend of my husband's so he spoke with Ron and he said you know her head is full of blood and they had tried to do an angiogram but there was so much blood and the only person that
could do it was a pediatric a pediatric neurologist who also read these angiograms and he he there was so much blood he couldn't see where it was coming from so their option was we can kind of stabilize her and just keep an eye on her but she could die within 24 hours or we could you know fly her to Dallas there were Specialists there who would take me on and my husband and I had a pack that if one of us were in the event one of us had a catastrophic illness or something that we
would not leave each other I watched a lot of people die alone and it's terrible and I got this sense that when you are dying you should have another human who loved you or can love you so until God takes your hand they've got your hands and they're holding them so my husband was told he couldn't go in the jet with me that it would have been too much weight or the weight would have been off and and to pressurize the cabin they just wouldn't take that risk he decided and we cuz I was in
and out of Consciousness I was able to talk to him I was extremely relaxed and I keep going back to the reason I was so relaxed because I'm not a relaxed person I'm very hyper very anxious in my real life well I used to be in the ambulance I don't know if you've ever had the kind of pain that it can make you go mad like it it can drive you crazy it hurts so bad and going over every bump I told God you know I I can't handle this I need your help and I
and and I I don't I don't care if I live I I've had a good life and if it's your will that I be gone then I want you to know I grateful and I said that at a time I I thought always thought that was the bravest thing anyone could ever say and my cancer patients used to tell me that they submitted to God and when they did they suddenly got a feeling that that it was in his hands a true letting go if you will and and it happened to me I got the
same feeling and as I let go of controlling my condition it seemed that my condition flowed in a way that that I wouldn't never be responsible for so when the neurosurgeons told me later probably part of the reason that you did so well is because you were in great shape I can't accept that and the reason I can't accept it is because that moment of submitting to God was so powerful for what it changed in my thinking in my brain and the and the organization of my illness like the trajectory that I I can't I
cannot explain it to you I can only tell you that it was real so anyway I woke up on Easter Sunday they had stabilized me with meds and everything and they were you know they were guarded but they were somewhat pleased that with with my ability like it seemed like I was more awake it seemed I was more alert and they were doing ultrasounds like every it seemed like every 30 minutes on my brain they they were doing numerous tests all the time and and my husband and several friends came over to see me I
was supposed to host a brunch at my house and I was adamant that my husband and my kids host that brunch only now do I see how ridiculous it was but I really thought that I may die and if I did I wanted them to have other people and I have to explain this to you the fact that I might die it was not sad to me it was not heartbreaking either it was almost like I was so totally in God's will at that moment I I don't know what else what other adjective I can
put with that so anyway to continue the story I made it through Easter Sunday and my husband was sending out emails and text to my family and friends and Monday I continued to progress you know not getting worse not getting better for sure but I was looking pretty good except a few people that would come in say you look kind of green or you look kind of yellow and and my husband and Ron said you know Mary I I don't I'm not sure because I thought okay well I'm just going to wait here until the
blood resolves and blood was running out of my ears out of my nose when when you have a bleed in your brain because your your brain is so organized that it knows how much fluid it can have and it had way too much so you have like three huge valves in the back of your head and those drains I also at this time had a I had a brain drain in other words they had put a tube in my forehead and they were draining out excess blood and they had it taped so I never really
saw myself but I think when my children came to see me they were a Gass with it and I I think that was very difficult for them I think it was also very difficult for Ron to see but as far as pain I had a terrible headache I had a terrible neck ache and you just feel nauseated and you're incredibly weak which for me since I'm so jumpy and usually anxious probably worked in my favor because they didn't want me out of bed I couldn't move and I I did had no desire to move or
get out of bed on Tuesday is when I had what I believe is a near-death experience when I was with God I woke up about 2:00 a.m. Tuesday morning to nurses putting stuff on me at this time I had been in the surgical ICU they moved me out to the floor on Monday and now I was on the floor going back in and they were putting like monitors on me they were waking me up they were doing all kinds of tests and they told me you know you're not doing well we called your husband and
we're going to move you over to the ICU so we can keep a good eye on you apparently my O2 SATs had been dropping so when I was in the surgical ICU I guess there had been an emergency call to these neurosurgeons in Santa Fe I don't think they were supposed to come back until Thursday but two of them came back if I recall that correctly they decided that they were going to do surgery on my brain they had done another angiogram they had been able to locate the aneurysm and they believed I was getting
septic and without this brain surgery I was not a candidate for them to coil it because it had already burst and coiling would have been easier because they could have gone through the groin and just not had to open the brain but they had to open my skull and during that time when they were when they were getting me ready and talking to Ron I saw a white light and it was in the upper right hand corner of my room you know I had been in icus I had been in surgeries as a nurse I
mean I had worked in the hospital a good portion of my life and this light was not like anything else I had ever seen it was a bit ethereal it was a kind of a different color it was a luminescent but it also was soft and and as I looked at it I thought what is that is that is that a tunnel because it almost has like that round the corrugated side almost as if it would be an encapsulated tunnel and then I as I looked at I thought well I'm not impressed because it's so
little and then all of a sudden I am moving into it and it's quite odd the way your body moves into it because you're not lying down flat you're kind of upright and you can your eyes work in a way that I know this sounds strange and even corny but your eyes can see behind you I I could see and sense that my body the shell was on the bed but what was unbelievable to me is and I believe my Consciousness which is very important to me was with me I think it was part of
my soul because I was able to see what people were wearing and I could see Ron Ron was there he had his head in his hands he was crying and he was looking at this document it was a surgical consent and all of a sudden I left that I didn't care about it I was so focused on what I was seeing and I came to this luminiscent like a light pinkish room and I got the sense that there were no walls it was it was just Mass it was an opening if you will and I
wasn't the only person going through it it felt like there were other people and I'm I'm referring to felt a lot because because it doesn't make sense but you sort of see you see with your senses too everything is with you as one and I felt like I knew that place like I I had felt that place before I had been there and all of a sudden I didn't I didn't see the exact action how it happened God was holding me and he he said it's not your time and I was so disappointed because I
wanted I wanted to be there with him and very different from what I ever expected the love was not human and it was it was comparing it like to human love would be plastic like a like a credit card whereas this was really deep and I said I can't stay but why not not and I started telling God all of my accolades I gave free Cancer Care I would come up at night when people were dying I would pray for people I tried to be a good mother I tried to be a good wife I
had been a good worker every positive thing I could think about myself which is so awful and now or arrogant or whatever I tried to tell and he said let me ask you one thing have you ever loved anyone the way you've been loved here and I said no that's impossible I am a human just to remind God of my humanness and then the sensation was a closer hold from God and he said you can do better and I and I don't remember leaving that space But I woke up to Ron like shaking me cuz
he felt like I was unconscious and saying Mary we have to make this decision together like they have to they have to open your brain and they have to clip this this vessel and you might never be the same you might not be able to run Mary or even walk and I'm a runner I was a runner I was running 50 and 100 MERS running was my life and and he said and your personality might change completely I I need you to I need you to tell me it's okay and I said it's okay I'm
not going to die anyway and Ron said well I hope not you know I I hope not Mary I I think if you pray you're close to God I I think you'll you'll be okay and I said I just talk to God and he's it's not my time Ron and I woke up after the surgery and I I was upset I was depressed in fact I was depressed that I was back here for several months after and what I live with every day now is I I live with this incredible memory or whatever's been branded
on me and I tell myself I ask myself am I doing enough and am I standing up for God's goodness am I being conscientious with what he gave me am I loving others the way he told me to practice loving more and the answer is always I'm trying but it's very difficult I will tell you one thing I think I'm a better therapist and I think I'm a better therapist because I judge less and and I think compassion is the most important gift we give each other and and just get out of this mindset of
who's right and who's wrong I mean we're all connected and we're all going back there all of us and and there is a God and he is our source he is my source I believe he's yours too but you have to get there on your own and I believe he knows each and every one of us he connects to us in a way that we can't possibly understand we're very limited with our minds with our brains with our bodies it's it's left me with a deep sense of of compassion thanks for watching today's video if
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