Blood and Angels

Photo credit – Aivasovsky, ‘The Ninth Wave’ (public domain)

I’ve written about dreams before and how they can inspire stories (and even blog posts)! But I’ve had two dreams (I’m only going to post one here) that didn’t come to me when I was asleep – they came to me when I was on death’s door.

Warning – it you’re squeamish about blood, please don’t read any further.

When I was in my early twenties I suffered a miscarriage. I was almost 7 months pregnant and spent several days in the hospital. When it was all over I went home to recover. I remember my mother feeding me fish and beans because ‘that’s what makes you better’. But I didn’t get better. For about a week I was lethargic, depressed and in pain. At the end of that week I had a bad fever and found it hard to get out of bed. My hubby called the doctor who came over to see me. When he arrived I tried to sit up in bed and started haemorrhaging. The doctor told hubby to drive me to the hospital (I seriously don’t know why they didn’t just call an ambulance!) So hubby packed me up in the car and we set out for the half hour drive to the hospital.

After about 5 minutes in the car I began to feel quite happy – in a contented and very peaceful way. The car seemed to slow down (even though hubby assured me later he was running red lights and breaking the speed limit). I actually thought the clock on the dashboard was broken because it stopped ticking over. Everything began to move in slow-motion. The trees and the white lines on the road were crawling by. My entire body began to tingle. I could hear hubby in the distance yelling over and over again, ‘Are you okay?’

Next thing I knew I was above the car watching it drive down the road. I could see myself with my eyes closed in the front seat and hubby still yelling. I turned away and found myself standing at the back of a little beach house looking out over the ocean. I’d never seen this house before, but it seemed really familiar. Out to sea there was a massive tidal wave heading into shore, but instead of white foam it had red foam. A man was standing close to me and as soon as I saw him I said, ‘I’ve missed you so much!’ (I was nearly crying because I missed this guy so much and to this day I have no idea who he was! But I knew I loved him). I told him the tidal wave was coming and he hugged me and said, ‘I’ll protect you from the blood.’ I looked up again and saw that the foam on the top of the wave was actually blood.

I felt a jab in my arm and opened my eyes to find I was in the emergency room with a doctor standing over me giving orders to a nurse. Another doctor appeared from the end of the bed and said, ‘There’s another one.’ I didn’t know what this meant until the next day when they told me I had actually been pregnant with twins and they didn’t know this when I miscarried. Naturally, the other didn’t survive and I had been internally haemorrhaging for a week.

The doctor told me I needed a blood transfusion. I was okay with this (probably because I was so out of it). But the hospital’s blood supplies had run dry and they were sending out the call to another hospital to get more. Three hours later I was told that there had been an accident and the other hospital couldn’t spare the blood.

My recovery was remarkable (considering I had lost so much blood and not been transfused). Within 3 months I felt as good as new and within 18 months I had given birth to a beautiful baby boy (Nicholas John).

The following year I was sitting in the kitchen reading the paper when I saw a notice regarding the hospital. They were contacting everyone who had received blood for the past four years. Apparently, there was a new virus known as HIV and they now knew some of the blood in our local hospitals had been tainted.

I often wonder what would have happened to me and where I would be now if I had the transfusion. How different would my life have been? My heart still goes out to all those who were not as lucky as I was and I often wonder what has happened to them.

I still don’t know if the man in my dream was my guardian angel, or if it was all just a strange coincidence.

Have you ever had a strange coincidence or amazing experience you would like to share?

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While I’m here – I’d like to thank Rick, Elisa and Richard for taking the time to read my book The Everything Theory and post reviews on their blogs.

Another update – thank you coffee2words for reading and reviewing my book Wolf Pear