I feel guilty because my NDE doesn’t affect me as it used to. In 1998 I didn’t know I was pregnant. I was kneed in the stomach by my former husband. We had three kids already and an okay friendship. I had an entopic pregnancy -- was rushed to the hospital in searing pain, screaming in emergency.

I exploded from every orifice and my blood pressure went way down. I was being asphyxiated by 2.5 liters of blood in my abdomen; it crushed my lungs and I couldn't move. My brain took me on a "pain journey" where I was taken away from the pain and visited a huge brown paddock and a miniature mythical Greek creature. He was my only company and told me he was “death, my only friend.”

The doctors slapped me, which woke me up and said they were taking me to emergency. They slid me onto the table and put the mask on my face. I pulled off the mask and shouted “everybody do a great job!” They then operated. I was under for three hours but it could have been three thousand years. My perception of time was gone. On the “other side” I raced down a dark tunnel. I couldn’t see the sides but I knew there was a tunnel. I was falling fast but traveling straight ahead. I was scared but at last started to slow down.

At that moment I knew the answers to everything – EVERYTHING. There was no time. I was surrounded by loving spirits who knew EVERYTHING about me and yet they accepted me and the love in my heart; they wanted to protect me. I'm not sure who they were. They were blue lights in the tunnel. The big blue light with white around it came towards me. It wanted me. I wanted very, very much to go to it. It loved me completely and cradled me in my feelings. It wanted me to come across the space that divided us. I wanted to come and felt pulled like a magnet.

I fell back into death but then I woke up two days later -- ALIVE in ICU. I opened my left eye and saw a butterfly and thought I was dead in heaven. It took a while for me to accept I was alive again. This is a shortened, honest account of what happened to me in October 1998.