From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody, and a warm welcome to our very special guests
from Texas.
And this is Deanna and Jeff Ray.
How are you guys?
Doing great today.
We're here.
Gonna ask for much more.
What part of Texas are you in?
We're in Denton, just outside of Dallas.
Gotcha.
Well, we're going to be talking about Deanna's near-death experience in just a second.
And I know it's going to be hard.
You have not shared this publicly in a forum like this before.
And it's hard because Jeff, and this is why I wanted Jeff on the show too, actually witnessed
the accident that happened to his lovely wife Deanna.
And we'll be talking about that.
Before we get into it, I'm going to give you 60 seconds to tell our listeners just a little
bit about you.
We are two retired, stay-at-home people.
And we're involved in our church.
And we have some great friends.
And we just are grateful to be here.
We've been through a lot in the past few years.
I learned so much about God's grace and deserve favor that we all received.
I have received it in abundance.
We both have.
How long have you two been married?
This will be seven years coming in June.
And the accident that we're going to talk about was how many years ago?
It's been almost four years.
Okay.
So you were relatively newly married when this happened.
Yes.
Still madly in love, which is awesome.
We still are.
We're honeymoon until we die.
Love it.
That's awesome.
All right, Deanna, take us back four years.
Tell us what was going on that led up to your accident.
Well, it was just as the pandemic was clearing up, we didn't have to wear masks anymore.
We'd received stimulus checks.
And we decided to stimulate the economy by buying a couple of electric.
Well, I got an electric scooter and just got an electric bike.
And we rode all over the place on them all around town.
And yeah, I mean, we just had so much fun getting out and doing that and exploring neighborhoods.
And the day of my accident, we had decided to ride up to the convenience store about
a half mile away.
We had become very comfortable on the scooter and on the bike.
We were just zipping around, going to go get some soft drink and have a bath home.
We were familiar with the streets, but we were going a little fast, probably about 25
miles an hour.
Did you have helmets on?
I was not wearing helmet.
Jeff was not wearing helmet either.
And I had good intentions of the type of thing.
I need to get a helmet.
I'm not 14 anymore.
It's hindsight though.
Yeah.
It's just a PSA for everybody to remember to get their helmets and wear them.
We had taken a corner and we were going pretty fast.
And I hit a rock or a pothole and I got the speed wall.
And I remember locking eyes with my husband, like, oh no, this is not going to end well.
Literally flipped over the handle rails of the scooter.
I did about one good army roll because I know how to fall.
But I was going so fast that on the second roll, I ragged dog.
I was slipping everywhere.
And I very distinctly remember hearing the sound of my head as it hit the pavement.
And that was the last thing that I remembered at that point was just the horrible sound.
I mean, Jeff hurt it as well.
It's traumatizing.
I relive it constantly.
Jeff, let's hear your point of view on what happened right there.
Like she said, we had those vehicles, electric bikes.
She was on the stand up when you've seen those things.
They weren't just the cheap ones.
They were nice.
Like we said, we'd gotten those stimulus checks and they weren't something we'd normally
afford because we're on disability both of us.
So we got something nice for ourselves.
And to stimulate the economy a little bit, you should see this girl.
She was, you know, it's like we were teenagers again, but we weren't wearing helmets.
We were raised in a different time.
We didn't wear helmets.
Looking back, we definitely will, but we'd just come around a corner and we were doing
about 25, that's faster than a school zone.
And you're totally in the open.
She hit, I guess, like carved into a little pothole or something, but we were about five
feet apart side by side cruising.
And you know, we blocked the eyes when she hit this pothole or handlebars started like
that.
She just went over the handlebars and she did do a tuck and roll.
I give her five out of five stars on that first roll.
But she, you know, inertia took over and she just like she said ragdoll out and just boom
like that, her head hit the pavement and it did.
It sounded like a watermelon hitting it.
And I mean, I'm sitting there like it went into like matrix slow motion, you know, and
there was absolutely nothing I could do to help because I was going just as fast as she
was.
And so by the time I had time to react to slow down, she had already hit and was tumbling
and her head hit and it was, it was, if you can imagine the sound it made, that's exactly
what it looked like.
And that's my beautiful wife that I waited 43 years by.
I can't even imagine.
Deanna, what do you remember next?
Well, I sat up and remember seeing, I was in the beautiful, there was ambient light.
It was very warm.
It was very inviting.
I felt no panic or fear.
And my two grandmothers were standing before me.
They were, I've seen pictures of them when they were younger and they surpassed their,
their beauty surpassed that more than I can explain.
They were ethereal looking.
They were so beautiful.
I was, I was speechless.
My maternal grandmother had reached her hand out to me and she was a smiling and welcoming.
I mean, I wanted to get up and hug her.
And I heard my husband's voice calling me, maybe you don't go, please don't leave.
I literally felt myself pull back and drop almost violently into my body.
I didn't even realize I was out of my body at that point.
I mean, I remember hitting hard.
I came to and my hands were over my face.
I was spreading gold face down on the concrete.
Blood was just, I was in a pool of blood and it was just pouring out of my head.
At that point, Jeff saw me moving or trying to move and told, you know, it's telling me
don't move, don't move.
The ambulance is on the way.
Well, I can tell how hard it is for Jeff to relive this and, and we're going to give
Jeff just a minute.
In the meantime, Deanna, I would love more detail on what you saw.
Now your grandmothers that you saw, had you known them in this life?
How long had they been gone?
I was so close with them.
They were like the two, we were running buddy.
One was Jewish and Ray's been going to the synagogue and the other was a Christian and
I went to church with her.
And I had grown up going to different churches my whole life, you know, just kind of trying
to find my way.
I finally found a church I was comfortable in when I met my husband.
He introduced me to his church and I had been baptized, but I was not really living the
way I was supposed to be living.
I was kind to people.
I had gotten more serious about praying, but, you know, I didn't read my Bible.
I went to church, but wasn't involved.
I was lukewarm about it.
Sure.
When did your grandmothers pass away?
One about, I'd say 20 years prior, my maternal grandmother, and then my paternal grandmother
had passed away about 10 years prior.
Now some people in their near-death experience talk about feeling like they traveled, whether
it's through a tunnel or a dark space or anything like that.
You didn't have that experience?
I did not have that experience.
I didn't go through the light.
I didn't go through a tunnel.
I was just there in a place.
And there were people behind my grandmothers too that I recognized, but they were in the
background.
I believe that's my father who had passed away about five years before, and my other
grandfathers, people I didn't know, but I knew I was familiar with them.
I knew who they were, but I didn't know their names.
I was comfortable.
The place was so warm and inviting.
It felt like belonging.
Do you remember anything else about what it looked like?
There was just a warm glow, like an amber ambient light that surrounded everything.
Everyone had a glow to them.
So I don't know if that was the ambient light that was being emitted from them or if it
came from someplace else.
And what were you feeling as you're seeing this?
Oh, I was so thrilled to be there.
I was so happy and calm.
I mean, there wasn't a joyous moment.
It was just, hey, you're here.
I'm here with you.
It was just very peaceful, very calming.
I'll be honest, since this has happened, my fear of dying is gone.
Well, Jeff will explain that I didn't have a pulse when he checked, and for about three
minutes I was totally unconscious or dead.
That's a short estimate because I checked her pulse and her breathing multiple times.
I was in scouts and I was a lifeguard when I was young.
I kept my head during this time.
I didn't freak out.
I'm not a, ah, I kept my head.
I literally kept her head while this was going on.
And I checked her breathing and pulse the entire time while the engine was on their
way.
She was definitely not, her vitals were not there for at least three minutes, possibly
as long as five, until the amulets got there.
Let's go ahead and jump to your part right now, Jeff.
Watch you said that she was visiting with her great brothers and possibly others.
When she came to rest, face down, she was not moving at all.
And I was calling out, don't leave me, don't go.
I was praying.
I was begging.
It got to where I was getting pretty aggressive with it.
I was angry.
I got pretty angry about it, as you can probably guess most people would be because we barely
married a little bit, maybe over two years at this point.
I had waited so long.
I was trying to keep her going.
I didn't want to move her.
I didn't know what injury she had, but besides what was blatantly obvious with her head,
I didn't know if she'd injured her spinal cord or whatever.
So I didn't want to try to flip her over and give her CPR or anything like that.
I was trying to stop traffic.
People were driving past and filming with their phones instead of stopping, or at least
they were hiding their face with her phone.
I don't know if they're filming or not.
There's possibly footage of this out there somewhere.
I don't know.
I had to aggressively stop a car and some American did stop and call it.
I don't know what happened.
I think the only phone we had with us was on her scooter mount.
That scooter was destroyed when she rapped.
When she said she came, I'll call it, please God, don't take her.
Don't take her from me.
Why would you wait this long to let me meet this woman and then take her from me?
But literally when she said she'd hand back to her body, if you've ever seen anybody
hit with the paddles when they're in cardiac arrest, then they arched like that.
They arched her back.
Boom, when they get hit.
I talk with my hands a lot.
I apologize.
It may be a little too much for this.
It's okay.
You just be yourself.
I don't know how else to act.
I'm not an actor.
She arched her back from face down like a trout or something.
Wham!
Then this is the funniest thing ever.
When I was like, I started saying, don't move, don't move, don't move.
Baby, baby.
I was so excited.
I was crying and laughing at the same time.
To this day, I now have an issue.
I laugh inappropriately when I should be crying.
I cry when I should be laughing.
If that happens through this podcast, please explain to your listeners that I'm not being
an a-hole.
I laugh when I'm supposed to cry sometimes.
PTSD, I don't know what the hell else to call it.
She said, no, babe, I don't want to go to the hospital.
We just live a block away.
Let's just go home.
Because we have a fear of hospitals to stay because of other things.
She literally was gone for at least five minutes with no oxygen, no breathing, no heart, pulse,
or nothing.
I'm not a certified doctor, but I know how to do things.
If we take care of ourselves here at the house, we've got health issues.
We know how to take pulse and things like that.
I can tell you, she was gone.
She was gone for a while.
What she said, she saw, even if there is nothing out there, and I'm playing devil's
advocate here, there's nothing else out there, what kind of miracle is in the brain to entertain
it like that while you die to make the passage out like that?
What kind of accidental chemistry in the universe gives us that kind of a passage out when you
die and then lets it reset itself to bring you back with that kind of a story?
Deanna, do you think that this was something like that or do you think this was something
very real?
I think this was very real.
I mean, I know I was in a different place, and I know that I was not in my physical body
here.
My biggest thing that I would like to share from my experience is that I know that when
we die, there's someplace else that we go.
There is something after that.
It's beautiful.
It's peaceful.
It's overwhelmingly calm.
I felt no anger.
I felt no pain.
I felt, I can't think of a better word for the beauty that surrounded me or for the peace
that I experienced.
That's when people talk about peace that passes on their feeling, that is what I felt.
I have never in my life felt anything so close to that calm.
You described your grandmothers as looking beautiful.
Can you give us any more insight into what they look like?
Well, other than, like I said, ethereal, they had this glow about them.
They were young.
I've seen pictures of my grandmothers when they were young.
They not only were young, they were an elaborate, beautiful extension of what I've ever seen
pictures of.
That's awesome.
Let's talk about the medical side for a minute.
Oh, how badly were you injured?
You went to the hospital, obviously.
How bad were your injuries?
I had an 8-millimeter brain shift midline to the left side of my head.
I later learned that they had given me a 10% survival rate that first night.
What about a 10?
One out of 10 people survived my accident.
First injury.
Within those first 24 hours.
I consider myself a miracle.
Me too.
What was the recovery like?
How long were you in the hospital?
What did they do?
Not very long, I had a craniotomy the first night, they had put some tubes in my head.
I had several brain bleeds that we were very concerned about.
They had put some tubing in my head to drain the fluid.
I stayed not very long for that visit.
Then I had another issue with swelling a few weeks later, went back to another hospital
that transported me to a specialized hospital that was a neurologist, top neurologist here
in Texas, neurosurgeon, had another craniotomy.
I had like sables that go from the middle of my forehead all the way around the back
of my head to right over my ear in a big horseshoe.
My head was shaved, I had just half a head spiky hair.
Then I got all these times I had people praying for me.
People lifting me up in prayer constantly.
People from my church visiting.
I had come home again and I remember somebody bringing me a meal so that I didn't have to
cook or just didn't have to worry about thinking and I didn't have to worry about eating this
cooking.
I might have been dangerous.
Very dangerous.
She looked at me and barged in and here's, here I am, half ball, fables in my head.
I see she looked rock and roll.
That's just me.
But she started crying.
She's like, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
And I, at that moment felt this joy in my heart and I said, you don't need to be sorry.
I'm okay and I've made it through this far.
I'm the happiest I've ever been.
I'm married to this fabulous man and I'm not damn.
Don't you be damned.
Just be grateful.
There's no, there's this grace that we all receive if we just reach out for it.
Sometimes we don't have to be reaching out and just get showered upon.
And then I got a post-operative infection.
MRSA.
MRSA in my skull.
Have you ever heard of that?
MRSA?
Yeah, MRSA.
Yeah, that's super staff.
That's what, yeah.
And it was in my skull, my face pulled up and I was going to the doctor to see my neurosurgeon.
The next day my eye had swollen and I had gotten a puppy.
I literally could not see out of my right eye.
And I went in to the doctor the next day and they said, you need to go into the ER.
You need surgery right now.
So here's my third craning autoimmune.
Each time I said it felt sorry for myself and there are a couple times I did.
I'm like, why me on this?
Hearing and trying to de-ride, de-cond, and live right praying and follow Christ.
So what are you doing this to us?
That's the urge that you get.
Yeah.
And sometimes I've seen people to shake their boat.
Vic, why me?
Why is God doing this to us?
People ask me, you know, don't you feel like you've been through, yeah, I've been through
more than what I feel is my fair share.
Yeah, but I think that it's taught me to have faith in something way bigger than me.
That God answers prayers because each time I came through better and better, my memory
was clearing up.
You know, I was a little kind of funky with all these staples, I got a big knot still
on the side of my hand that we don't know what it is, but it was cough from the rack.
And I walked around for about six months with a hole in my skull that they had taken out
of the credit card size hole in my skull because it was during COVID and they were saving beds
for people in case there was a case or another COVID outbreak.
So I had to walk around with a helmet on and protect this helmet on my head.
Like they were for the kids on the special needs kids.
They had her, like if she would have bumped her head on anything, she would have died.
I would have died.
And yet they had this entire floor of the hospital with empty beds just in case there was COVID.
It was an elective surgery to have a tartanine flake put in my head.
They said it was an elective surgery, so they wouldn't give it to her.
But I finally had the cranioplasty and I've not had any problems since then.
My hair's grown back finally.
And I don't have the cool Mad Max hairdo anymore.
I feel like I have this story to share with people that regardless of what happened, I
mean, like I said, do this whole thing.
I wasn't afraid each time that I was going to die.
I knew that if I did, that I would be safe and I would be comforted and loved and that
I have a loving father in heaven.
He knows what's best for me.
I've got a purpose here that he wants me to fulfill or he wouldn't have brought me back.
And so now I tried to live my life as righteously as I can, as Christ-like as I can.
And I backslide.
I'm not saying I'm perfect by any means, but I don't live a day where I don't thank him
and I don't have gratitude for being able to walk and talk and speak and be alive because
I could be so much worse.
The mid-length shift was so bad that I mean, I have seizures.
I do have seizure disorder.
And you have one like two days of epilepsy.
And that kind of is a pain, but I take medication for it.
It seems to be relatively controlled.
I'm not angry about it.
I live with it.
I think it makes me a stronger person and I can be hopefully, I mean, I was going to
share this experience privately amongst friends who was some friends at church and hopefully
I can inspire people to live a good life, to be kind to others and to know that there's
a place to go.
We just don't die and fall into a black hole.
Growing up Jewish, you know, there was never a real definition between heaven and hell
and whether or not we went anywhere.
Jews, funerals are so depressing.
And I know that I can leave this world and see my family.
You know, there are people that are there that are waiting for me to hang out, be there
and rejoice.
I get overwhelmed by that at times, just knowing, but I'm so grateful for the grace of God that
I'm here and that I'm doing everything I can to share this with others.
So they know that they too can have a place in the spirit world in heaven whenever you
want to call it.
Afterlife.
The afterlife that we have our families there waiting for us.
There is something to look forward to.
There is something to work towards.
There is a reason for the season.
There's a reason for her story and there's a reason that I want to help her to get it
out because you never know when you're going to be riding your bike with your wife one
day and she's gone.
And be nice to people.
Be kind.
Be kind to each other.
I mean, you never know who that you're going to walk past in a grocery store and just a
kind word or a smile can keep that person from hanging your spouse or to your spouse
or to a stranger that is on the street that is walking past or whatever that you don't
know what struggles people have that you don't know what people are dealing with in their
life that there are one step away from just ending.
You never know when your number is going to come up what little pothole somebody symbolically
is going to run over in their life and just they're gone.
Sometimes they don't get that chance to come back and tell their story.
And there's a lot of darkness in the world that people are dealing with every single
day.
I went through it.
She went through it before we found each other.
There I mean the valley of the shadow of death is deep out there and they don't always
know that there's footprints in the sand carrying them.
Grandma Ma has that poem hanging on the wall everywhere but not everybody has that grandma
to read that poem to know that they're being carried through that.
Do you know what?
Everybody out there know what I'm talking about the poem on Grandma Ma's wall.
Yeah I think we know the poem of walking on the sand.
This woman here man I saw her go through it and she went to the hospital.
She had tubes hanging out of her skull.
I mean they were telling me that I was going to have to find a place for her.
I mean the first two couple of nights she was in there they're like if if she makes
it out of here you need to find a hospital to put her in because if she wakes up she's
not going to know you probably if she does she may not even be herself.
She may have a completely different personality.
She may be angry, hateful, spiteful.
She may be extra loud and walk.
She might be paralyzed.
You may have to change your diapers and I said you know what all of the above she's
going home with me because I'm going to take care of her.
I just want to thank you too so much Deanna thank you for sharing this story and Jeff
I want to give you the last word.
I know how hard this has been for you and the last word that I'd like you to share
with us is what are you grateful for today?
First of all I'm grateful to have a father in heaven that has given us this chance to
be here on this earth to live this life but I'm grateful most of all today for this chance
to get this story out for people to hopefully get something good out of this and I'm grateful
for my wife most of all.
I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.
She cared for me and I'm glad I was there to be able to help her get through this and
I'm very grateful for you to help us get this story out on this and I hope somebody just
one person can get something good out of it.
Honestly, no there's something good out there for you all.
There's something good waiting.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtripdeath.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.