Miracles
In June 2019, Mark miraculously survived his plane crash, rescued by a courageous Good Samaritan who pulled him out of his burning plane.
He had lost engine power shortly after takeoff and tried to emergency land. To avoid hitting drivers on a two lane road, he swerved right. With the plane careening, his right wing clipped a couple light poles and caught on fire.
He suffered 3rd degree burns on over 80% of his body.
A few minutes after three bystanders carried Mark to safety, the plane exploded. The EMT rushed him to a renowned burn center 21 miles away.
Against the odds, Mark survived his first two weeks at burn center ICU. He was placed in a medically induced coma shortly after his arrival in ER because his condition and expected treatment would be too painful to endure.
His survival the first two weeks were a miracle.
Infection
After a couple months of what would become a marathon stay, Mark contracted a potentially fatal fungal infection on his arms.
It’d be difficult to treat because there was only topical treatment available, no medication to treat it if it spread internally to his vital organs.
Severely burned survivors lose their biggest protective barrier – their skin. It makes them vulnerable to infection.
There wasn’t much to see. Mark was in a coma, wrapped head to toe in white bandages like a mummy. Only his face showed but he was unconscious, eyes closed.
They explained that Mark could die in the next few days and that I should urgently call our family in for a meeting with the medical team.
I desperately tried to keep my growing fear at bay. All I could do was to beg God to spare Mark while I waited for our family to fly in from all parts of the country.
The doctors told our family that there were three potential scenarios for Mark.
Scenario 1 - His infection doesn’t spread and he recovers.
Scenario 2 - The infection spreads on his arms. They’d have to amputate his arms which could create a downward spiral.
Scenario 3 - The infection spreads internally, affecting a vital organ and he dies.
It’d be a wait and see over the next few days.
My Inner Voice
The day after our big family meeting with the doctors, I was sitting with our family in the lobby, waiting to visit Mark.
I got up to use the restroom near ER. It was a dingy old bathroom but the closest to the waiting room.
While I washed my hands in the sink, I was startled to hear:
Mark will be fine. Don’t worry.
Where was this message coming from? Was I hearing things? I wasn’t sure.
I went back to waiting room to rejoin our family.
The next morning, I was working out in our condo’s small fitness center. It was the only time we couldn’t get in to visit Mark. Every morning, the nurses spent three hours painstakingly changing Mark’s dressings for clean ones. It was critical to keep burn patients sterile and clean to avoid infection.
After I finished exercising, I walked back to my condo when I heard that voice again.
Mark will be fine. Don’t worry. Don’t doubt.
I stopped, snapping to attention. There it is again. I noted that there was now a third statement – don’t doubt.
How interesting. As if my inner knowing or God knew that I had doubted the first time I heard these words.
On the third day, sitting in the waiting room, I heard the message again.
Mark will be fine. Don’t worry. Don’t doubt.
I marveled at how simple and to the point the repeating message was. I’d now heard the same message three days in a row.
I held my breath whenever I remembered the messages. I was too scared to tell anyone. I could be wrong and I didn’t want to count my chickens before they hatched.
In spite of the small cloud of doubt in my mind, the repeating messages became a secret that allowed me to feel cautiously optimistic about Mark’s condition.
Over the next few days, he didn’t get worse. His infection didn’t spread. But he doesn’t get better.
Everyone flies home. I promise to keep everyone updated.
Six weeks later, Mark recovers and there’s been no spread of the infection in the weeks leading up to his recovery.
The doctors tell me it’s a miracle that he didn’t die.
What Does Trusting Your Intuition Look Like?
My journey of learning to trust my inner voice and intuition began with Mark’s recovery from the fungal infection.
In her book, Awakened by the Light, Nancy Rynes encourages readers to listen to their head and heart. If your head and your heart are not in synch, it’s worth taking the time to reflect and ask yourself why.
In one of her video series, Martha Beck, the coach and author describes trusting your body as a compass, especially when you’re making a decision.
She shares her own story. Many years ago, Martha needed to decide whether to accept an academic position at Harvard.
She sat in her car in front of the academic building she’d potentially work at and noticed that she felt agitated.
Martha encourages us to feel out body sensations when we need to make a decision – do we feel a “pull or a push”? A “pull” is when we feel “physically drawn to something” in a compelling way. A “push” is when we feel “physically repelled.”
She trusted the agitated sensation in her body and declined to pursue the role. That decision became a pivotal fork in the road that led her to become the prominent coach and prolific author that she is today.
My Own Intuition Journey
After Mark died, I started to experiment with letting go of control. I resonated with the idea that our life has a natural flow to it, like a river. I would gently steer my boat in the current, but I wouldn’t fight it. Sometimes the current was peaceful and slow, other times it became fast rushing.
I would make plans but I held them loosely, not tightly. I made room for spontaneity. I no longer rushed to make decisions. In the past the tension of not making a decision made me anxious. I let go to trust in the river of life.
Why did I do this? Why now? After the unthinkable happened to Mark, what did I have to lose but to experiment with my life? I thought I’d done a good job of intentionally driving my life for so long and while it mostly turned out great, something horrible happened to Mark.
I began to wait and listen for inner guidance before making decisions, big and small.
I had to let my financial advisor go after Mark died. He treated me like an ignoramus who didn’t need to understand anything he was recommending. He hadn’t treated Mark this way.
I interviewed several financial advisors before I decided on an advisor based in San Diego. I paid attention to my head, heart and body. My head told me that the firm’s strategies made sense for my life stage. My choice also felt right in my heart and body – I felt deeply calm and peaceful.
One of the advisor’s client references was a widow in Seattle who also lost her husband recently and had to let her advisor go because like mine, he treated women like they couldn’t understand the complexity of financial matters. I was struck by how similar our situations were.
Once I started working with the San Diego advisor, he revealed to me that he was in Phoenix the day of Mark’s plane accident. He and a fellow staffer watched the story in local TV news in their hotel room. A interesting coincidence or was it?
He was professional enough not to share this with me earlier because he didn’t want it to unduly affect my decision making.
But it was a detail that confirmed for me that he was the right advisor to work with.
He Was The “One”
A couple years after Mark passed, I started to dip my big toe in the water of on-line dating. For five months, I went on dates with several guys, none of them quite right.
One day, a handsome looking guy named Robert from La Costa, California reaches out to me online. He’s tall and has very kind looking green eyes.
Where’s La Costa? I have no idea. I google it and discover it’s a neighborhood in Carlsbad, a few towns north of San Diego.
Because of the distance between us since I’m in northern California, it takes us three months to meet up in Lake Tahoe for our third date.
During a magical afternoon, enjoying drinks lakeside, the turquoise deep blue lake shimmering, I know he is “the one.”
A few interesting synchronicities to note.
I had told no one but Mark that I wanted a beach cottage in Carlsbad. Did Mark guide us to each other?
I discover that Robert and my dad (who passed away when I was twenty three) have two things in common.
They both played the harmonica and owned a pendulum. Yes, a pendulum – a clear ball on a thin silver chain.
My dad once tried to hypnotize me to sleep when I suffered from second grade insomnia. Robert who has an interest in frequencies, owned a pendulum to measure energy.
What’s the Venn diagram for people who play the harmonica and own a pendulum?
I’d guess it’s miniscule.
There are many more details about how Robert and I met, which I share in my book, Forever Fly Free. Since I wrote the book, he and I discovered a few more synchronicities between us.
We both worked at the same tech company in Santa Clara 30+ years ago when we were both newly married. He was a consultant who drove up regularly from LA while I worked in the same office for ten months. Undoubtedly, we crossed paths in the office without being introduced.
We also learned that in 2019, Robert and his late wife were in Phoenix for alternative treatment for the cancer she would succumb to shortly.
We were staying in the same neighborhood of Phoenix that year while I was at the burn center with Mark. Robert and his late wife stayed in an AC Marriott hotel five blocks from my Airbnb. We’d shopped at the same Whole Foods and Trader Joes. We’d eaten at the same pizza restaurant in the neighborhood.
Two years later, we would meet online.
It was as if we were circling each other until we were ready to meet.
When I declared to myself on that third date that Robert was “the one,” I didn’t want to make the same mistake I made when Mark and I first dated.
Mark proposed after we’d dated for 4 months. I was a young twenty four year old who hadn’t thought much about marriage. I lived in my head too much and didn’t trust my heart.
I wrestled with the idea for five months before my friend Suzie asked me – Do you love him or not? If you do, just marry him because I’m sick and tired of talking about it!
I said yes to Mark’s proposal the very next day. It was one of the best decisions I made in my life. We were so happy together.
We All Have Access to Wisdom
All of us know more than we realize.
It took going through the darkest chapter of my life to learn to trust my intuition.
We each have access to our inner wisdom to navigate both the calm and stormy seas of our life.
I’ve learned that in order to do so, you need to live from a place of inner peace and stillness. However you can slow down to be in a state of loving awareness – in meditation, in prayer, in nature, exercising, or listening to music – these are the moments where you can discover real clarity.
If you’re caught up with the distractions of an overly busy life, you’ll miss it.
In our always “on” digital life, the distractions are endless.
We once had a saying in my corporate job working on teams and organizations –
Go slow to go fast.
I get that now at a deeper level.
Slow down, take a deep breath wherever you are in your day, so you can see and hear things more clearly.