Author Lauren Canaday recently shared her harrowing near-death experience during a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' session. She recounted how she lost consciousness for 24 minutes, being declared "clinically dead" after her heart stopped beating, only to be resuscitated by emergency medical technicians (EMTs) after almost half an hour.
Canaday revealed that the incident occurred in February when she went into sudden cardiac arrest at home. Her husband promptly called 911 and performed CPR for four minutes before the EMTs arrived to take over. Following resuscitation efforts, she spent nine days in the intensive care unit (ICU) and eventually woke up after being in a coma for two days.
Despite this critical period, she was relieved to discover that she was "cognitively intact" and displayed no visible brain damage on MRIs following the incident.
In her Reddit post, Canaday disclosed that her husband's quick action in starting CPR significantly contributed to her survival, even though he hadn't been certified in CPR for quite some time. Paramedics suggested that her cardiac arrest may have been linked to complications from Covid, as she tested positive for the virus upon ICU admission.
Moreover, she described undergoing an electroencephalogram (EEG) test, which surprisingly revealed normal brain activity, despite experiencing a 30-minute epileptic seizure after being resuscitated.
Her experience seems to align with what's known as the Lazarus effect or autoresuscitation in clinical terms, a rare occurrence where a patient previously declared dead from cardiac arrest shows signs of life, seemingly coming back from the dead despite not having truly died.
