I’ve already lived my allotted nine lives and somehow I keep surviving . . . I didn’t figure out why I kept surviving until October of 2010. The story of my nine lives really is its own story, and it’s much like Baby Cherrie Gets a Home – Where My Life Began in that much of this is fundamental to who I am today. But this story, the story of all ten lives, is like drinking water from a fire hose. In the span of a few pages you’ll have assimilated copious volumes of content. You are going to know me so much better by the end, we’ll be like old friends.

So here’s the abbreviated list of what expired each of my nine lives (full stories of each below):

#1. near-drowning
#2. car wreck – driver
#3. car wreck – passenger
#4. rafting accident
#5. suicide attempt
#6. heart stopped beating
#7. heart stopped again
#8. heart stopped, for waayyyy too long
#9. and then . . . cancer

Sometime during the survival of #9, I finally gave in to the obvious to admit I must be in this world for a reason. I had been wandering around for years wondering why the heck I existed and not figuring it out, and I wasn’t even sure I should exist. Now there’s a brain teaser to mix up your head with! Basically I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out who or what I am and why I exist. Even when I was teaching and getting direct feedback that I was making a difference in people’s lives, I still wasn’t sure why I existed. There were all these times in my life where it could have easily ended, perhaps should have ended from a purely objective standpoint. Nine time, in fact. But I am a survivor. It took my entire life to figure it out, but that’s what I am and what I have to teach people: how to survive, and grow in self-awareness in the process.

So, let me take you on the journey of my nine lives. 🙂

Survival #1. Near-Drowning.

When I was six, we took a family road trip from Nebraska to L.A. to go to Disneyland. We went some other places too, but I was too little to really remember anything from the trip, and if I hadn’t nearly drowned I don’t think I would have remembered it at all. But here’s what I do remember, as vivid as if it were yesterday.

I was wearing orange and white checkered overall shorts with a white t-shirt. And I remember the water and how it moved.

We were at the beach. There were surfers to the side of us, and lots of really neat waves rolling in, crashing way out from shore, big rolling bumpy waves closer to shore, then pretty gently waving water nearer shore, and finally spilling onto the shore with a feather’s touch. Seriously. I was six, and I was freaking fascinated by how the water caressed the sand where they met. And the water at the shore was gentle, so Mom let us play there in the sand where the water would roll up and recede back to sea.

Here’s the thing . . . when I was a kid, I had no fear. We’d go to the swimming pool and since I loved the water, I’d jump in. Anywhere. Especially the diving pool though, because that’s where the water was the prettiest color, the deepest blue. When I was three years old, after two years of constantly “rescuing me” from the pool, the lifeguards finally insisted my parents put me in swimming class even though I was too young to be enrolled. By the time I was six, I lived in the pool all summer long. I was on the swim team with my brother, going to swim team practice every day before dawn, which meant I got to spend even more time in the water. I loved the water. I still do. Mix that in with a lack of fear and no comprehension of danger, and you basically have six-year-old Cynthia Swan pegged. Hmmmm, when we get to the fourth near-death story, you could probably say that I was the same at 26 as I was at age 6. Am I still that way now? Hmmm again, I’ll have to ponder that one and get back to you. ☺

So I’m playing in sand wearing orange and white overalls. I sort-of remember piling up sand with my brother and saying we were making a sandcastle. It’s not that I remember that exactly, but I do remember what he looked like and how he smiled and watched over me all the time.

The water was so gentle where it reached the shore. Mom let us play in that calm water, splashing each other and squealing in that fun ear-piercing way little kids do. We wandered out to where it was knee deep, and the water was stronger. There was power beneath that smooth wavy motion.

I started jumping up with the waves as they rolled in, landing on my feet as the water moved out. What no one realized was that each jump was taking me further from shore because of the strong outgoing pull of the waves shifting me further and further out. I hadn’t a clue, I was just looking out at the water and jumping up and down, landing on my feet the same way every time, and nothing seemed amiss to anyone. I was watching the ocean, so I had no idea I had moved away from shore at all. But then I jumped up with a bigger swell, and as I came down the undertow took my feet out from under me so my bum bounced off the sand beneath the wave. I didn’t see any problem with this, I loved the water and I had no comprehension of fear. It was fun! Swimming in the ocean is so much fun!!

I tried to stand up, but my feet couldn’t find the bottom. Not that I cared, water is for swimming in, after all. And waves are pretty. It was so neat to tread water and rise and fall with the top of the wave, gently up, gently down, soooo smooth. I was fascinated.

When he saw me fall down into the water instead of landing on my feet, my brother Eric immediately started coming out after me. He was sooooo protective of me. My mom saw Eric trying to run through nearly waist deep water, didn’t see me at all, and yelled for my dad.

Then it got dangerous. As the swell lowered, something pulled my feet out from under me. The undertow had me. It pulled me under and I started rolling with the wave under the water (which is a seriously cool experience, btw). I was just starting to realize that I couldn’t swim to the top to get a breath when a hand grabbed the back of my overalls and pulled me out of the rolling undertow. My dad had to swim pretty hard to get back into where he could touch the bottom with his feet, and then he also picked up my brother on the way back because Eric had come out too far trying to get to me.

If she hadn’t been so distressed, I think Mom could have snapped a pretty neat photo: my dad walking out of the ocean, one kid dangling arms and legs from a hold around his waist, the other still laughing and trying to reach her toes to the water, being held up by her orange and white checkered overalls. 🙂

So, averted death #1 – I almost drowned in an ocean undertow when I was six.

Survival #2. My Car Wreck.

Nothing particularly dangerous happened again until college. Well, not dangerous enough that I could or should have died save for some freak happening. We used to go cliff diving in the mines during cross-country practice in school, and apparently at least one kid a year hit the rocks and drowned doing that every year, but it was never anyone I knew so I didn’t think about the danger.

So I’m a sophomore in college, home for Christmas break. I was driving to my boyfriend’s house for Little Christmas Eve, and then would be back home the next day. His family lived about three hours away, if I remember correctly.

It being Little Christmas Eve (the night before Christmas Eve), I was all dolled up with fun Christmas attire . . . red Santa suspenders, candy cane/Christmas tree socks, red ponytail holder, etc. I had the map opened up on the seat beside me, and as I glanced down I hit a patch of black ice (black ice is when the road is covered with a sheet of ice but you can’t tell by looking at it that there’s a sheet of ice). The car slid toward the left side, touched the snow bank, came back more strongly angled to the snowbank on the right, and the front fender hit at just the right angle with just the right amount of force to keep the fender in the snowbank and the back end of the car to flip completely over before pulling the front end up and out of the snow bank in a smooth arc. The car came down upside down & backwards onto a tree that shattered the back window and lodged against my front window. The tree had torn my hair out out of the top of my head, but that was a blessing because if I had not been wearing my seat belt, that tree would have gone right through either my brain or my spine.

A ways back, another car had seen me flip over, and they pulled over and helped me crawl out of my snowy upside-down car. I was shaken, I had never had a car accident, and I didn’t want to have to tell my dad that I smashed my car. A second car had stopped also, and it was full of ladies on their way to a prayer meeting at a friend’s house at the next exit. It was decided that I would go with them to this woman’s house and we would call a tow truck from there, and then I could either ride back to town with the tow truck or these ladies would take me.

They loved my little tree-ornament earrings and thought I was just “the cutest little thing!” The tow truck took forever, while I sat with these women who had gotten together to read and discuss the bible.

You know, I got enough of the Bible in Catholic school. They were nice ladies, but they weren’t going to convert me or whatever it is they were trying to tell me the bible said . . . or didn’t say but meant. 😉

So, averted death #2, I flipped my car, almost got a tree through the brain, and then did not get “Saved” by the Bible thumpers.

Survival #3. Passenger in a Car Wreck.

This was the second time a safety belt saved my life, and I wasn’t even driving!

I was a passenger in another car wreck, hit by a drunk driver who apparently in his stupor thought it was a good idea to make a left turn across oncoming traffic to get on the other lane before a big truck came. He hit our back left fender and we spun around in front of a semi and landed in the ditch behind it as it whizzed by. Everyone was rushed to the hospital and four kids (from the drunk’s back seat) had to be airlifted out. The ER said I had a concussion and pretty severe bruising from the seat belt but that it had certainly saved my life because the impact would have thrown me through the windshield and possibly right under the semi. Uff da. That accident left me with permanent knee damage that I gave up on correcting when the first surgery didn’t take care of it.

Survival #4. White-Water Rafting Accident.

I was knocked unconscious in a rafting accident in an unexpected class 5 white water rapid. I washed up down shore below the rapids unconscious and woke up six hours later in the emergency room. I walked away with only a concussion. This happened with Artie and his friends one year on our annual camping/rafting trip together. I found out later that Todd (the big loud one who happened to be seated in front of me at the front right corner of the raft) thought it would be funny if he did the opposite of what the guide told him to do going into this class 5 rapid. It was supposed to be a class 4 rapid, but there had been some late season melt or something and the guide had told us it has roiled up to a class 5 which they weren’t supposed to take us through but they thought the water was going to come down enough before we got there so it would be back down to more of a class 4 rapid. The guide was calling out directions, but we went straight down into a hole instead of around it. The raft shot straight up in the air out of the hole and I could see Todd’s back coming straight down on me while I felt Artie grabbing at my life jacket but his hand slipped and I think he got jerked away from me when the raft hit the water upside down. Unluckily for me, there was an oar holder thing, really hard, that came down on me and the punch of that on my head drove me under the water (this is the point where I lost consciousness) and I apparently rolled along the rocks at the bottom of the river for some 200 yards before my life jacket got me to the surface and they hooked me out of the water.

What makes this story bad is that I was apparently talking and walked back to the van with them, and then I fell asleep when we got in the van. Not a good thing to let someone do when they’ve been knocked in the head, but my “friends” apparently didn’t know any better and they let me lie in the back of the van for almost six hours before Artie got wound up enough to force everyone to finish packing up camp quickly so they could take me to the hospital.

I can’t tell you how many times he apologized for that over the years, after he found out in the emergency room how dangerous the situation was. He felt doubly responsible, first because he couldn’t get a grip on me to hold me with him when we flipped, and second because he let the group drag out packing up camp which endangered me further in terms of potential brain damage or something.

So, anyway, that was $3, the whitewater rafting accident.

Survival #5. Failed Suicide.

I tried to commit suicide, just once, but I apparently didn’t really want to die because I didn’t cut deep enough. You know, I could write an entire book about this, but now is not the time. In terms of timing in my life, it was maybe a month or so after Artie’s horrific motorcycle wreck. For now let’s just get through the current story. Where were we? Oh, yes, I had just survived a failed suicide attempt.

Survivals #6, #7, and #8. Heart Condition Stops Heartbeat.

I did actually die three times one day.

It was a normal Sunday morning until I collapsed while playing the flute for church, during The Lord’s Prayer. Turned out my heart stopped. The piano player, less than two feet from me, was an ER nurse (how’s THAT for lucky?) and in seconds she had assessed the situation and told her husband (the guitarist) that they had to get me an ambulance right away. They had stopped Mass and someone called 911 and the priest told everyone that paramedics were on the way and they were going to go ahead and have communion.

Meanwhile, I’m blacked out, without a heartbeat.

But besides the piano player being an ER nurse who immediately recognized the severity of the situation, apparently I needed a little more good luck, because the church was pretty far out of town and at best it would take an ambulance ten minutes to get out there. Except . . . the EMTs were next door having lunch with their buddies at the firehouse. So the EMTs showed up in about 30 seconds, and I was rushed out the doors before communion was even finished.

They shocked me back in the ambulance and got me to the emergency room, where they immediately hooked me up to a thousand wires and monitors and had a nurse at my side constantly watching my vitals.

After about an hour I seemed stable, so they sat me up to take my vitals again, and I got woozy and my heart apparently pumped up pretty quickly. They had been planning to stand me up but I collapsed back onto the bed and the monitors flatlined. “For a long time, my cardiologist always reminds me when I ask him if maybe we can get me off the heart meds some day. No doing, I’ll be on this Norpace every twelve hours for life.

For me, the freaky thing about the second “death” that day is that I had experiences, flashes of life, a near-death experience some might call it. That’s really more of an element of spirituality, though, so I won’t drag this out with that.

They did get me back again, and stabilized me. I was stable for about three hours and even able to sit up by then, and I was dying to go to the bathroom. They had brought me a bedpan, but I’d never used one before and it was so foreign that I couldn’t go in it. I begged and pleaded for the nurse to help me into a, well, potty chair I guess you’d call it, so I could go. She brought in another nurse and two big aide guys to hold my arms as they all eased me to the seat, but Whammo! As soon as my feet were off the bed and my head upright, the heart monitor switched back from beeping to that terrifying flatline tone. The ER staff flipped out this time and had even more trouble getting me back. The cardiologist on call wasn’t completely sure of the diagnosis, and he called in a neurocardiologist specialist guy, but he didn’t get there until after the third “episode.” When they finally got me back after the third episode the cardiologist ordered me to the ICU immediately and told me if I so much as sat up and had a whiff of another “episode” he was putting in a pacemaker regardless of whether or not I gave my permission. Luckily the night passed uneventfully, and by morning the neurocardiologist had studied all the monitor records and after examining me and asking a ton of questions about how the episodes came on, he said it was a clear diagnosis of neurocardiogenic disorder, and that he wanted to start me on a medication that I would have to take every twelve hours.

And I wasn’t allowed to drive for three months while they made sure the medicine was working. It would have been horrible to have an episode on the road and possibly kill someone in a car accident.

So, that was the day my heart stopped three times. That was about a year and four months after Artie died.

Survival #9. Cancer.

The big one – breast cancer – was diagnosed in April 2009. I journaled daily throughout all that was my cancer treatment experience, and the six months of treatment became the foundation of my book My Tango with Cancer. But I survived that too, my hair’s grown back golden brunette instead of golden blonde, and now . . .

Life #10.

Well, now I’m on Life #10, and living with purpose. Cancer didn’t kill my body, but emotionally that was the great transition in my life, my coming of age if you will, much like the duckling realizing its true place in the world as a swan. I didn’t know why I survived so many likely phoenix-like deaths, it took me another year after cancer to reach the swan-like sense of self I have today, but there was absolutely no doubt I was supposed to be alive, so I lived. Now the sky’s the limit.