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My blood ran cold as I watched the video of Terri Schiavo. I shivered at the news that this brain-injured woman was comatose or in a persistent vegetative state while the video seemed to show otherwise. The chill was more than just my journalistic intrigue. People everywhere were debating the right to "die with dignity" and wondering what it would be like to be in Schiavo's place, but I didn't exactly have to imagine.

One year before the day Schiavo's feeding tube was pulled, I awoke briefly from a 47-day coma, only to go back under for several more weeks. Severe childbirth complications resulted in two emergency surgeries and the transfusion of 20 units of blood and blood products—about twice the blood volume of my body. I remained comatose and on life support in the ICU for two months.

My family expected my death repeatedly during my coma. I developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is often fatal, and it critically impaired my lungs. I had pneumonia, a toxic blood infection, blood clots, kidney failure, and life threateningly low blood pressure and oxygenation. My family was told I had anoxia—brain damage from oxygen deprivation. I lay hooked up to a ventilator and a feeding tube, receiving maximum doses of drugs to keep me alive. Heroic measures and life-and-death decisions were daily realities for my family.

My husband slept and ate little. Tim juggled his job with being constantly available to me, to doctors' consultations, and to our family. He described our surreal journey in e-mail updates that were forwarded by many people around the world. He also undertook "Caroline therapy": laying our mother-deprived newborn on my chest while I slept, so she would sleep too.

Tim learned to be an effective advocate for a critically ill patient by researching my diagnosis thoroughly and making the doctors make him understand. And on days when his faith was in shock and he was too numb to pray, the prayers of others and a Holy Spirit-inspired mind propelled him beyond his capacity. Yet the possibility of a brain-damaged wife, or the thought that he was about to be a single father of five, including our newborn baby, always hovered.

Our children took on responsibilities uncommon for their ages. Three birthdays and our 15-year-old Claire's high-school homecoming came and went while I slept. The children discovered that profound sadness can coexist with moments of normalcy and surprising pockets of happiness. But in the dark, a brave front gave way to deep fears as 10-year-old Allison finally admitted to her father, "I'm so afraid of not having a mommy."

We experienced the body of Christ in action as our local church and others completely ran our home and came in the middle of the night when I'd take a dive. My fellow members of the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association held a day of prayer and fasting, unaware that their prayers ascended on my worst day.

Three of my close friends took weeklong turns in our home caring for the baby and children. Our eldest daughter, Jacquelyn, decided to leave her freshman year in college to become the baby's primary caregiver.

She also experienced a faith crisis. One night, in her car in the hospital parking lot, she pictured her life two ways—with God and without. Was her faith in God just her parents' teaching to invoke good moral choices, or was it real, hers, and worth anything at all? She pondered that age-old question: How could God let something so terrible happen? She decided that as difficult as this was to get through with God, going it alone terrified her. Her faith became her own that night.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2