A woman who defied all odds has revealed exactly what it feels like when you’re near death in an ‘out-of-body experience’. The mum felt herself leaving her body
A woman who felt a crushing pain in her chest that she brushed off as the tail end of a bug she had picked up from her children has relived the moment she nearly died while home alone.
Jenna Tanner, 49, suffered what’s known as a “widowmaker” heart attack – one of the most deadly forms of cardiac arrest – while in March 2022. The mum-of-three from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, said: “It felt like an elephant had walked in and sat on my chest,” Jenna recalled. “I knew instantly that I was having a heart attack.”
For two hours, Jenna drifted in and out of consciousness as her left anterior descending artery became completely blocked. Her phone was in another room, but she managed to crawl to it and call her husband and 911 before collapsing completely.
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By the time medics arrived, Jenna had stopped breathing. As paramedics worked frantically to save her, Jenna said she felt herself leaving her body.
“Suddenly, it was like I was floating through space,” she explained. “I was getting closer to what I would describe as a nebula – a big cloud of colors that kept shifting and moving. Everything was vivid stars. I was just floating peacefully.”
Far from frightening, Jenna described the experience as overwhelmingly calm. “Not once did I remember or relive any bad parts of life,” she said. “Everything I thought about was the connections I had made with people or places while I was alive. It was just all the good stuff.”
Known as the “widowmaker” because it is so often fatal, this type of heart attack has a survival rate of just 12 percent when it happens outside a hospital.
“In a 20-year career and over 4,000 surgeries, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jenna’s cardiologist said. “I didn’t even know people could survive this.”
Thanks to a rapid response time – under 13 minutes – Jenna was stabilised and taken to hospital. The fire department later received an award for their speed, and Jenna was even invited to their banquet the following year to celebrate the lifesaving efforts.
After doctors implanted a heart pump and placed a stent in her main artery – a procedure usually requiring bypass surgery – Jenna spent 10 days in hospital, six of them in intensive care.
She managed to walk out on her own, without even needing the walker or rehabilitation doctors had prepared for her.
But recovery wasn’t easy. She had to take 13 new medications, gained 40 pounds (which she has since lost), and struggled with PTSD from the trauma.
Now writing a memoir about her brush with death, Jenna says the experience has changed her completely.
“Life is really good right now, thankfully,” she said. “It took almost losing it to really see how much there is to live for.”
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