Ten Seconds from Death
How I escaped a brutal murder with no traumatic stress
At four o’clock on the afternoon of June 16, 2000, inside my own home, I was stabbed five times by my lover of seven years. The final stab was a slit to my throat.
Following emergency surgery and a tracheotomy, I spent one week in intensive care, two weeks in the trauma ward, and one month convalescing at my parents’ home.
Yet I suffered no post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead, over the next two years I experienced a euphoria that involved delusions of grandeur.
Why is that? Twenty years is a long time to ponder that question. I have read dozens of books by doctors, neurologists, psychologists and survivors. I consulted with several psychiatrists and counselors, and devoted over 4000 hours to personal growth group therapy at Karyl Pope & Associates before I finally learned the answer.
The memories of both the assault and its aftermath remain crystal clear. I was walking my 12-year-old daughter home from school. She was very happy to see me. Although her biological mom, my partner of seven years, was safe in the psych ward in a nearby hospital, I had taken a hiding place with a friend to avoid being assaulted again while a friend looked after our two children. Fiona was psychotic and had tried to kill me several times over the past three years, and I feared for my life.
(Yes, I participated in that toxic thing we call domestic abuse. I won’t go into the psychology of it here, or discuss why I, and thousands of other spouses, stay in a violent relationship rather than just leaving. That is the subject of another article.)
As we passed the cedar bushes in front of our home, my daughter and I both froze in horror. Fiona was sitting there on the steps waiting for us. The psychiatrist had done it again: released Fiona in a full psychotic state with no regard for her family’s safety. Fiona had tried to kill me twice before, using a knife and a belt, while she was supposed to be in the psych ward.
My body temperature instantly rose. Every hair from head to toe stood at full attention. I calculated it would take my two friends Rhonda and Sherona 30 minutes to get home with my 8-year-old son. Help would be here soon. I just had to calm Fiona down until they arrived and could call the police.
I moved slowly and methodically. Fiona told our daughter to go downstairs to her room. She obeyed. Fiona sat down on the living room couch. Feeling my daughter was safe, I began to prepare supper as if nothing was wrong. Instinctively, I placed my glasses inside the cupboard. On several previous occasions Fiona had hit my face.
While the spaghetti sauce was warming on the stove, I went to change the kitty litter in the bathroom, just behind the couch where Fiona sat staring at me. When I got into the bathroom I noticed the kittens had peed on a towel on the floor. I proceeded to wash the towels in the bathtub, leaning over the tub with my back to the door.
Suddenly I felt a heavy thud in my back. I was pushed into the bathtub, water splashing about on my running shoes. Another thud on my back. I wheeled around, still on my feet. Fiona held a long kitchen knife in her hand and stabbed me again, this time in my belly and chest. I yelled her name as loud as I could, looking into her eyes and then at the knife. She came down once more, this time slitting my throat. The blood began to drip from the knife. I grabbed her wrist, held it back with all my might, and tried to loosen her grip on the knife by uncoiling her fingers. She was looking into my eyes and smiling.
After what seemed like a long time, I twisted the knife out of her hands. It fell with a clank to the floor behind the toilet. I was still yelling but no sound was coming out of my mouth. She was still smiling as she tried to push me down, into the tub or onto the floor. I kept looking into her eyes while my shoes kept a firm grip on the bathtub floor.
I do remember thinking one thought in that moment. This was my partner of seven years, the mother of my children, but I do not want to die. This is not my time to die. It’s either me or her, and I am prepared to fight to the death.
I summoned my inner demons and went to work. I wrestled her to the floor and, grabbing her hair as hard as I could, used it as leverage to pummel her head against the floor. My aim was to kill her or knock her out. She acted as if she felt nothing: she actually started singing as she smiled at me. Horror movies are not far off the mark when it comes to psychopaths.
All I needed to do was get outside. This is downtown Parkdale, and Cowan Avenue is always busy. Someone is walking up or down every minute of the day. If I can just get outside, someone will rescue me, I know it.
I managed to yank the bathroom door open, but she grabbed me. I leaned out the door and tried to yell for help, but no sound came out. Blood and spit was filling my lungs.
I dashed into the spare bedroom, grabbed the phone and started dialing 911. Fiona pulled the phone out of its socket and, as I turned and ran to the door, threw it against the back of my head. She grabbed me, spun me around with my golf shirt in her fists, and started to choke me with it.
Without thinking, I lowered my head and extended my arms, the way little kids do when mothers are taking off their shirts for bed. The shirt flew off, and Fiona fell back onto the floor.
I turned and ran. I dashed down the first flight of stairs to the living room. I ran across the living room, across the kitchen, out the front door, across the landing, down the front steps and out to the sidewalk. At each step I felt like I was floating, dancing, skipping.
And then I lay down.
I was topless and my bra was drenched with blood. Within a few seconds, a hand was under my neck. I opened my eyes. The man leaning over me had a cell phone in the other hand. “101 Cowan Avenue. Bleeding bad.” A cloth was wrapped around my neck wound. Feet behind my head. Mumbling. Footsteps. A towel. More people. I felt cared for, surrounded by love.
I looked up at the man leaning over me, whose arm extended past my face, whose hand held my neck wound, and whispered, “What’s your name?”
“Dr. Rifaat Kamil.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Yes, a psychiatric doctor. I work at the Clark Institute.”
I found out later he had been driving by. Had he been 10 seconds earlier, he would not have seen me. Had he been 10 seconds later, I may have died on the sidewalk.
My daughter appeared, crying, screaming. Someone was holding onto her shoulders, I could not see who. Then my son suddenly appeared at my side, bawling, kneeling beside me. “Don’t die, Laurie, please please please don’t die.”
I looked into his eyes and squeezed his hand. “I won’t die, sweetie.”
The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics held my wrist. “Can’t get a pulse.” They hoisted me onto the stretcher and wheeled me into the ambulance. Unknown to me, the police had been called. A neighbor had seen Fiona running into our back shed. Paramedics found her half dead, having tried to disembowel herself with another kitchen knife. A helicopter was circling above our neighborhood looking for the man who had attacked two women.
The ambulance sped down the freeway. I was fully alert and pain-free except for the blows to the back of my head. The last thing I remember was the stretcher being lowered into the emergency entrance.
When I awoke the next day, I was lying in a busy Intensive Care Unit at St. Michael’s hospital surrounded by nurses running back and forth. Among multiple hoses attached to my body, one was stuck in my nose and another to my throat. I could not speak.
And yet I felt like a queen on a throne surrounded by servants.
The surgeon appeared in a few minutes. “You are one lucky lady,” he said behind his clipboard, as the nurse checked my pulse. “Ten seconds later and you may well have been dead. You know they could not even get a heart rate when they found you.”
I nodded, smiled, and wrote on his paper, “Thank you! I feel great!”
The surgeon explained that the stabbing to my chest had pierced my lung, and then because of the cut to my throat, my saliva and blood had leaked into my right lung, collapsing it and my diaphragm, which is why I lost my voice. The throat wound missed my jugular by a few hairs. Had Fiona used a serrated knife I would have bled to death within minutes.
I seemed to be feeling no trauma, no stress. In fact, through the entire stabbing incident, the only pain I felt was the bruise on the back of my head. And now, the pains I felt were the wounds from the tracheotomy and other surgical incisions into my belly and elsewhere, and the interminable needles to test my blood.
During my stay in the hospital over the next three weeks, I did experience dread. The ambulance had delivered Fiona to the same ICU room, only three beds away from me. Her wounds were many times worse than mine and it was more of a miracle she was alive than me. She was incapacitated but two police officers sat on both sides of her hospital bed 24 hours of the day. One night I woke up terrified because I was hallucinating, seeing Fiona at the foot of my bed. The nurses suggested it was the morphine.
After one week, when Fiona and I had been transferred to opposite wings of the trauma ward, a nurse attempted to wheel me through Fiona’s wing to an elevator. I began to shake and cry. “It’s okay,” she said, “she cannot hurt you. The police are there.” Through my tears I wagged my finger and wrote on the paper, “Do not go there.” She agreed, and the fear quickly subsided. I learned later that these two events were critical in my healing.
Following the three weeks in the hospital and a month of convalescing in my parents’ home, I was still experiencing no signs of trauma. The Crown Attorney and Homicide Detective were stumped. They said they had never seen anything like it before. Victims are usually wracked by fear, bitterness, rage, resentment. I had become a single mother of my assailant’s two children after co-parenting them for seven years, and did not act like a victim.
There were cerebral reasons for my elevated state. Had I been maimed, perhaps I would have felt defeated. But I was unscathed except for scar tissue in my throat and a compromised diaphragm. And oddly enough, many things transpired together to blow my mind. The whole murder attempt had solved a very big problem within a few terrifying moments. After all, I had been out of options for solving a very serious quandary: how to remain safe while coming up with a solution for the kids.
The history of June 16 involves seven years of co-parenting poisoned by perpetual violence. It is the classic case of domestic abuse. Our two kids were the worst victims, having to hear the horror, scurrying into their bedroom and hiding under the covers.
In the spring of 1997, I experienced the worst shock of my life. Fiona went insane. My whole world turned upside down and I plunged into one of the deepest depressions of my life. It was a summer of mental chaos, intense stress, emptiness and loneliness while I had to continue my consulting business, pay the rent, find the cash to move, decide where to move, and look for the kids, whom Fiona had rented out to random friends.
It was a dizzying circus of police and phone calls, doctors and forms, hospitals and courts, streetcars and buses, strange pillows and blankets on friends’ couches, and hours and hours playing Arkanoid at Galaxy Donuts on the corner of King and Dufferin. I consulted with a psychiatrist and was prescribed anti-depressants that only made me want to throw up.
I could not figure out what to do. I did not want to lose the kids. They were experiencing worse upheaval than I was.
Fiona finally settled into the Psych ward, and her meds returned her to a relatively normal state of mind. We found the kids and moved into a new home. But due to her personality disorder, cannabis and booze, she soon resumed her former violence. In late May 2000, while we were both attending a conference in Ottawa, the police were called to the hotel when other guests heard my screams. Drunk out of her mind, she beat me up in our hotel room and threatened to kill me. She spent the weekend in jail.
I dashed home to Toronto, packed up my things, arranged for a friend to take care of the kids, and moved into the spare room in one of my clients’ homes.
Which brings us to the day I was almost murdered. On June 16, Fiona was released from the Psych ward and our lives changed permanently.
With Fiona headed to prison, the kids were safe and I was safe. As I lay there watching the nurses zip hither and thither, I assessed the price of my freedom and the kids’ freedom. I just had to get stabbed five times. Was it worth it?
Oh yes. If someone had offered me the option I would have taken it.
Whenever I share my near-death story in person, the typical response is wincing, eyes squeezed shut, and groans. “Oh, that is so horrible. I am so sorry.” This response leaves me perplexed. I want to say, “Sorry? Did you not hear the whole thing? I defeated death! Congratulate me! Say, Holy shit! That’s amazing! It was like getting the gold in the Olympics triathlon, or climbing Mount Everest. I was liberated from a very abusive relationship, and granted full custody of two beautiful kids! What is horrible about it?” But I never say it. It would make me look loopy.
Besides this breathtaking near-fatal solution to an unsolvable problem, there were other factors that could explain my euphoria. Maybe it was the morphine. But the morphine lasted only one month while the euphoria continued for two years. Was it the outpouring of support I received from my family, my friends, my clients?
My siblings and parents corralled a host of resources and muscle to load my entire household onto a tractor-trailer and deposit it into my sister’s unfinished basement. They traveled from nearby cities to visit me. They acted as powers of attorney, arranging paperwork, organizing phone calls, and sending messages.
My clients paid me for projects I could not finish, sent me flowers and gifts, and jostled for access so they could award me with new contracts. Even previous clients moved mountains to arrange for accommodations and care for my two kids.
Friends spent hours at my bedside, shaking up their schedules and skipping work to be with me.
All of this could have compensated for any trauma and helped me heal. It might even explain my feelings of transcendence and elation. But it would not explain the complete absence of traumatic stress.
In fact, I witnessed a chemical shift. My frequent lifelong headaches vanished. Over the next two years, situations that would normally elicit dread or an instant spike in heart rate left me perfectly calm and unfazed. I experienced a profound constitutional renovation. My energy levels soared to unforeseen levels, my sexual drive skyrocketed, and I observed strange physical responses. Driving up the hill on a busy thoroughfare, a car pulled out of a plaza and crossed my lane into oncoming traffic, missing my car by a few feet. This normally would set my heart racing and make me scream or yell. But this time, though I took instant action by pressing the brakes, my gut and throat did not respond. I was amazed.
I spent hours in my living room singing and dancing by myself to music while dreaming great dreams, feeling like I was on top of the world and could achieve anything. My charisma and energy seemed to ascend to new heights. People by the dozens were magnetized to me. Opportunities opened up. I was offered the biggest contract of my career while a big bandage still graced my throat and I could only talk in a whisper. All my clients knew what had happened to me and seemed to hold me in awe, like I had crossed to the other side and come back. Over the course of two years I was asked on five different occasions by four different political parties to run for office — not because of my political views but because of my vocal appeal and confidence speaking in public.
It wasn’t until ten years later I learned what was going on in this body, and why. I picked up a copy of Dr. Peter Levine’s book, In an unspoken voice: how the body releases trauma and restores goodness (2010) and devoured it. A stress consultant for NASA, Dr. Levine has helped soldiers heal from PTSD and traumatic brain injury. His other book Waking the tiger: healing trauma has been translated into 22 languages. I learned not only why I did not suffer post-traumatic stress, but also why I enjoyed the most extended period of euphoria in my life.
According to Levine, trauma is not danger, harm, fear, pain or violence. Trauma happens when we cannot run away or fight back during these events. And post-traumatic stress results when we remain stuck in that paralyzed state.
The natural response to danger is to fight or flee. But in many cases the cost of doing either one may be higher than delaying the natural response. If you see a bear, you may know that running away could be worse than staying still and silent.
I am no stranger to trauma. I lived it for seven years with Fiona. I opted to save my kids, my home, my reputation, and my business, rather than run away. I chose injury over death. When Fiona was beating me up, the chance of overpowering her was nil: she was much stronger than I, and I knew from experience I would suffer worse blows if I fought back. And if I ran away, what would happen to the kids? So I played a boxer in the ring bouncing against the ropes with both hands against my head. And I learned the power of arnica to heal bruises overnight.
Unlike adults, children seldom have the choice to fight or flee. During my own childhood, my siblings and I cowered in corners, petrified, while my father beat up our younger brother. And both my children suffered this trauma as well when they witnessed Fiona’s violence.
But if you are lucky enough to fight or flee, you suffer no trauma. I did both. I fought with all my might, knowing it may be to the death. And then I fled. Levine explains that in the act of fighting back and running away, the anger and fear are instantly replaced with the feeling of attacking and running. The source emotions are dissolved in the action.
What I did on the afternoon of June 16, 2000 was something few of us ever get to do: respond to basic instincts core to our most ancient biological roots — before we evolved our homo sapiens brains — and then execute on those instincts. “It is our legacy,” says Levine, “to feel really alive only when our survival instincts are fully engaged. However — and this is the rub — modern life rarely provides the opportunity for that kind of raw and powerful expression.”
In other words, I had the opportunity to release a whole heap of energy. “Trauma,” says Levine, “represents a profound compression of survival energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action.” Since I completed the meaningful course of action, I experienced no trauma. On the other hand, “The ability to access the rhythmic release of this bound energy makes all the difference as to whether it will destroy us or vitalize us.”
Vitalize us? Indeed. The experience of danger, he says, can be either traumatic or triumphant. And here’s what explains the triumph. In the process of fighting death, I stimulated my amygdala to extremity. While the amygdala is, in Levine’s words, the brain’s “smoke detector for danger and rage,” stimulating it “can also evoke the experience of ecstasy and bliss.” In fact, it appears that “the very brain structures central to the resolution of trauma are also pivotal in various mystical and spiritual states.” My friends can attest I did launch into an infectious brand of mystical transcendence, acting like a visionary or guru.
Among so many enlightening passages throughout Levine’s book, what struck me was how our visceral receptors process a violent attack. The vagus nerve is central. Second only to the spinal cord in total number of neurons, it meanders around our entire torso like tree roots, and “its main function is to relay information from our guts to our brains.” During my attack, my gut was telling my brain what to do via the vagus nerve. And I obeyed. There were no inhibitions or delays, no thinking or strategizing. There was only action. In the process, I must have harnessed an immense volume of adrenaline and endorphins, which explains why I felt no pain from any of the stabs.
On retrospect, it felt like a cataclysmic cleansing of my entire nervous system. Perhaps we enter our lives as babies with a clean, uninhibited nervous system. We cry when we get hungry, laugh interminably at the littlest things, and go to sleep when we are tired. As we mature, we learn to hamper the execution of our instincts by a growing number of mental rules largely based on social custom. We no longer scamper to the front door screaming with giddy delight when Daddy comes home from work. We don’t cry at the top of our lungs when we get hungry. We choose not to punch the dog when he tries to grab the food off our plate. Rather than executing our gut instincts, we contain them. And we do this for good reason: our survival often depends on it.
When I was attacked, there was nothing to lose — no kids to protect, no business to salvage, no reputation or way of life. It was either me or her. Survival depended on executing my gut instincts with no delay, no second-guessing, no compromise. In that moment I returned to my body’s infancy and summoned the most powerful agents of mammalian survival. It recalibrated my entire nervous system and spun me into a protracted high.
Eventually my system returned to normal. I abandoned my teenage-like plans to marry a movie star, run for Prime Minister, and save the world. But I look back on June 16, 2000 with gratitude and wonder. There remains no fear, anger, or resentment, and only joy. In fact, for all it gave me, I would do it again.
