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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.

Our story is like a movie shown on two screens: my loved ones' experience on one, my experience on another. Their story happened to me but I missed it, missed two months of my life and the greatest tragedy my family's been through. My story shows me giving a happy birth, then having trouble, then going to sleep before the surgeries. I awaken from a drug-induced coma, thinking it was the next morning, and hear my husband say, "You've been here for 47 days." Later that day, I slip back into the coma for several more weeks, then awake to the invasion of the body snatchers, unable to breathe or move on my own, my heart severed from my newborn.

When Schiavo's story broke, I waded through the murky ground of what many felt but few voiced. Many prolife Christians agreed that what was being done to Schiavo was terribly wrong, but still deep questions swirled: Who would want to be in her position? Is there a morally acceptable line for relinquishing life support? Could sanctity and dignity of life walk hand in hand?

When Dr. James Dobson was a guest on Sean Hannity's national talk-radio show discussing Schiavo, he recounted my story. Add me to the list of poster adults for not pulling the plug. Yet from my new perspective, the sanctity of life versus the dignity of life still seems complex.

Gradually I've begun to remember bits of my comatose state: The swimming-through-mud feeling of trying to surface to awareness. The frightening dreams. The intense and very real spiritual warfare, a battle as unto death. The fog of being strapped in a chair with daytime television on to "stimulate" me, vaguely registering that people were in my room, but unable to comprehend that, let alone communicate. It was like watching someone through opaque glass underwater, visible but obscure and unreachable. And the weeks of living in the shadowland between my coma and full awareness, with times of frustration beyond belief.

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