After suffering a sudden cardiac arrest, a woman says she was dead for 27 minutes before she was revived by doctors. When she came back to life, she had an important message that she could not wait to share.
Tina Hines, a healthy and active mom-of-four from Arizona, shocked her husband Brian when she suffered a sudden cardiac arrest in their driveway as the couple was preparing to head out on a hike in early 2018, according to Yahoo! News. As Brian watched in horror, his wife began to turn purple, prompting the terrified husband to immediately call 911 and attempt CPR with the help of a neighbor as he waited for paramedics to arrive.
Brian was initially able to bring his wife back, but her heart stopped again soon after. This pattern continued with the paramedics, who arrived and brought Tina back again only to have her heart stop not once or twice but three times before doctors took over. In all, Tina was reportedly resuscitated a total of five times — as her family prayed for her life — before she finally regained consciousness after being technically “dead” for 27 minutes.
After being successfully revived and returning to the world of the living, Tina immediately wanted to share a message the moment she regained consciousness, but she was unable to speak because she was intubated. So, she motioned for a pen, and then she scribbled down an eerie note that eventually stunned her family. Initially, her loved ones weren’t sure what she was trying to write, but it eventually became clear.
“She just started making marks, and I couldn’t tell what it was, and I was almost shaking. I was fixed. I just held the book steady because I didn’t want it to drop,” Tina’s husband recalled, according to Mirror. “We figured out she wrote I-T-S-R-E-A-L. ‘What’s it’s real?’ And I go, ‘The pain? The hospital?’ She’s slowly nodding her head. Eyes are closed. She’s fully vented,” he furthered.
After scribbling, “It’s real,” to the best of her ability, Tina eventually nodded upwards as her family tried to decipher what she meant with the note. According to Brian, their daughter eventually figured it out, asking, “Heaven?” to which Tina responded by nodding “Yes.” Once she finally regained her voice, Tina said that during the 27 minutes in which she was technically dead, she crossed over to the “other side.”
During her near-death experience, the devout Christian claimed she saw heaven and Jesus, and it was incredible. “It was so real, the colors were so vibrant,” Tina recalled, adding that she saw Jesus haloed in a bright yellow glow as he stood in front of a set of black gates. “I just wanted to share I saw Jesus face to face and the unbelievable rest and peacefulness of what I was experiencing was Jesus standing there with his arms open wide, and right behind Jesus standing there was this incredible glow it was the most vibrant and beautiful yellow.”
Four days after the incident, Tina was miraculously discharged, having made a full recovery just like her family had prayed. The nearly tragic incident has strengthened her faith as well as her family’s faith. In fact, Tina Hines’ experience inspired her niece Madie Johnson to have the words her aunt wrote, in her hard-to-decipher post-revival handwriting, tattooed on her wrist.
Moved by her aunt’s experience that reinforced her beliefs, Madie took to social media to share Tina’s experience along with her new tattoo. “Her story is too real not to share and has given me a stronger confidence in a faith that so often goes unseen,” Madie wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of her tattoo. “It has given me a tangibleness to an eternal hope that is not too far away.”
