Back From The Dead With Lessons On How To Live

You can learn more about Lauren Canaday here. Find her book Independence Ave here.

TRANSCRIPT

TW: A head’s up we mention an assault in this episode.

INTRO: The Picture Of Independence

When Lauren Canaday was a teenager she loved to piece together collages. They helped her make sense of a confusing time.

I would just collect and hoard magazines and then every now and then I'd go through and like, you know, cut out pictures or sayings…collect them in a shoebox. And then down the road, whenever I just needed to process something, I would pull out a piece of poster board, a glue stick and make a collage with all the pieces that spoke to me in that moment. 

When Lauren was 17, her parents called a family meeting.

We all gathered in the living room and they just said, you know, we're gonna get a divorce. …My brothers, I have two younger brothers, and they crawled on the sofa and were like hugging my parents and everyone was crying. And I just remember running upstairs to my own room and just thinking, you people are crazy… And I just felt this sense that I was going to have to look out for myself now. 

She got out her shoebox full of pictures, her scissors and glue stick and started collaging.

There was one image in particular of this girl just striding down the street, looked very professional. She had her shit together, this woman, and you know, perfect hair, stilettos, and she was walking forward quickly. And you could tell kind of, I think, like the swing of her coat, but she like turned over her shoulder and was looking back… Like something just grabbed me and I didn't need to understand fully why yet.

Well into her twenties Lauren thought about that picture.

…because it did grab me so much. And I think it has to do with her independence... So I kind of imagined this whole like scenario about her, you know, she's a career woman and she's going back to her immaculate studio apartment, like I don't know, but it was definitely an image of what I thought I wanted at that time.

LAUREL: What do you think encouraged you onto a path of independence?

LAUREN: Fear is the honest answer. I really believe that the best way to be safe was to secure my own financial independence…I wanna make sure I have a strong career and a strong income stream so that I never have to be dependent on anyone, but also so that in my most important relationships, and especially in that, in like a marriage, that I would be an equal partner and never end up where my parents did. 

This is a story about how Lauren learned that independence is overrated. This is 2 Lives. I'm Laurel Morales.

No Whining

All families have stories they tell – family lore they’re sometimes called. In Lauren Canaday’s family she remembered her mom and dad talking about how rough they had it when they were starting out. 

So there were, you know, horror stories that I was told from a young age about their cockroach-ridden apartments and eating only pancake mix and just how tight times were.

After they had kids they were still frugal, so instead of extravagant vacations they’d go on road trips. Lauren’s parents would load her and her two younger brothers into the car and drive for hours to places like Pikes Peak, Yellowstone, and Mount Rushmore. 

I hated it. I hated being crammed into the backseat with my brothers.

All three of the kids got car sick so Lauren dreaded these trips and, as any six year old would, she'd complain about them. At one truck stop Lauren’s dad came back to the car with a gift for her.

My dad bought this no whining button, we called it, but it's just the word whining on a little button that you could attach to, pin to your shirt, and it had a circle with a cross through it. So he bought that, I think at a rest stop, if I remember it correctly, or a gift shop, and put it on me. And my parents thought this was hilarious.

At age six Lauren received the message loud and clear. And to prove it she’d show them. She would stuff down any feelings of discomfort and never complain again.

And I really, I thought, okay, this is how I can stick it to my parents because they're up there laughing at me for expressing, you know, what I thought were very reasonable concerns about being in this terrible car for hours on end, feeling sick.

She’d put on her headphones and crank up some Tom Petty. 

I was actively trying to shut that down and just be above it, escape into my music. I guess I thought it would give me a sense of power. Instead of being laughed at, I could be, I don't know, somehow I'd have the last laugh if I was impervious to all of it. 16:45 It turns out you can definitely train yourself to feel fewer feelings or feel them less strongly.

One time when Lauren was in high school her friends decided to go cliff jumping. She didn’t really want to go but went along with it.

I succumbed to peer pressure and jumped into the river with my friends, but I was so afraid. I kind of crunched up in air and I didn't dive well. And we were jumping from such a height that the impact of the water itself was pretty severe. So my legs bent in air and I kind of landed in an L shape and it knocked the wind out of me. They had to pull me out of the water and I had terrible injuries from that that lasted for weeks and I didn't tell anyone. I mean, I didn't, my parents, I hid it from them. I was like sick with probably some sort of shock and like didn't tell them, hid my bruises. 

She refused to be that whiner her parents joked about.

LAUREN: It's something I think about. What would it have taken for me to tell them that I was in pain and that something had happened? I'm not sure.

LAUREL: What was the extent of your injuries from that?

LAUREN: I had like the full backside of my body was just covered. It was like one big bruise. And it did take weeks for that to go away just because of the way I landed on the water. 

Independent Career Woman

When she got to college she chose a major based on this idea that she needed to be financially independent.

And in my model, that was my dad and what he did was work and he had gone into consulting and he had an engineering background. I had this idea that like I need to pursue STEM and then I need to go get a job, and I need to work really hard, and that's where all the happy things are out there. 

So she decided to study statistics and escaped into numbers. She wound up getting her master’s in it. But when she graduated and landed her first job as a mathematical statistician at the Army Evaluation Center, she learned she didn’t just want to be a number cruncher. She felt a strong need for a clear role in affecting change.

At 25 she became obsessed with the makeover show What Not To Wear, and thought what if she quit her statistician career to learn how to do hair? 

I think I wanted to prove to myself that people can be like self-made, that I could be whoever I wanted to be and I could start with my hair for whatever reason. And the show What Not to Wear was a big factor. I loved that show. And yeah, it struck me that always in the hair scene, that's where people cried and they broke down and the real change started to happen…I really think my attraction to doing hair was like the first step towards becoming like a change consultant, because I really was interested in that individual level change at that point. 

Her step mom was a hair stylist and she opened Lauren’s eyes to all it could be, that it wasn’t just selling haircuts.

The whole world sucked me in, and I saw the business side of it, and I felt like I could apply a lot of my interest there. Then I wanted to manage things and run things and teach people and consult, and I just felt like I could do anything from there.

Her step mom introduced her to a tight knit group of hair industry mentors in Washington, D.C. 

They were the people who'd been in hair a lot longer than me who were kind of pulling me in and bringing me into the conversation, putting me on stage in front of other salon owners and hair businesses like product companies.

No Way Out

It was 2015. Her mentors had become like family. They’d shown her the ropes, introduced her to others in the industry, and given her a platform so she could become more like them. 

LAUREN: And so when one of them stayed, you know, after a meeting was kind of talking to me about work stuff, and then just with zero warning, like held my wrists, forcibly kissed me. I escaped, but, and like ran down the street. He caught me a couple of times on my way before I got all the way home. I felt like prey. 

It's really hard to explain what a surprise this was, like how well I knew him and the people that we both ran with, and how much I trusted this person. The people I trusted in that world, that you know, a world that meant so much to me at the time, it was unthinkable that one of them would show me they were just in it to get in my pants frankly. And like, it was humiliating because I thought I was there for other reasons. And I thought I'd been like building this great thing… And it made me question everything. And it didn't stop there. I mean, he pursued me very aggressively … I went through a period of a couple of weeks where I tried on the idea, like, can I deal with this? Like, can I manage this by doing what he wants? Because if I don't, I'm going to lose not just him, but this whole group of mentors and all these relationships that are intertwined. I knew it would be really bad for me if this got out.

LAUREL: Bad for your career?

LAUREN: Um, yeah.  My first instinct was to save my career and to save my livelihood and my community. I suspected and I wasn't all wrong that if I told my other mentors it that they would not defend me.

So she waited until she had a way out. She decided to go back to school and get her second master’s in organizational development.

It hadn't usually gone well for me to express how I really felt. I was under the impression that I just needed to appear strong and forge ahead and independence is everything. I’d been building a reputation. It was so important. I didn’t want my reputation to be about that.

She eventually pulled aside two of her mentors from that group and told them what had happened.

One was super supportive and one was in the moment while I was telling her, like a little bit supportive, but afterwards I heard from mutual friends, like she was saying it was my fault.

It wasn’t until a couple years later during the Me Too Movement that Lauren discovered she wasn’t alone, that he had preyed on other women.

The Diagnosis

By that point Lauren had cut ties with the group. At 34 she kept herself busy running her own salon and consulting small businesses. On top of that she was in grad school. 

One day she was sitting in class when something strange happened. She blacked out and found herself waking up on the classroom floor.

And I thought it was a dream at first. It's really disorienting when you wake up from a long, long nap. It's kind of that feeling of like where am I? What year is it? And why are my classmates in my dream? And what's happened? You know, gradually come to and realize that something bad happened and I fell out of my chair.

They told her she’d had a seizure. Her teacher called campus security who took her to the hospital. By the time she got there she felt ok and didn’t want to be a bother. She just thought she’d been pushing herself too hard.

I didn't know what that really meant medically. And I was like, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. 

Less than a couple weeks later in January of 2019 she got in her car after work, waved to a coworker, and put on her seatbelt, when she had another seizure.

I was strapped into the front seat of my car about to drive home. So it's one of these many things that like, I'm just the luckiest person because five minutes after that, I would have been on 66, I-66 driving towards DC. Um, and you know, it would have had a very different outcome to be seizing for five minutes. Um, I was luckily, I was still in park and in the parking garage. The second one was much scarier, just hard to think and speak and move afterwards. I was looking at my cell phone, like it was this foreign object I'd never seen before.

She finally called 911 and went to the hospital. That’s when a neurologist told her she had epilepsy.

It's kind of an out of body experience. She hadn't said when she came in, ‘we think you have epilepsy.’ She just starts launching into what epilepsy is. And I'm thinking, ‘why are you telling me this?’ And I'm like, I'm a 34-year-old woman. Like, what are you telling me? Like something's wrong with my brain that's been there? Like that doesn't add up. And of course, because I'd been sick, it could also be because of that. So it's just, I felt a lot of confusion. And she's just telling me all these things like, you know, you can't drive for a year. You have to be careful just in your day-to-day activities. Like this could happen at any point. You can fall over at any point and start having convulsions. So, you know, there's a lot of things that suddenly get dangerous that you never thought about before. And she's just laying all this out…she's telling me is just that I was gonna have to be on a medication for probably life.

She later learned epilepsy is sort of a default diagnosis.

It's what you get handed if they don't know why this is happening to you…The next thing they do is they treat for epilepsy and see, does that help? Because the idea is if your seizures go down or go away, then they're probably right. It’s really just being told like your whole life is going to change now. And you may never get any answers about why.

Dependent On Others

A couple years passed and Lauren felt the medication had controlled the seizures. It was late 2020 several months into the pandemic when she decided she was ready to date again. She met Chris online.

I wasn't really interested in falling in love until it was safe. So, I had to verify some things before I was, I was willing to, to really go there.

They’d planned to go to the National Christmas Tree, but kids hadn’t made ornaments that year.

… and it was very bleak. There were just these laminated, like cut out pictures of ornaments. And there was no music, no hot cocoa… So we ended up walking around the city.

The two hit it off and eventually got married in July of  2021 seven months after their first date.  In December of 2022 Lauren caught a mild case of COVID with upper respiratory symptoms.

And what stayed though was like the fatigue and the mental fog. And then two weeks after I tested positive, I had this intense dizziness.

The dizziness got so bad Chris took her to urgent care. They told her not to worry, that it was common. But it lasted weeks.

I was struggling to even just like walk down the street.

Six weeks after she’d tested positive for COVID she had a breakthrough seizure, this time she fell and hit her head on her desk and the floor. She’d been on anti seizure medication for five years.

I felt like I wasn't being taken seriously that something was going on and they didn't really find anything of note there. I got on the phone with my neurologist. 

Her doctors recommended upping her dosage. 

One week later on February 7, 2023, she had another seizure. Her husband found her on the floor turning blue.

He came over cause I was on the floor and shaking, but then I wasn't breathing. And so that's not normal for a seizure. And he, um, he called 911 and that's, that's when I had my cardiac arrest. The operator asked him, have you started CPR? And that was his clue. I should do that. So as soon as he could, he started and kept it up until they got there.

It took four minutes for the ambulance to arrive, another 20 minutes to revive her. 

I was clinically dead for 24 minutes …

Then Lauren was alive but in a coma. The doctors diagnosed her with myocarditis, a condition that inflames the heart. 

So my memory comes back when I was in the ICU and I'm just completely helpless, everything hurts. I think a lot of people, they hear cardiac arrest and it's cardiac.

It is cardiac, but when your heart stops and your body starts shutting down and mine lasted 24 minutes. So because of CPR and the advanced techniques that the first responders used, they were kind of forcibly pressing oxygen up to my brain, you know, chest compressions and things, like artificially getting oxygen to my brain, which is so important because otherwise at 24 minutes, I would absolutely be brain dead.

Within one minute brain cells begin to die. Within 10 the patient is unlikely to recover.

LAUREN: There’s all these things they need to do after resuscitation to keep you alive. It’s one thing to survive until you get to the hospital, it's another to survive until release from the hospital. I start to remember things several days in. I remember getting wheeled off to surgery. I remember being in a lot of pain after surgery. I remember not being able to stand up right after surgery. I have these like snippets and like laughing with my brother who had flown in from Colorado, you know. All these things were happening and I didn't understand them at first. My family kept trying to tell me why I was there and I didn't understand. I kept thinking I had a seizure and I was here because of a seizure. I didn't understand that this whole new health problem had just come into the mix.

LAUREL: And at what point did it dawn on you how rare it is to survive this incident and to survive with your everything intact?

LAUREN: Oh, I just got chills. I think I could tell in the hospital a little bit by just the way...that people were talking to me and treating me. I got that something really profound had happened and like, basically I got that this was like the worst thing that could happen and that I had made it, but just barely. I got that. And then, but I didn't really know much about sudden cardiac arrest. And so it was after I got home and...I started researching and like, what is this really? What does this mean? I'm getting these like doctors notes about each visit. There were so many visits at that point, multiple a week, different specialists and I'm starting to see like numbers. Like it's just like how rare this is to survive. And so I guess it was partly through my own research that I started a piece together. I mean, no one sat me down and said, look, this is what happened. I mean, they probably did, but I don't remember it because I don't know what they told me those first couple of days after the coma. My husband told me early on that, they'd taken him aside, like as soon as I got to the trauma center and said, they were guarded and that I might not wake up, he was being prepared for the worst. They sent a chaplain right over. I … I knew I'd been on the edge, but I didn't understand how many sudden cardiac arrests happen a year and how few people survive them and any of that, that was later.

In fact only about 10 percent of people who experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrests survive, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Second Life

I'm part of this long chain of survival that had to happen where everything had to go right and so many people had to be involved. 

A crew of eight rescue workers and volunteers worked quickly with precision and expertise to save Lauren’s life from the 911 operator to the firefighter who arrived four minutes later. Not long after her stay in the hospital the director of emergency services awarded them for not only saving her life, but also for keeping her “neurologically intact.” 

AUDIO FROM THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS VIDEO

It was that night that Lauren realized her view of independence had shifted.

So all that stuff I did building my career up into my 30s, like everything that I put into that, like. I kinda don't mind because I have such different priorities at this moment, but it's like that whole dream died, that I would be able to get to this safe place where I'm independent and nothing can touch me. None of that exists. I'm only here because other people fought really hard for it against all odds. There's really no part of my life now that's independent. 

She still has multiple doctors caring for her. Her husband often takes her to those appointments, drives her to the store, even helps her upstairs some nights. For a while she was having daily seizures. She’s not sure what the next day will bring.

I can't get answers. So I've tried to like look into it on my own and read medical journals, but like, basically where I've landed, and this is the grief and loss part, I mean, I'm not gonna get an answer. But I do know I need help with a lot of things… I'm still having kind of where I get stuck. It's kind of like you hear about with Parkinson's. I'll be thinking like I want to move, but I can't quite do it. There's a disconnect between thinking it and actually doing it. Jury's still out on what's going on there in terms of brain damage and things. So I'm still learning, but I mean I get it. I don't forget for a second and I don't think that I've got to get back to independence or something. Like that ship has sailed.

She wrote a book called Independence Ave: How Individualism Killed Me And Community Brought Me Back. She lived on Independence Ave. in her 20s and 30s in Washington, D.C.

After my sudden cardiac arrest, suddenly independence takes on this different meaning. It's like, that's not what it's about and a lot isn't up to me. 1:32:00 It was like, my whole worldview just shifted…Like being born again into this totally different life where none of the rules are what I thought they were. 

The more she realized the number of people involved in helping her, the more she felt a need to give back. Lauren now volunteers six to eight hours a week for a crisis hotline.

Like, I really have this belief now that like, I guess of service. And I love just putting aside all my problems and then just hearing someone else and what they're going through turns out I'm not alone.

She’s learned a lot over the last year.

I've learned that I can't be this self-determined individual that I thought I could, but that also means that yeah, I think that necessarily means I have to cultivate some gentleness towards myself. I was spending my time and energy tamping it down and keeping myself in like strict you know, bounds of how to behave. And so now like I'm unwilling to do that, but I'm not really sure what to do with all of the feelings. And luckily, I mean, I just have to say, partnership means so much because my husband, his ability to just hear whatever's going on with me in whatever bad way I spit it out in the moment and not judge me for it, …The thing about feelings is they're like clouds, right? And they just they pass and I sometimes have trouble understanding that when I'm in the middle of a strong emotion.

In addition to expressing her emotions, she’s also finding times to be still and present.

My ability to sit quietly is much heightened after. I just get really excited about small things. Noticing small moments like maybe something in nature or yeah, a flower. There was this grouping of flowers. I'd thrown seeds in the ground kind of carelessly for these wild flowers in one corner of the yard and they bloomed last fall. And I was so excited about it. Like I kept showing people. And at some point it dawned on me, like, this isn't normal to be this excited.

When she meditates, she thinks back to those 24 minutes. 

I don't remember that time in terms of visions or specifics, but I love it. Like I go back to that moment and in meditation sometimes like I really want to feel calm and peaceful. Think about being clinically dead. And all the things that happened after I woke up that were so terrible and scary and painful and all the loss and grief that I've gone through. But in the moment, it's like I just had a break from, I mean, maybe that's what death is, like it's a break from all the things that were hard in life.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.