Amanda - It was 20 years ago today It was 20 years ago today I promised someone I would tell the whole story, from the beginning, on this twenty-year anniversary, so here goes... When my mom was pregnant with me in 1972, she started having a recurring nightmare. In the dream, she was laying over someone's shoulder, bleeding, and she could hear people saying that she had been stabbed. She had that dream over and over for 29 years and told me about it several times. Early in the morning on October 19, 2001 something woke my mom and she said she had this uncontrollable urge to pray for me. She says that she asked God to watch over me, then made a cup of coffee and started her day. Just a few minutes after that, there was a knock on my door. I opened the door and was hit in the head with a flower pot from my porch. The next few minutes will remain the most terrifying of my life. I was punched, kicked, and stabbed. The last thing I remember was seeing the reflection of him cut my throat in a mirror and then falling to the floor. There were nine 911 calls that night from neighbors as far as three buildings away. Two off duty HPD officers, who were on their way back from breakfast, responded to the second call that came from my downstairs neighbor. He first reported a disturbance (when the flower pot hit my patio and bounced downstairs onto his porch) then next reported that he saw someone leave my apartment covered in blood. The officers arrived to find me on my dining room floor with multiple stab wounds. EMS arrived next and transported me to Ben Taub. As they took me from the apartment to the ambulance, I pointed out my attacker's car, still parked in the lot by my apartment. When his car was towed, the knives he used were on top of the tire, under the wheel well. I coded in the ambulance and was revived, multiple times. Upon arrival at Ben Taub, the paramedics were told that there was nothing that could be done to save me. The paramedics insisted they try. Eighteen minutes of open-heart massage and still no sign of life. I was pronounced dead. Then, as they lifted me up to complete the wound chart that would be necessary for the police report, I took a breath. All on my own. The nurse who was holding me said it felt like a bolt of lightening hit him when I took that breath. While all this was going on, the news had reported my death. Friends were mourning the news and one friend called my mom to tell her what happened. My mom refused to believe it. She said if I was dead she would be able to feel it. She called a family friend who worked for HFD and they eventually found out that I was at Ben Taub, just coming out of surgery. My attacker left my apartment that morning, went home and went to bed. He was arrested later that day and went to jail in the same bloody shoes. I identified him in a photo lineup from my hospital bed. He was held without bail and eventually sentenced to forty years in prison, beginning from his original arrest on October 19, 2001. Twenty-seven stab wounds and I spent twenty-one days in the hospital. The road to recovery was long and painful. Surgery after surgery. Physical therapy and learning how to do everything left handed. Everything hurt all the time. I cried a lot. My whole world changed. This went on for a few years, but gradually got better as time passed. People were amazed when they heard the story. Sometime in 2004 I was visiting with a customer at work. I shared my story and she told me that I would learn the reason I was saved in a dream. She said it would take 10 years. I laughed it off. Truth be told, this person claimed to be psychic and I've never believed much of that. In the summer of 2014 my family attended a weekend-long birthday celebration for my grandfather. One morning, my mom was asking him a ton of questions about his leukemia diagnosis, treatment, etc. It struck me as a little odd at the moment, but I didn't really think about it much after that morning. Not until I started having a recurring dream of my own. About the time the school year started, I began dreaming pretty regularly that I had been selected as a bone marrow donor. I would wake up terrified at the thought of enduring another surgery. Anesthesia and being intubated is not my favorite. I always just assumed it was back to school anxiety and that eventually it would subside. I was wrong. By spring break, in March 2015, I was having the dream several times a month. By the end of the school year I was having it a couple of times a week. My mom called me one Sunday in late May 2015 as I was driving home from the farm in Madisonville. She was having some weird pains and we were discussing what it could have been. A couple of days later she went to the hospital in Tomball because she continued to feel worse. Within a few days she was moved to MD Anderson and just a few days after that was an Acute Myeloid Leukemia diagnosis. She was in and out of the hospital, undergoing various treatments, throughout the summer. We all went and got tested for a bone marrow match. On my visit, the nurse thanked me for my time and told me it was highly unlikely I would be selected because typically a child is not a close enough match for their parent. I told the nurse that I believed I would be selected and told her about my dream I'd been having for almost a year. She laughed at me. About a month later I got the call that I had been selected to be her donor as part of a study at MD Anderson that specifically uses a child as a donor to a parent. The next few weeks were painful. I spent so much time at MD Anderson getting evaluated for the procedure. The date was set, September 11, 2015. I arrived at the hospital at 5:00am on surgery day. They took a liter and a half of marrow from my hip bones. I had three external needle entry points, but almost 100 little holes in the bones. By the time I woke from the anesthesia my mom was already getting the stem cells. My dad said she was eating a cheeseburger and worried about how I was. I was in pain, but I didn't want her to know that. Over the years, we began to celebrate October 19 and September 11 as our "rebirthdays" and counted those annual milestones. For my mom, each year signified progress toward remission and recovery. For me, each year led me to think less about survival and more about my attacker approaching parole. He would become eligible after serving twenty years. October 19, 2021. Today. As the day got closer and closer there was something I really needed to do. One Friday afternoon I got online and registered with crime victim services. I cried the whole weekend. It was all getting a little too real. The next week I started getting emails from victim services, the parole board, and other organizations. I was overwhelmed. I knew it would culminate by meeting with the parole board. That meeting was scheduled for October 6. My meeting was with the lead voter of the parole board. She was really easy to talk to. I told her my story and answered her questions. She explained the process that would occur after our meeting. After the meeting, I sat in my car and cried for twenty minutes before I could even drive home. I still assumed that October 19 would be the big day. I was surprised to receive a text message the next morning that his parole was denied, with the next review on October 7, 2023. Another day to celebrate, or dread. Maybe now I can celebrate my survival on the 19th and without the thought of possible parole. Or maybe it just proves that the dates are arbitrary. Maybe my destiny, my purpose in life, was always to save her. Maybe none of this was ever about me to begin with. Maybe it was always about my mom. Only time will tell the rest of the story. An interesting thing about my mom's dream is that she had short red hair in it. When she finally found me at Ben Taub, she was shocked to find I had cut off my long blonde hair and dyed it red just a few days before the attack. My mom has never said if it was that dream that woke her that night, but she's never had the dream again since I was stabbed. I’'ve never had the bone marrow dream again either.