A mother-of-three from Oklahoma, USA, has shared her extraordinary near-death experience after surviving a 'widowmaker' heart attack, which she initially mistook for flu. Jenna Tanner, 49, described floating through a cosmic landscape and feeling 'enveloped in blackness' before being 'shot back' into her body.
Tanner, from Broken Arrow, had been experiencing shortness of breath and chest discomfort for days but dismissed it as flu-like symptoms following her children's recent illness. On 9 March 2022, after her children left for school, she texted her husband Ryan, 51, thinking she might be unwell, but instead of seeking help, she began tidying the house.
As she entered her home office, her blood pressure dropped suddenly, and she lay on the floor to avoid fainting. She then lost consciousness and suffered cardiac arrest. During the ordeal, she had a profound out-of-body experience. 'I remember kind of just floating through this space - like a space universe - and I was getting closer to what I would describe as a nebula,' she said. 'There was a big cloud of colours moving that was changing. Everything was vivid stars. I was just floating peacefully.'
After regaining consciousness, she felt an intense pain in her chest, like 'an elephant sitting on it', and realised she was having a heart attack. With her phone in another room, she spent nearly two hours alternating between consciousness and unconsciousness. She recalled thinking only of positive connections with people and places, not any bad parts of her life. The thought of her son Brady, then 13, finding her dead spurred her to drag herself across the floor to call 911 and unlock the front door before collapsing.
At hospital, doctors were stunned to find her entire left heart had stopped functioning; only her right side was working. Her cardiologist, with 20 years of experience and over 4,000 surgeries, said he had never seen anyone survive such a condition. She received a pump inside her heart and a stent in her main artery, a procedure that usually requires bypass surgery. The fire department won an award for reaching her in under 13 minutes.
A widowmaker heart attack, or anterior STEMI, occurs when the left anterior descending artery is completely blocked, cutting off oxygen to a large part of the heart muscle. Survival rates outside hospital are just 12%. Tanner, now recovered, described herself as a 'miracle patient'.
