When I first started shidduchim, I had high standards. I want to marry a guy who went to an Ivy, I remember thinking. And oh, it would be great if he works at Goldman Sachs and is six feet tall. But over the years, you gain more humility. You realize how little status matters. You look at people less judgmentally. My very long dating journey — 15 years in all — taught me that while we can put in our hishtadlus, success is up to Hashem.

At age 38, I met Eliyahu again at another singles event. By that time, he had been married and divorced, with no kids. Once again, we immediately hit it off. Like me, he’s a lawyer, but not Ivy League. At 28, that would have bothered me a lot. But at 38, I knew that was narishkeit. Eliyahu has a true love of Torah, learning, and Israel, which I deeply respect. He’s the type of person who shows everyone respect. He knows the names of the custodians in his building, the police officers on the street, and he always gives them a smile and a hearty thank-you. It was worth the long wait to find him.

There was no honeymoon period in our marriage. Due to my age, we knew we’d have to start fertility treatments right away if we wanted to have a family. Our shanah rishonah was full of doctors’ appointments, anxiety, and waiting. So much waiting. It was very intense, and it put a lot of pressure on our new marriage.

We’d get so hopeful about a treatment, and then it wouldn’t take. I’d learn I was expecting, and then I’d miscarry. Every loss was a heartbreak of its own.

When I became pregnant at age 40, I knew I couldn’t take any chances: A family friend went to Rav Chaim Kanievsky ztz”l to get a brachah for us. The Rav specified three things that Eliyahu and I should take on, for the rest of our lives. Two were for my husband — he should make Havdalah on wine instead of grape juice, and make a personal supplication for children in the Amidah every day — and one was for me: I should bentsch licht ten minutes early every Shabbos.

In June of 2017, I gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Eliyahu and I were overwhelmed with joy. In the hospital room, we wept tears of gratitude to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, who had blessed us with a child — a blessing we didn’t know if we’d merit. We named him Dovi.

Eighteen months later, that same family friend was visiting Rav Kanievsky again and he kindly asked for another brachah for us. As it happens, I was expecting, but our friend didn’t even know. The Rav’s response was terse: “Hatzlachah.” I had a bad feeling about that, and sure enough, the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

Even before Covid hit, 2020 was a trying time for us. We flew to Montreal to visit my parents, and right after we returned home, my father died suddenly. My son Dovi, who was almost three by then, sensed all the tension and sadness in our house and he reacted — in a big way. He didn’t want to eat or sleep. He refused to leave our apartment, crying and screaming when it was time to go out.

We knew we needed help to handle his behavior so we hired a child psychologist. We were slowly starting to see progress when… we got another blow. Our nanny, who was a part of our daily life, had a brain aneurism in our bathroom. I was the one who found her and called Hatzalah. They were able to revive her, but she ended up dying a few weeks later. It was traumatic for all of us.

There was no time to process or heal from any of this because Covid hit and the world started shutting down all around us. Eliyahu and I were now working from home and going out only when absolutely necessary. We hired a new nanny who continued to come to us throughout Covid, but it was difficult with all of us being home — four people working, living, and playing in one tiny New York City apartment.

In the midst of it all, I learned I was expecting again. I was both elated and terrified. No one knew how this strange new disease would affect expectant women or their babies. The medical system was in crisis mode, and it was impossible to find a doctor who would see you in person.

When I was 28 weeks pregnant, I woke up in the middle of the night with a nosebleed. It was strange because I’d never had one in my life before, but I thought I had just burst a blood vessel in my nose — no big deal. I cleaned it up and went back to bed. When I woke up the next day, it was still dripping. A ten-hour nosebleed? That was weird. I called my OB-GYN, who recommended I see a primary care physician.

The best I could do was schedule a telehealth visit with a doctor who was seeing patients remotely. During the call, I started coughing up a small amount of blood. When I mentioned that to the doctor, she told me to go straight to the emergency room. The ER scared me — what if I contracted Covid? But the doctor was adamant: Coughing up blood is a medical crisis that needs immediate attention.

I kissed my son Dovi goodbye, not knowing that it would be close to a month until I’d see him again. My father-in-law drove Eliyahu and me to the emergency room, but due to Covid restrictions, they wouldn’t let my husband in.

At the hospital, I started feeling dizzy and lightheaded. The orderly made me sit in a wheelchair so I could be wheeled into the emergency room. I sat down in the chair, and the nurses wanted to do an X-ray. “I can’t,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”

“It’s very little radiation,” the doctor said. “You really should do it.” That’s when I started throwing up a ton of blood. And everything went black.

The next nine days of my life are missing, gone — like pages ripped out of a book. When I regained consciousness, I asked question after question to Eliyahu, the doctors, the nurses, anyone who could fill in the blanks for me. I combed through my hospital charts trying to piece together what had happened to me during those lost days. It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with nine gaping pieces missing. Slowly, the threads of the story started coming together.

After I started vomiting blood, the doctors sedated me so they could try to figure out what was wrong. They put me in a medically induced coma, on a ventilator, where I hovered between life and death.

It was a real-life medical mystery, and the clock was ticking: Even in a coma, I was still bleeding effusively. Did I have a blood clot? A CT scan ruled that out. A severe nosebleed? A throat endoscopy eliminated that. They decided to perform a bronchoscopy — a procedure where a doctor inserts a thin, flexible tube with a camera into your airways. They cleaned the blood out of my lungs and also did an angiogram — a series of X-rays with contrast dye to view the blood vessels.

That’s when the doctors finally solved the mystery: In my lungs, they found a fistula, which is when two blood vessels are connected where they’re normally excluded from one another. It’s incredibly rare and the doctors weren’t sure if I had been born with it or if I had developed it over time. What was certain is that they had burst, causing blood to gush into my lungs.

Stopping the bleeding wasn’t simple because of the type of arteries that had burst. The first few attempts didn’t work; I needed multiple surgeries. Eventually, a surgeon was able to successfully plug the artery with metal coils, a technique called embolization.

It was Covid, but Eliyahu was granted permission to visit me because the doctors weren’t optimistic that I would pull through. They wanted him to be there in case he had to say goodbye.

“Is the baby going to be okay?” he asked the doctors.

“We don’t know,” they said. “When we do an ultrasound, the baby isn’t moving, which isn’t a good sign. But the truth is, we haven’t seen a case like this before where the mother’s ventilated, intubated, and sedated.”

Eliyahu was terrified for me and my unborn baby. And what would he tell Dovi if something happened to me? Our child psychologist advised my husband to tell Dovi that something was up, just in case, chas v’shalom, I didn’t make it.

“Mommy’s in the hospital because she’s very sick,” he eventually told our son. Dovi got very quiet. He had lost his nanny two months before this, so he was so confused. “Why is everyone leaving?” he asked my husband. “Are you going to leave, too?”

Behind the scenes, my husband, family, and friends were fighting for me. Eliyahu arranged for people around the world to pray for me. Our family friend, the one who had a connection to Rav Kanievsky ztz”l, ran to him and asked for a brachah. “Both mother and baby will be fine,” the gadol hador told him.

His promise was fulfilled. Baruch Hashem, after a successful surgery, my body slowly started to heal. Gradually, I regained my strength. After nine days in a medically induced coma, the doctors felt it was safe to wake me up. I found myself alone in a hospital room, having no conscious memory of how I got there. My husband was outside in the hospital courtyard, as close as he could get — they wouldn’t let him in at this critical moment because of Covid restrictions.

The first thing the doctor said was, “Your baby is fine.”

“What?” I asked, confused. “I’m not pregnant.”

My brain was foggy — from both the coma and the multiple surgeries, when my brain had been deprived of oxygen for a few seconds. Everything was blurry and out of focus. My whip-sharp brain — a brain that a little over a week before could find a typo in a contract in a second — was sluggish and slow. I didn’t know what was real and what was a dream.

“Do you know who you are?” the nurse asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Um, wherever my husband drove me…” I stammered.

It was all so confusing. I couldn’t connect the dots. It was only days later, while on a video call with my husband, that some of the puzzle pieces came together. “Wait,” I said, “is this all from when we drove to the hospital for the nosebleed?”

I was still struggling to figure out the basic facts of what had happened to me when the doctors gave me more bad news:

“You have preeclampsia. It’s dangerous and could lead to organ failure for you and the baby.”

“No, I don’t,” I argued. “I feel perfectly fine.”

“Your blood pressure is too high. You must deliver the baby.”

“Are you sure your instruments are right?” I asked. I was scared to deliver the baby at 30 weeks.

“Trust us,” they replied. “It’s better for you, and it’s better for the baby.”

Before the medical team could proceed with the preterm delivery, they had to notify me of all the possible risks to my baby’s health — breathing issues, infections, vision, and hearing problems. I know it’s irrational, but in that moment, I was overwhelmed with a deep sense of guilt, as if I had put my baby in danger. I had once been a competitive athlete and now my body was failing both me and my child.

The baby had to come out — and soon — but the doctors needed to first confirm that I was strong enough to recover from a C-section. They asked me to sit up, but after nine days in a coma, I couldn’t. I simply crumpled over. Standing was an even harder challenge. I had to relearn how to do everything.

At this point, I had one goal: to deliver a healthy baby. Whatever I needed to do to regain my physical strength, I was going to do. The same single-minded determination that had helped me get into Ivy League schools, and work until 2 a.m. every night, would now help me relearn how to walk.

On my 15th day in the hospital, only five days after being weaned off sedation, with Eliyahu at my side, I gave birth to my second son. His newborn cry was the sweetest sound I’d heard in my life. A really sick baby wouldn’t have been able to do that, I told myself. He was immediately whisked to the NICU.

At this point, I could barely pull myself up. I was considered a “fall risk,” so I wasn’t permitted to walk anywhere without a nurse or orderly accompanying me. But with the help of a nurse and a walker, I made it down to the NICU to see my baby.

His little body was hooked up to machines that flashed and beeped constantly. He was being fed through a hole in his belly button. An oxygen tube protruded from his nose. Through an opening in the incubator, I was able to caress his skin for a few precious moments.

Due to Covid, I was only allowed one visitor, so every day, Eliyahu checked in on me, keeping me company as long as he could. And I needed it. Covid made everything feel even scarier and more isolating. All the doctors, nurses, and orderlies were wearing KN95s, as well as shields over their face, so I never felt like I could establish a rapport with them. In my disoriented state, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting more visitors, and I was worried that there was something wrong with my baby. Are they hiding something from me? I wondered.

Fortunately, I was able to video call Dovi every single day. But at a certain point, we had to stop because he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t coming home to him, and he’d get really upset. I so badly wanted to comfort him and give him a big hug, but I couldn’t even get up.

I was discharged before my baby, and although it hurt to leave him, the nurses in the NICU were human angels. They let me call them up at any time. They kept careful watch over my baby, and I felt so blessed to have them on my team.

Going home was strange. The apartment was the same, but I was so different now. My brain was slow and sluggish. I had trouble recalling words. My creativity and language skills had atrophied.

I also needed physical therapy since I’d been immobile for so long. I would lean on things while standing. I just didn’t have any strength in my muscles. Getting off the sofa, standing — it all took a huge amount of effort. I felt like I had been reduced to jelly.

Just as important, I needed to speak to a therapist because my whole sense of self had been shattered. Since childhood, I had relied on my physical and mental abilities, but now I had neither.

On Yom Kippur, we say, “Ki hinei kachomer — Like clay in the hands of the potter, if he wills, he can expand it, if he wills, he can contract it. So, too, are we in Your hand… Like stone in the hand of the mason, if he wills, he holds it, if he wills, he smashes it; so, too, are we in Your hands.”

I used to say these words by rote. Not anymore. Being so close to death, my own fragility so palpable, these pesukim are a truth I feel deeply in my soul.

I wasn’t the only one who needed healing. My husband was a rock throughout the ordeal, but he had gone through the terror of almost losing his wife and unborn child. My sweet Dovi didn’t know how to process the new reality — was I really home for good? Or would I disappear again? He was constantly testing me.

These were trying times. I was visiting my baby in the NICU every day, getting speech and physical therapy, helping my older son process his feelings, and trying to process my own new reality. Luckily, my husband was able to get paternity leave so I wasn’t alone. Our nanny was also a huge help with day-to-day childcare.

In the NICU, my miracle baby was getting stronger. There were a few setbacks, but after ten weeks, they let him come home. He was four pounds, as small as a Shabbos chicken. Dovi was so excited — he couldn’t wait to hold and carry his younger brother.

At two and a half months, our baby was cleared for a bris. We named him Moshe. I was so grateful to the doctors and nurses, to my husband and our wonderful family, to all the people who had prayed for me and most of all to Hashem — for allowing me to live to see this moment.

Moshe is now five years old. As a baby, he got early intervention for physical therapy, but now he’s smart, athletic, and loves sports. He’s doing great in school, and no one has any idea that he was born at 30 weeks.

Dovi is eight now. He’s incredibly bright and creative — and very resilient. He doesn’t crumble if things don’t go his way; he shakes it off and forges ahead. A sensitive soul, he’s extremely kind and patient with little kids.

These challenges, one after the next, were painful. They didn’t seem to serve any purpose. But on the other side now, I can see the yeridah letzorech aliyah.

Each one has taught me to reexamine my priorities. From what I thought was important in a partner, to making the decision to leave the cutthroat corporate world and start my own firm with some friends. Life is short — being on a ventilator for nine days taught me that — and I’m newly grateful for every breath. I want to spend my time with the people I love most.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 957)