In 2016, I was working a discreet protective mission in Peru, supporting Malia Obama’s gap-year cultural immersion journey through the Andes and the Amazon.

After five weeks of high-altitude emergencies, trauma care in the field, and treating indigenous patients in makeshift basecamps, we entered the final phase: the jungle. On a routine hike outside Pilcopata, I slipped in the mud—and landed on a fer-de-lance, one of the most venomous snakes in the Americas. Its fangs sank deep into my left arm. The venom spread quickly. Within hours, I was unconscious.

What followed was a five-and-a-half-mile Skedco evacuation, hemorrhaging, loss of consciousness, and two cardiac arrests in a remote emergency room. But that wasn’t the whole story. The moment that changed me came during a clinical code—when my body lay on the gurney, but I wasn’t in it.

An Out-of-Body Experience—and a Spiritual Reckoning