I had a near-death experience on January 4, 1982 after a misdiagnosed ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Four days I laid in a hospital bed before "emergency surgery" was done. I don't remember much of the details of the NDE other then looking down from the ceiling at my body in the hospital bed. Later, I woke up with the question "What have I been doing with my life?" repeating again and again in my head. The following is an account of the aftereffects of my near-death experience. First Seven Years: Immediately after the near-death experience and for the following year, I grieved for the loss of my baby. Yet I also felt almost blissful. Perhaps I brought back some of the peace I had experienced on the other side. I became more outgoing and less shy. The question "What have I been doing with my life?" remained in my head. I began changing my life accordingly. I returned to college where I made several friends and acquaintances which gave me a social life that I did not have before. In nursing school, I discovered that I really didn't need to study. After a while I was falling asleep whenever I opened a textbook, but I still excelled on tests. It was like I "inhaled" the lectures even though this included subjects with a lot of material such as pharmacology, microbiology, anatomy and physiology and of course, nursing as it related to each disease from infancy to old age. My husband could not deal with the changes in my life or my blossoming personality--mostly because he was no longer the center of my attention as I had new other interests. I still cared for him and our home but I now had a life too. Basically he was wasting his life out in the streets and not home much anyway. After the near-death experience, I chose not to enable him anymore.