by Keith Hoerner

Created on: January 11, 2010   Last Updated: January 12, 2010

Then Sings My Soul

Verses from the old hymn rise harmoniously. First faint. “O Lord, my God …” Then increasingly louder. “When I in awesome wonder …” As shadow people circle Ann in undulating shades of grey. She feels the deepest, purest sense of serenity. Love, indefinable, wraps her in its comforting weave as the music crescendos and the light grows blinding. She does not, cannot raise her head out of sincere humility. For Ann recognizes she stands in the presence of God.

On April 28, 2008, Ann Thomas, then forty-six years old, “flat lined” on the operating table at Barnes-Jewish St. Louis Hospital, after being given an overdose of the narcotic painkiller: Dilaudid. It is in these moments (suspended between life and death) that this account of her being in the presence of God, and conversing with Him, originates.

“I was having a procedure,” Ann explains, “called (now let me say this slowly and forgive me; I can sound like a doctor after all these years) … endo-scopic retro-grade cholan-gio-panc-rea-tography or ERCP… a process to detect blockage in the bile ducts leading to the pancreas.”

Pancreas Divisum, a congenital birth defect of the pancreatic bile duct, is the cause of Ann’s living daily with severe abdominal pain for over thirteen years. “It’s less than it was since … the experience,” Ann answers, when asked what level of pain she now lives with (on a level of one to ten - with ten being the worst). “But it still floats somewhere between five and seven.”

“How do you cope with it?” I ask.

“How do I not?” she asks in return. “You just accept it.”

This seems remarkable, in that Ann is vivacious, hardworking, successful and rarely without a smile. I picture myself wincing and “ouching” all day long.

A homemaker for eighteen years after high school, and a rising star in real estate for eight years, Ann is a fast-paced woman. Her shoulder-length blonde hair crowns a fit frame dressed with a discerning sense of style. She is “put together” as one might say. Not stand-offish, her green eyes invite you in without question. She is accessible, wanting to help you in any way possible. Ann attracts those that meet her effortlessly by offering something that can’t quite be pinpointed: a knowledge, a secret known.

The ERCP procedure, done through an endoscope, was to seek

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