A three-year-old girl left her parents stunned when she revealed she had an encounter with God while going through a near-death experience.
It was the middle of the night in 2018 when Ohio mom Brittani Tomic was woken up by her daughter, Zola, who came into her room bleeding from the mouth after recently having her tonsils taken out.
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"I knew I needed to stay calm," Brittani told Inside Edition. "We knew we needed to get help. So we called 911… It was like the panic didn't set in until she was rushed back into surgery.”
The surgery came after Zola began experiencing seizures when she was two years old. Doctors suspected it might be sleep apnea, and she was referred to a specialist of conditions of the head and neck.
The specialist informed Zola's parents that her tonsils were enlarged and could obstruct her breathing, so she underwent surgery.
“We were confident. We felt like this was going to be the end of all of her seizures and the medical issues. This is going to be the surgery to fix everything,” Brittani said.
When Zola came into her parents' room bleeding just over a week later, the mom knew that wasn't going to be the case.
The three-year-old had to have an emergency blood transfusion, which thankfully saved her life.
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After the transfusion, doctors were also able to figure out that Zola has a condition known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which makes your body's connective tissue weaker than it should be.
“They bruise easy. It's a lot of pain, a lot of fatigue,” Brittani explained. “What I tell people is that the condition itself is not life-threatening, but it has a lot of life-threatening complications.”
However, it wasn't until months later that Brittani learned exactly what her daughter experienced on the night she almost died.
“It’s something even to this day that I still can't even comprehend,” Brittani said. “I was getting her ready and, it wasn't even like we were talking about anything God-related beforehand, we were just getting ready to go to gymnastics.
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"And she just asked, ‘When can I see God again?’”
Brittani was naturally confused, considering that as far as she was aware her three-year-old, like most people in the world, had never seen God.
She asked Zola exactly when she'd seen the heavenly figure, and she replied: "Oh, the night I died.”
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The three-year-old revealed that God 'gave her a hug', and that she still had conversations with him.
“The thing is, she never flat-lined when she was in the hospital,” the mom said. “So it really was just, I guess, a near-death experience she might've had, or he came to her to calm her and stay with her.”
Zola didn't only reveal an encounter with God, but also with his son.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that's so amazing that you felt comfort, and you saw him,’” Brittani recalled. “And that’s when she said that it looked like a rainbow and Jesus thanked her for being his friend and for loving him. And I just can't explain it. I'm just so grateful she's still here.”
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After hearing about her daughter's experience and how it brought comfort to her, Brittani and her family decided to start going back to church.
Emily Brown