24-year-old Libby Oxley shares her miraculous story after clinically dead for 40 minutes

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) - “The last thing I remember from that day is looking down at my gear shift and that was it.”

That’s where 24-year-old Libby Oxley’s heart stopped.

She was rushed to Ball Memorial Hospital where doctors immediately started life-saving measures.

While they tried to revive her body, her spirit was already moving on.

“I did have an experience where I did see angels,” Oxley said. “I have an angel and she’s very sweet and very loving. She was like, ‘Yeah you’re dead. You’re in heaven now.’ And I said, ‘I’m not dead. There’s no way I’m dead.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah you are.’ And I said, ‘I’m not ready to die. I want to be alive.’ She gave me a hug and said that’s okay.”

Her doctors weren’t ready to let her go either.

Libby’s heart stopped due to blood clots cutting off circulation to her heart.

Doctors used tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) treatment to break up the blood clots.

”They told us she had a two percent chance of living through the night,” Abby Oxley, Libby’s sister, told 16 News Now. “It’s not likely because she coded twice so it’s just a waiting game to see if she can hold her blood pressure or if she can’t.”

Libby beat those odds, but still wasn’t out of the woods yet.

A few days after she escaped death, she suffered a stroke to the left side of her brain.

“Everything on the left side— all my cognitive abilities— they were just moot,” Oxley said.

Unable to speak, read, or even match playing cards, Libby amazingly recovered through months of physical therapy, even finishing up her master’s degree before the end of the semester.

“But when you go through something that messes with your brain, that is what kind of changes things--your perspective, your patience level, and it just changes a lot.,” Oxley said.

She lived at home in South Bend the following year as she bounced back from the near tragedy. Libby was initially admitted to Memorial Hospital’s inpatient rehabilitation program, where she started regaining her physical strength. After discharge, Dr. Christopher Ketcham directed her outpatient care at Elkhart General Hospital’s neurorehabilitation program.

Libby says the physical trauma is mostly healed, but the emotional scars may never go away.

“I suffer with severe depression, like really bad, severe anxiety, and PTSD. I didn’t sleep for a long time after the hospital witch is normal for people who spent a long time in the hospital, to suffer from some kind of stress afterward. You know not having a nurse there if something happens or a doctor there if something happens,” Oxley said.

She still deals with these emotional challenges, but with the help of her doctors in Muncie and South Bend, as well as her family’s support, Libby is getting another chance at life, having already died once.

Libby is back in school working on earning her second master’s at Ball State.

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