(CNN) --
The doctor pleaded with Paige Deiner to close her eyes and sleep.
But she refused to listen.
She was terrified.
"If I fall asleep, I won't wake up," she told him.
It was a night in October 2021 and Deiner was fighting for her life and that of her 24-week-old baby.
She was in the intensive care unit of a Delaware hospital after being diagnosed with covid-19.
She had lost nearly 30 pounds in 12 days after being put on a ventilator.
A doctor later told her that at one point she calculated that she had a 5% chance of survival.
Paige Deiner survived a near death experience from covid.
Deiner was trying to calm his nerves when the doctor entered his room.
She listened to Celtic music on her iPhone and watched "Peppa Pig," an animated children's television show, on the television.
But her every breath became a painful rattle, and she couldn't help but hear the beeps from the monitors as the doctor told her to listen.
"You have to sleep," the doctor told him.
"If you don't sleep, you're going to die. You can't heal if your brain can't sleep."
Deiner fought back panic and closed his eyes.
He thought it was the end.
His world turned dark.
But his story had only just begun.
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After spending 549 days hospitalized for covid-19 in nine hospitals and health centers, this man is finally home
A new kind of near-death experience
Anyone who has read about near-death experiences (NDEs) can imagine what he thinks happened to Deiner.
Float through a tunnel toward a light in the distance.
Hear heavenly music.
Greet loved ones who died many years before.
These are the kinds of stories people tell in books like "90 Minutes in Heaven" and "Proof of Heaven."
Each of the survivors of a near-death experience shares stories of being spiritually transformed by what they glimpsed in the afterlife.
Paige Deiner, in a hospital, while recovering from a near-death experience that changed her perspective.
But in the two years since its inception, the covid pandemic has spawned a new category of near-death experiences, recounted by people like Deiner who re-perceived the miraculous in the ordinary of everyday life: being able to savor and smelling the coffee, hugging a child again and seeing the sun rise after fearing not hearing the birdsong again in the morning.
They were spiritually transformed not by a vision of the afterlife, but by what they saw in this life, as they struggled to stay alive after being hit by covid.
These kinds of stories don't usually get book or movie deals.
However, people like Deiner, 41, have these amazing survival stories that can help us all.
It all starts with the power of gratitude.
It's a cliché for some, but not for many covid survivors.
"I often think about how much we take for granted," Deiner wrote in a Facebook post shortly after being discharged from the hospital in December, "from the ability to walk or swallow to the ability to breathe."
Global death toll from covid-19 exceeds 6 million
angels all around us
Before he got sick, Deiner was a ball of energy.
He was working on his doctorate in Oriental Medicine after earning a bachelor's degree in International Relations.
She was a mother, a former journalist, a massage therapist living in Lincoln, Delaware, and a Reiki teacher.
She once toured Central America with nothing more than a backpack.
"I was at the top of my game," he says.
Covid changed all that.
He had to learn what many of the best spiritual traditions say: we come into the world helpless and we leave it the same.
We need we a they.
"When you're really sick, you're in a powerless situation," he says.
"You depend on people and strangers to keep you alive."
Like many survivors with near-death experiences, Deiner met angels.
But they weren't the winged, glowing creatures that appear in books and movies.
There was the nurse who patiently cleaned her up after she was covered in vomit and blood.
The pastor who approached the Intensive Care Unit, prayed the Our Father with her and cried with her even though she didn't know him.
The doctor who urged her to sleep.
When she opened her eyes eight hours later, "he was still there," she says.
A prayer for the living
Deiner didn't think he would end up in the hospital.
She had already been vaccinated for the first time and was about to get vaccinated for the second time last year when she got sick.
While hovering between life and death in the ICU, she says she began experiencing "intensive care delirium," a disorder in which patients hallucinate, become paranoid and lose track of time and space.
When they took her off her ventilator, she lost all feeling in her body and found herself floating above herself, looking down at the attending doctors.
She could see her body covered in bruises and the tubes dangling from her arms.
"I couldn't feel the baby move anymore because I didn't feel anything," she says.
"I thought he had died."
So Deiner did what anyone in the Internet age would do while stuck in limbo, not knowing if he's dead or alive.
He texted a friend.
She doesn't know how she did it, but she somehow sent a message to a friend after she was taken off her ventilator.
She was so disoriented at the time that she believed that she had messaged her friend through a form of telepathy.
The friend was Craig Maull, a fellow massage therapist interested in alternative forms of spirituality who also repairs roads for the Delaware Department of Transportation.
He got a message from her after not hearing from Deiner for 12 days ("He checked the obituaries three or four times a day," he said).
Her message was simple: "I think I'm dead. I don't feel my body. I must be a ghost."
"You're alive. Trust me," he replied.
"You were in a coma for about 12 days."
Maull gave him a mantra, a traditional Hawaiian meditation to sing and calm his mind:
"I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you."
Meditation helped save his life, says Deiner.
The power of it lies in its simplicity.
He says it helped "unite my mind, body, and spirit."
A question you can't answer
Deiner recovered and gave birth to a healthy five-pound son in December.
She named him Soren and says "it's growing like grass."
She says that she only realized how close she came to death when a doctor later told her that they initially calculated that she had a 5% chance of survival.
Paige Deiner with her son, Soren.
She calls him "miracle baby".
Hearing that forecast terrified her.
"It felt like a bucket of cold water, horror and panic all at once," she says.
But Deiner still faces big challenges: he can't cut his own food, tie his shoes or change Soren's clothes because of the constant pain in his hands.
He has trouble walking and has needed therapy to learn to swallow again.
He lost his sense of taste and smell.
The nerve damage caused by the disease still persists, and he is in constant physical therapy.
She depends on her daughter Isabella de Ella, 15, to help her.
"It's hard. I'm not going to lie," says Isabella.
"It's hard to watch someone struggle. It's hard to put things aside and help her. But I'm so thankful that she's alive to ask for help."
Deiner's body may be weaker, but his dreams are bigger.
She has a massage, wellness and yoga center, but she wants to do more.
She says that she wants to get a degree in oriental medicine to help others.
She thinks of moving to a small town in an underdeveloped country to provide medical care.
She can't imagine going back to her life as it was before.
Almost a million Americans have died from covid.
Many of us have lost parents, siblings, friends, coworkers... the sudden absence of people who, in the words of the poet Billy Collins, "have left a form of air walking in their place."
For Deiner, there is still a mystery about her illness that she cannot answer: Why did she survive when so many others died?
"What can I say? It wasn't my time. There were other people praying for me. I'm very lucky to have good medical care," says Deiner.
"I have no idea".
But Deiner says he can answer that question in part because of the way he now chooses to live.
"I have a deep sense of responsibility," he says.
"I was given a second chance to live. I have to live an honorable life for the people who didn't have a chance, and for the people who will never walk, talk or breathe on their own."