Lynn Darmon couldn't shake the terror that her daughter was suffering from some sort of illness, despite doctor's assurances that the baby was healthy. Darmon turned out to be right. (Courtesy Lynn Darmon
We've all heard of mother's intuition: when a mom just knows something's
wrong with her kids. But have you ever wondered if there was something more
going on?
Michigan mom of two Lynn Darmon is convinced that has to be the case
after she nearly lost her second child shortly after birth. For Darmon, it
started as a feeling -- a sixth sense filling her with dread that something was
wrong while her baby was still in the womb. It was "just a feeling that
something was not right; that something wasn't feeling right. Not that
something was wrong in the present with the pregnancy, but that something was
going to come up, with the baby's health," Darmon told Elizabeth Vargas in
an interview airing tonight on "20/20." "The feeling pretty much
was, to prepare myself for it and to be able to recognize when it was going to
happen," she said.
What exactly? She wasn't sure, but Darmon passed along her feeling to
her doctor, who assured her everything was fine. "There was always a
feeling, 'Well, maybe it's just my imagination,'" she said. Her daughter
Ali was born healthy and happy, and just as Darmon was about to dismiss the bad
vibes as parental paranoia, they came back with a vengeance. "Ten days
into her birth, it was early morning. I remember holding her, and having that
feeling, that something was really wrong with her." Her pediatrician
encouraged her to go to the emergency room with Ali, mostly to try to alleviate
Lynn's fears. Twice she brought Ali in and was returned home with a clean bill
of health, but the feeling persisted and grew stronger.
Sensing the clock was ticking on her daughter's life, Lynn took Ali
again, this time to Beaumont Children's Hospital. When they once again tried to
send Lynn home, she dug her heels in. "They said, 'She is fine. Here are
your discharge papers,' and I refused to sign them," Darmon said. She said
that at that point the medical staff thought they had a mother who needed help,
not a child. "And at that moment, they are thinking they have a mom with
post-partum psychosis," she said. But before hospital staff could get her
to see a psychiatrist, Pediatric Infectious Disease specialist Dr. Bishara
Freij stepped in. "She was clearly concerned that there was something
serious going on that nobody had yet to identify or explain," Dr. Freij
told "20/20." "He said, 'You are so sure that there is something
wrong with your daughter, you tell me what it is.' And I remember at that
moment looking at my daughter, making eye contact with her and knowing
immediately it was in the, in the abdomen. It just came to me," Darmon
said.
Dr. Freij ordered a CT scan, and, as it turned out, Darmon had nailed
it: Ali had a rare, undetected infection outside her small intestine which
could have been fatal if not caught just in time. "She ended up being in
the operating room really within two or three hours of the encounter,"
Feij said. Looking back, Darmon is convinced that her feeling wasn't just
mother's intuition, but a paranormal phenomenon called a premonition. Dr. Feij
isn't sure what happened that day, but to him, a mother's intuition or
premonition is always something to take seriously. "I'm an older
pediatrician and my mother still insists some of her intuition is better than
our education," he said. "Sometimes, she's right."
Dr. Larry Dossey has studied and collected cases of the phenomena
extensively for his latest book "The Power of Premonition." He says premonitions
-- which usually warn of health problem, impending accidents or natural
disasters -- often come to us in our sleep. "Roughly two thirds of people
will acknowledge having some sort of premonition dream in their life,"
Dossey said.
According to Dossey, one of the most common types of premonitions he's
seen are those experienced by mothers about their children. "There's an
older term back in the 1800s [called] Mother Wit: what women just had for their
babies. And if you look at premonitions, in the literature, the most common, is
that of a mother for something happening to her baby," he said. Dossey
added there are some clues to identify a dream premonition. "One woman
said, 'The premonition dreams that turn out to be true are lit up from the
inside.' So the vividness is one clue. Another clue is whether or not they're
recurrent. Many of them that turn out to be true come back night after night as
if they're clamoring for attention," he said.
Of course, it's not hard to find skeptics who dismiss all this as
new-age blather. "If premonitions are real, the most convenient way to
explain them would be that information is traveling back in time from an event
to a person. And so if that is right, then pretty much everything else we know
about physics is wrong. So that's kind of a big hurdle to get over," said
Matt Hutson, a writer for Psychology Today and the author of the book "The
7 Laws of Magical Thinking."
Hutson believes there's a simpler reason behind what we think are
premonitions. "We're always thinking about what might happen in the
future, so it's easy to feel like, maybe I have anxiety for a reason, maybe I'm
sensing the future. And then, looking back and labeling, a thought as an
example of precognition that is mostly because of our tendency to see patterns
in the world," he said.
But Lynn Darmon says it's hard to ignore one's sixth sense when it's
been calling to you your whole life. Her premonition about her daughter, she
said, wasn't her first. "The earliest memory I have, I was about five
years old, uh, when my grandfather passed. I remember waking up feeling very
sad for my mother and trying to explain to her that her father had just passed
and she said, 'he is OK, you just had a bad dream.' And I kept saying, 'No, I,
I am so sorry, Mommy,' and then about two hours later, she received a telegram
that confirmed that."
Darmon said premonitions followed her all her life, but it wasn't until
the incident with Ali that Darmon decided to embrace what she calls her gifts.
She now works with clients in need of spiritual guidance. As for Ali, she is
now a healthy 20-year-old and attends college. "Now I realize how special
her gift truly is, and how lucky I am to have grown up with that and to have
her as a mom," the young woman said. "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't
for that."
ABC News
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