New disabilities board member gets new leaseon life

Mario Sequeira, Staff Writer
Johnson County Sun

Robert Cantin of Olathe last year lost his lower legs, received prostheses and resumed a near-normal life.
In the process, Cantin said, he experienced a life changing moment. As he teetered between life and death for a week in February 2005, Cantin said, God appeared to him and pulled him back to life.

Newly disabled but alive, Cantin, 53, said he feels gratitude and a desire to give back. When he learned of a vacancy on the Olathe Persons With Disabilities Advisory Board, he applied. On Tuesday, the Olathe City Council appointed him a board member.

"My gratitude for surviving left me with a need to give something back to others in need, and to serve them in some capacity," Cantin said Friday. "Also, because I became disabled so recently, I thought I could bring a fresh perspective to the board. After getting my life back to normal, I wanted to exceed that and do something I had not done before."

Cantin, a member of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, pieced together a record of what happened in the hospital, with help from physicians, nurses, family members and friends. He said he wrote the record between April and September 2005, soon after he left the hospital.

According to his chronicle, Cantin's wife, Robyn, called an ambulance in February 2005 after finding him unconscious. The ambulance took him to Saint Luke's South Hospital. The pneumonia-causing streptococcus bacteria had entered his blood and begun to cause serious problems. Cantin wrote his vital organs were failing and doctors thought he would die.

As he lay unconscious for seven days, Cantin wrote, he slipped into another world that was pitch black, cold and frightening and in which he sensed an evil presence that was "pummeling" him.

"I tried to fight back but I couldn't," Cantin explained Friday. "I just got pummeled. I was in another world or consciousness. My experience was different from what was going on around me at the hospital but as real."

In his unconscious state, Cantin wrote, he learned from others that he tossed, turned and lashed out so much he had to be tied to the bed.

At one time, he wrote, he began hearing a growing and constant noise, "the noise of a large crowd when everyone is talking." Cantin attributed that to the hundreds, maybe thousands of friends and strangers praying for him. He said his name had found its way onto dozens of prayer lists and prayer chains.

Complications included massive hemorrhaging, which cut off circulation and oxygen to Cantin's body, causing his organs to start failing and his legs to die. The bleeding also caused bruises all over his body, Cantin wrote.

At the moment he gave up fighting, Cantin wrote, his recovery began.

He wrote: "For six days, I had been knocked down, over and over, only to get up again to fight. Now I didn't think I could get up anymore. For the first time, I began to think the fight was lost ...

"And then something happened. Suddenly, the darkness was replaced by an intense all-consuming light. The cold gave way to warmth. The constant noise I heard for six days was silenced. And then I heard a gentle and comforting voice say, 'You will be fine.'

"It was not exactly the awesome, biblical response I would have imagined, but it was said with such reassurance and strength. I was no longer afraid. My fatigue disappeared, and I felt strong. There was no more pain, and I was totally at peace. More importantly, my attacker was gone, vanquished. ... I knew at that moment that I would live. ... At that moment, there is no doubt in my mind that I was in the presence of God. It was a wondrous thing."

Recalling those lines a year after he wrote them, Cantin said he would not change a word.

"They're just as real today as then," he said. "I don't even know how to explain it. I don't want to come off as a kook but that was my reality. All I can do is tell what I saw."

Cantin made a miraculous recovery, but not without cost. A surgeon told him his legs would have to be amputated or gangrene would set in. Cantin said he prayed for a solution. The surgeon returned a few days later and suggested placing him in a hyperbaric chamber to see if it would speed healing.

In the airtight chamber, Cantin explained, a patient inhales 100 percent oxygen, which is also "forced" into body tissue to hasten healing from open wounds.

The treatment probably helped save his upper legs, Cantin said.

After surgery, Cantin said he eagerly embraced rehabilitation and left the hospital in a wheelchair within 12 days of the amputation.

By June, he began trying temporary artificial legs and also returned to work at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, where he is a business development administrator. After about nine months, Cantin said, he put on permanent prosthetic legs and began working full time.

Through his ordeal, Cantin said, his wife remained rock solid beyond his expectations.

"I never imagined she would be so strong," he said. "She was the only person who didn't think I was going to die. I think it contributed greatly to my survival."

His disability requires adjustment, Cantin said. With the prostheses, bending is limited. He begins and ends the day in a wheelchair. He cannot sleep with the artificial limbs because they chafe too much. He showers sitting down. He cannot enjoy gardening as he used to.

Cantin said he does not know why but he is certain he faced evil during his illness.

"I think that is because it was such a brutal way to die," Cantin said. "I call it evil for two reasons. I have never been that scared in my life. And I had never felt that way ever in the presence of anything. ... when I was in that dark room in the presence of something I couldn't see, I felt it clear to the bone."

Cantin said he has always been a believer but the near-death experience changed him.

"Faith is believing things you can't prove," he said. "My experience is so real to me, it's almost not faith anymore, it's like a knowledge that I know God exists."

He said he never doubted the power of prayer.

"I heard it, I saw it and I felt it," Cantin wrote in his account. "The evidence is abundant: darkness lost to light, cold lost to warmth, fear lost to courage, fatigue lost to strength, pain lost to peace, and the enemy lost to God."