Life before death sprang a nasty surprise on Amber Rose Kordiak. When she was just seven years old, a 600-pound tyre fell on top of her in July 2013.
It was awful, as it crushed the delicate bones in her face. Her parents feared the worst.
Amber Rose's injuries were so terrible that even the paramedics were shocked.
"They were standing there with their mouths open, they were frozen, they weren't moving," her mother, Jen Kodiak, recalled
Amber was taken to a Twin Cities hospital, where she seemed to have lost so much blood that the little body was in shock.
Fortunately, the organs remained intact and did not shut down.
Immediately she was sent in for surgery and fell into a coma. Was she going to live or die?
It turned out to be both! She was alive because she awoke, of course. But after opening her eyes, she told her mother, Jen Kordiak, that she had "been to heaven".
Later, Jen said: "I think she probably did die; I don't know how she made it."
Amber had said: "When I went to heaven, I saw light beams of prayers coming up to heaven." Jen said that her daughter had followed "bright lights and beams of prayers". The dead girl was gazing down on herself after she had the accident and actually watched her father pulling off the tyre from her body.
Jen told KSTP: "She said, 'Mommy, I floated up out of my body and I saw dad holding me. He pulled the tire off me.'"
She added: "She was happy in heaven. She says she could see us and could reflect on our heartache and regret and chose to come back to this world."
After three years, Amber narrated everything that happened. She confessed to her parents that she "had decided to come back to Earth" because she "didn't want her family to be sad".
It was her choice, therefore, to live.
A number of surgeries have helped to restore her face, although many bones have crushed her facial bones beyond repair. In order to get back her vision, her orbital bone needs to be restored, while her nose too has to be rebuilt so that she can breathe again. Her jaw, teeth and nerves also have to be repaired and she suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Amber has gone through a battery of surgeries bravely and is getting back some order into her face from Mayo Clinic.
Jen said: "I just love what she teaches us about love and people and mercy and beauty and she doesn't even know she does it. ...When it first happened they told us our baby girl would never smile again, and her smile was amazing from day one. She defied odds, and said, 'I can't frown, but I can smile' and that's what happened."
