Healing Conversations: Triffany Hammond

Triffany helps people reinvent themselves from a place of passion and purpose. She will discuss what it takes to experience painful life events and come out the other side of that pain.

Triffany Hammond

One of the things I remember most about my brush with death wasn’t even the close call itself; what stuck with me was everything that came afterward. One Saturday morning in 2004 I was rushed to the hospital with a searing pain in my head and neck at the slightest touch, sound or light. Up until that morning I’d been in the best health of my life. We were an active family, choosing picnics at the park playing baseball and frisbee over languorous dinners on the deck. I loved my workout routines and we lived close to some of the most amazing walks/hikes in our area and took advantage of them regularly. Then, without warning I couldn’t get out of bed. “I’ll be fine,” I said, but I couldn’t lift my head. “Probably just a sinus infection,” I explained, but when I tried to open my eyes it felt like my brain was going to explode. I was married at the time and my husband wasn’t buying it. I was in agony during the driving simultaneously feeling like a trip to the hospital was a severe overreaction and also feeling like if I didn’t brace myself against the car window my head my detach from my body at the next right turn.



I had meningitis. Likely contracted through a mosquito bite. West Nile? They didn’t care because West Nile or not it was now definitely meningitis. Two people had died from it in that very hospital the week before.

There I was on a steady morphine drip to ease the pain – that was all they could do for me and it didn’t help all that much not to mention that it was literally burning through my already flimsy veins. There was a moment, though, when I remember making a choice…about whether to stay or go. These machines that loomed over me, chirping out “you’re sick, you’re sick” began to quiet. The light between the slats over the window that felt like acid beneath my eyelids if I so much as turned my head in that direction began to dim. I was no longer burning hot and even the sensations in my skin dulled until I couldn’t feel anything. I was weightless, quiet, peaceful. I remember a vague and unconcerned thought, “am I dying?” I no longer saw the light through my eyelids at all. It was a grey sort of darkness…until I saw a vision of my children. Nothing dramatic – it was like they were looking at me and asking the same, curious question, “are you dying?”

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