A 6-year-old girl has quite a story to tell three years after surviving a near-death experience.
Zola's parents had struggled to figure out what was going on with her medically since pregnancy.
"When they did [an] ultrasound, they found the choroid plexus cyst in her brain," mom Brittani Tomic told Inside Edition.
"But since she didn't line up with the Down syndrome or the trisomy 18 [markers], they just wrote it off as a fluke."
As Zola got older, they couldn't continue to write it off. She wasn't progressing the same way other kids did. At 2, she started having seizures, but doctors ruled out epilepsy and looked to sleep apnea. Zola was recommended to have her tonsils removed because doctors felt their large size might be obstructing her breathing.
"We were confident. We felt like this was going to be the end of all of her seizures and the medical issues. This is going to be the surgery to fix everything," Brittani recalled.
Sadly, things weren't that easy. Shortly after her surgery, Zola awoke in the middle of the night, hemorrhaging from her mouth. Her parents took her to urgent care, where she was transferred to a local hospital for a blood transfusion. Doctors discovered she'd been bleeding internally for 10 days, so the procedure was lifesaving. This led to the then-3-year-old being diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
"They bruise easy. It's a lot of pain, a lot of fatigue," Brittani said.
"What I tell people is that the condition itself is not life-threatening, but it has a lot of life-threatening complications."
Brittani and her family have learned to navigate Zola's diagnosis, but nothing could have prepared them for her story about meeting God.
"I was getting her ready and, it wasn't even like we were talking about anything God-related beforehand, we were just getting ready to go to gymnastics. And she just asked, 'When can I see God again?'" Brittani recalled. She asked Zola when she saw God, and the little girl replied, "The night I died."
"The thing is, she never flat-lined when she was in the hospital," Brittani said.
"So it really was just, I guess, a near-death experience she might've had, or he came to her to calm her and stay with her."
