Area Woman Dead After Life-Changing Journey Through Time

Pine Valley, IL - Pine Valley resident Margaret Turner, having discovered how truly unfulfilling her life would have been if she had never married her husband, died today as a result of an injury sustained when returning from a magical journey into the past.

Turner, shown here with her husband a few minutes after realizing how much she still loved him, and right before her brain stem herniated through the hole in the bottom of her skull

"This sometimes happens with traumatic brain injury-induced life lessons," Dr. Mort Fishman, a neurologist at Pine Valley Regional Hospital, explained. "The first hit to the noggin is typically well tolerated, with perhaps only some mild confusion and a headache upon awakening in the past or alternate reality. It's the second impact to the skull that's the problem, the one that sends them back after figuring everything out."

What Dr. Fishman is referring to is known as second impact syndrome, a rare but potentially deadly outcome after an individual experiences a second head injury before fully recovering from an earlier one. According to Fishman, the ability to regulate pressure takes time to reset after a traumatic brain injury:

A second hit can cause excessive dilation of dysregulated blood vessels, and that extra blood flow leads to swelling and rapid deterioration. The brain can literally squeeze through the hole in the bottle of the skull, which is fatal. It sounds like Mrs. Turner must have suffered a second hit to her head while she was searching for a second chance at true love. What? Too soon?

Travelling through time, or to a fantasy version of reality where meaningful people in your life take on fantastical new roles while guiding you to understand what is truly important, is a powerful means of self-improvement or even self-actualization. Extreme personal growth, or the realization that what you were looking for all along was right in front of you the entire time, often requires being knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. In some cases, making a wish on a shooting star or dropping a coin into a magic fountain is necessary for the head injury to result in a voyage of discovery.

Fishman reassures us that death, although possible, is rare and should probably not deter anyone who is drifting through a seemingly pointless life from seeking out a transformative concussion, even when it isn't entirely clear whether or not the experience is real or simply the result of widespread cerebral dysfunction. "This was tragic. But we can take solace in the fact that Mrs. Turner probably didn't suffer. At most, she had maybe two to five minutes where she knew she had made a mistake by asking for a divorce before the cerebral edema shut down her ability to breath. Death came on pretty quick after that."