Actress Danielle Vasinova is opening up about her unique experience with death.
In December 2019, months before COVID was declared a pandemic, Vasinova caught the virus. The actress, who will kick off 2025 with roles in both “1923” and “The Madison,” another “Yellowstone” spin-off, became so ill that she flatlined for three minutes.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, she explained that when she got sick she felt like she had the flu, so she went to an urgent care in Los Angeles, where doctors sent her home with a diagnosis of strep throat and instructions to rest.
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The next day, she said she woke up feeling “very weak” like she couldn’t walk. She’d had plans to travel to Las Vegas to film a commercial, and a family member drove her there from her home in L.A. Vasinova felt ill throughout the drive, but it wasn’t until 2 a.m. that night that she woke her brother, who she was staying with, to tell him, “I think I’m going to die.”
He drove her to the hospital and dropped her off in the front while he went to park the car, and she said that he has since told her that by the time he made it inside the hospital, “it was like a scene out of a movie,” with people all rushing into one room. When he got there, he saw a woman on top of Vasinova, giving chest compressions, and then he saw the heart monitor flatline.
“For three minutes,” she said. “Gone.”
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After doctors and nurses were able to get her heart beating again, she was transferred to another hospital, where she was immediately placed in a coma.
“So I had complete organ failure,” Vasinova explained. “They put me on a ventilator, and I was there for almost a month. My mom was from New York. They couldn’t tell her that I was going to make it. They didn’t know if I was going to relapse, if I was going to pull through, if this was the end of the road or not. But there was something more for me. It wasn’t my time to go.”
She was admitted to the hospital on Dec. 12, 2019, then released on New Year’s Day.
During her stay, in addition to complete organ failure, she was given a pericardial window – a type of surgery done to drain fluid from the sac around the heart. She also had two tubes placed in her lungs to drain fluid and was placed on a ventilator.
“I was 90 pounds,” she recalled of being discharged. “I had to relearn how to walk.”
She continued, “I had to really take a step back and figure out … why was it not my time, and what is my purpose, and what am I here to do? Because I didn’t even know how I was going to work again. I didn’t know my path forward. I didn’t know what to do.”
WATCH: DANIELLE VASINOVA SAYS DOCTORS WERE ‘BAFFLED’ OVER HER DECEMBER 2019 COVID CASE
Vasinova grew up around horses and has always loved to ride, so she said she ended up turning there for answers.
“I started going to the barn and I couldn’t ride because I was so weak. I couldn’t even go up a stairwell. But I started going to the barn, and it was like, the healing, the healing power of horses and just being around them and being around that energy. And I just felt like … there’s a greater purpose here.”
The actress said she’s grateful to the medical team that helped her and for the “love and prayers” that were sent her way during her ordeal, adding, “It was really connecting with God and just being grateful for every day here.”
Although she was technically dead for three minutes, she said she didn’t have a near-death experience. Or if she did, she doesn’t remember it now.
“I don’t remember because they induced coma right away,” she explained. “Right away. Like after I died, I went right into a coma, and they said that I could have flashbacks, I could have things that happen or that come to me later in life. But I don’t remember seeing a light. I don’t remember anything like that.”
What she does remember is feeling “a sense of peace” as she flatlined.
“I can’t really describe it as anything other than like, there’s nothing to be afraid of. So weird because it was so traumatic, like it was so … I was gone. But there was just this sense of peace, the sense of calm that came over. That’s that’s all I remember.”
Five years later, Vasinova says she’s still not completely recovered.
While she’s “stronger every day,” her left lung is still not at its full capacity, “So I just have to continue to train and to strengthen and to, you know, work out. And sometimes I get tired. And so I just have to, you know, recognize that and just take a timeout. So it’s a work in progress.”
Still, her condition now is “night and day” from what it was in the thick of it. She said she’s doing “better every day.”
Her faith, she said, “100%” helped her through it.
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“I think I had lost touch with my faith a little bit before that,” she said. “And I think it really reconnected me and, you know, showed me really what’s important in life.”
In February, Vasinova will make her debut in the “Yellowstone” universe, appearing in the second season premiere of “1923.” While she didn’t have any stories to share of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, the show’s stars, she did have an interesting story as to how she came to be cast.
“They flew me down last minute because I actually wasn’t the first choice for the job,” she revealed. “But another girl that they had cast, I guess she couldn’t ride [horses], and so, you know, I ride, and they’re like, ‘Can you be here tomorrow?’”
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Her character, Ata Waipa, is a Native American from the Comanche nation. Vasinova herself is Cherokee and Sioux, and she said that although she was cast last minute, she had to learn how to speak Comanche for the role. A storm pushed back filming for a couple of weeks, giving her more time to prepare, but she said she did have the dialect and the language ready to go in the short time frame.
In “The Madison,” another upcoming series in the Taylor Sheridan universe, Vasinova will appear alongside Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman named Kestrel who lives on a Montana ranch with her husband. She didn’t offer any additional details for fear of spoilers.
“Michelle is … she’s a superstar. She’s a rock star. She’s a sweetheart,” she gushed of Pfeiffer.
