It was Nov. 15, 2022 when Father Bill John Acosta-Escobar, then 47, began to feel some unusual pain. It was in his chest and right leg. He drove to Wake Med’s North Hospital in Raleigh. It was seven minutes from the rectory where he was living, he said, and he figured they’d check him, prescribe pain medicine and send him home.
He learned he was having cardiac issues and was asked to change clothes for a transfer to Wake Med Hospital on New Bern Avenue, where more tests could be done.
He left a message for friend Father Rafael Leon-Valencia, letting him know he was going to “Big Wake” for heart studies. Father Bill John started to change his clothes for transport.
It’s the last thing he remembers about that day.
“My understanding is that while I was in the ambulance, I had the first cardiac arrest,” he told NC Catholics about a year after the incident. “And then they put a stent in … [and] then I started developing some kind of internal bleeding.”
Father Bill John was later transferred from Wake Med to Duke University Hospital in Durham, where, he said, ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, offered him lifesaving support .
“When I arrived to Duke, I had another cardiac arrest … I don't remember anything of that,” he said.
It would be a month before he could be told what happened and begin to comprehend it. Father Bill John spent weeks in an induced coma. That time was marked by five surgeries, two bouts with pneumonia and one with bronchitis, he said. For Father, there were vivid dreams and, likely, hallucinations.
His body was so swelled that it couldn’t be stitched up all at once, he said. “They were coming every day putting three or four stitches, until they were able to completely close my body.”
On the 7th floor of Duke, his cousin, Clara Rivera, stayed as near to him as she could considering all the machines and needed workspace in the room. She had recently retired from teaching in New York and represented his family members, who were living in their home country of Colombia. Father Michael Burbeck, vicar general for the diocese, was there every day of the coma, too, Father Bill John said. And Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama was a regular visitor.
Rivera decorated, and redecorated, the window in Father’s room with greeting cards that arrived. “Boxes. I tell you … boxes of cards. From every classroom [at St. Catherine of Siena School where he was pastor],” she said.
Seeing the students’ artwork and reading their words was a comfort for her, especially because the window was next to the chair where she sat each day.
Available surfaces held scapulars and a small statue of Mary. Many of the gifts were from people who wished they could visit. The medical team, Father said, was focused on his health and keeping potential infections out. Visitors were limited.
Instead, people prayed from their homes and other places. Father Bill John’s parish held holy hours and prayed rosaries for him. So did other faith communities.
“The amount of people that were calling every day! The amount of love and care that they gave to him and to me!” said Rivera emphatically, remembering how people offered to help her and how the news of Father’s hospitalization spread. “And then they connected with other people … I noticed that every time there were more and more. It was like a chain reaction.”
People cared and wanted to know his condition. Those closest to Father Bill John faced daily choices about what details to share and when. “They couldn’t know how much they could say, for my privacy … the things I would like or not,” he said.
It was a period of intensive care and critical condition. For Rivera, it felt like there was bad news about an organ or fluid every day for almost two weeks. “Nothing good happened,” she said. “Every day was something worse.”
The team kept trying. When tough choices were discussed among the medical staff, Rivera and close brother priests, they agreed to “wait a day and see,” she said.
Soon after Thanksgiving, it seemed like a miracle had arrived.
“They started lowering the sedation,” said Rivera. “We had the hope because things were getting better. It was a miracle. There is no other explanation.”
Coming out of the coma
He emerged from the coma Dec. 8, 2022. It was the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. But during the time immediately before, he was in a changing state of consciousness.
“When I was becoming fully awake, when they were using all the medicines … I started to remember a few things, especially some of the priest friends who stopped by to say goodbye,” he told NC Catholics.
As Father Bill John finished saying these words, he smiled. And then a quiet pause was filled with only his breath, eyes shifting to the side and his clutched thumbs moving in a pattern that was perhaps equal parts self-comfort and nerves. He stifled tears.
“I do remember those prayers,” he said, nodding his head and gesturing toward his ear with his hand.
He recalled familiar voices and not only the prayers of priests and the manner in which they prayed, but also the prayers of his cousin, about ten years his senior, and her voice reciting devotions they learned in childhood.
At times, things felt scary.
“I remember … people who were doing prayers at a funeral ... I thought I was going to be buried. I had vivid dreams … [in one] I remember falling from a building and seeing hands trying to reach me and they couldn’t … I remember thinking that I was falling to purgatory because I remember in purgatory you cannot pray for your soul, you depend on somebody else’s prayer,” he said. “But the doctors would say that was part of the process of delirious situations and hallucinations … being on the medicine.”
Some of the cardiologists, he added, had a nickname for him that he began to learn during his recovery.
“When they stopped by to see me, they said, ‘How is Father Lazarus?’ Not only because they know the Biblical story of Lazarus but because, in a way, they are confirming that something special went on there and I attribute that to the people of the diocese praying for me,” he smiled.
The nurses, he added, encouraged him to restore and recover.
“I couldn’t be in better hands, in the spiritual sense and also in the medical sense … the nurses were really patient with me,” he said, noting that he went back to visit those who cared for him and prays for them every day.
Life after ICU, hospital
Father Bill John left the intensive care unit Dec. 12, 2022, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Ten days later he was discharged from the hospital. With his diocesan status as medical leave, he was no longer expected to carry out the duties of a pastor or priest in active ministry. He moved from the rectory of St. Catherine Parish in Wake Forest to what’s known as the Gossman House, a diocesan residential property in Raleigh where he lived with Monsignor Jerry Lewis.
With physical therapy and medical care, he relearned how to walk, eat, speak and use his hands to write. Some of the best news he received, he said, was when he learned he was ready to drive a car again.
For the first time since he entered the seminary in 1992, he was able to spend Christmas Day with his family in Colombia in 2023. He celebrated Mass with his parents, friends and other family, including Rivera, and shared his story with them.
“I traveled with families who offered promises on my behalf for my recovering,” he said, adding that took him to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa, Santuario del Senor de los Milagros in Buga, Colombia and Santuary of Lourdes and St. John Vianney in France. He went to Rome for three months for a sabbatical program that he called “a dream come true.”
In the United States, driving again gave him the freedom to visit friends, celebrate Mass on weekends and run errands, such as shopping. Inevitably, he would run into people who prayed for him. He sometimes felt like he was seeing and talking to people who knew his story, but whom he’d never met before.
It brought him comfort, he said, but also required his humility.
“Normally I am accustomed to doing things for people instead of people doing things for me. Normally I don’t like to be known too much,” he smiled.
When he talks to others, there are some common questions that emerge. Did he see the light? No. Did he see a tunnel? No. Did he see the face of Jesus? Also no.
Conversations sometimes become deep. After all, many people and their loved ones have had similar, life-threatening situations with very different outcomes, such as death, slower recoveries and other losses.
“I mean, they are happy that you are ok,” he said of the interactions. “But I guess they may ask themselves, ‘Why Father [Bill John] yes and my husband no? Or my wife no?’” For all involved, it’s a tough situation to ponder.
While he can see the visible scars of his surgeries, there’s a lot he knows people, including himself, cannot see, know or understand. Those big questions fall in that category. He can feel the pain of other situations, accompany people and pray, but he said only God truly knows the why of peoples’ lives.
Life today
While he was on medical leave, there were things to enjoy but Father Bill John missed parish life. It returned in the spring of 2024 when he was assigned to St. Bernadette Parish in Fuquay Varina.
“My heart is working fine. My organs are working fine. They put a defibrillator in my heart just in case I need it in the future. The heart beats like anybody else. But I need, of course, right now to lose some weight,” he smiled. “Prayers are important … to those struggling and having difficulties. I believe everything they did because I see all my scars … sometimes I wish I had a little more memory to make it more real for me inside, but I guess it’s not what the Lord wanted. There you go. The Lord’s plans aren’t always the same as ours. But I am very happy to be here.”
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Editor’s note: In November 2023, about a year after suffering cardiac arrests, Father Bill John Acosta-Escobar sat down to talk with NC Catholics. At the time he was on medical leave. But, as of summer 2024, he has returned to active priestly ministry.
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