Cardiac Arrest Survivor Quotes

(Notably, temporary loss of blood or oxygen or excess carbon dioxide in the blood can also cause a disruption in the temporoparietal region and induce out-of-body experiences, which may explain the prevalence of these sensations during accidents, emergencies, heart attacks, etc.) NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES But perhaps the most dramatic category of out-of-body experiences are the near-death stories of individuals who have been declared dead but then mysteriously regained consciousness. In fact, 6 to 12 percent of survivors of cardiac arrest report having near-death experiences. It’s as though they have cheated death itself. When interviewed, they have dramatic tales of the same experience: they left their body and drifted toward a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. The media have seized upon this, with numerous best sellers and TV documentaries devoted to these theatrical stories. Many bizarre theories have been proposed to explain near-death experiences. In a poll of two thousand people, fully 42 percent believed that near-death experiences were proof of contact with the spiritual world that lies beyond death. (Some believe that the body releases endorphins—natural narcotics—before death. This may explain the euphoria that people feel, but not the tunnel and the bright lights.) Carl Sagan even speculated that near-death experiences were a reliving of the trauma of birth. The fact that these individuals recount very similar experiences doesn’t necessarily corroborate their glimpses into the afterlife; in fact, it seems to indicate that there is some deep neurological event happening. Neurologists have looked into this phenomenon seriously and suspect that the key may be the decrease of blood flow to the brain that often accompanies near-death cases, and which also occurs in fainting. Dr. Thomas Lempert, a neurologist at the Castle Park Clinic in Berlin, conducted a series of experiments on forty-two healthy individuals, causing them to faint under controlled laboratory conditions. Sixty percent of them had visual hallucinations (e.g., bright lights and colored patches). Forty-seven percent of them felt that they were entering another world. Twenty percent claimed to have encountered a supernatural being. Seventeen percent saw a bright light. Eight percent saw a tunnel. So fainting can mimic all the sensations people have in near-death experiences

Nonetheless, after installing 1,000 shelves and following 2,060 cardiac arrest cases over ten years—which had yielded just two out-of-body cases—with our luck, both of them had been in areas of the hospital without a shelf! So our research staff were unable to ask if they had “seen” any of the independent objective images; and once more, the images were not able to be used. This is the reality of very low rates of survival after cardiac arrest, combined with the rare recall of the out-of-body phenomenon among survivors. However, our findings did support the results of another significant scientific study that had been published in 2001 in the The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, by Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel. He and his team had studied 344 cardiac arrest subjects and found one patient who had also reported a so-called out-of-body experience. As the man’s mouth was opened to insert a breathing tube during CPR, his doctors noticed that he had dentures. One nurse then removed them quickly and placed them in a specific drawer before continuing to help with the resuscitation. After ninety minutes the man’s heartbeat was restored, and he later recovered. A week later, he was transferred back to the ward where that same nurse happened to be working. The man recognized her, even though he had been unconscious the entire time during his CPR. This really baffled the nurse. He then recounted where his dentures had been placed. He later told Dr. van Lommel that during the cardiac arrest: “I was floating up near the ceiling, and I was trying to let everyone know I was still alive because I was afraid, they were going to stop trying to resuscitate me.” Based on this description alone, he, too, had likely maintained conscious awareness for some minutes while his heart was not beating and he was undergoing CPR.