Home Health ‘I remember everything about my death.’ An intensive care doctor shares incredible stories of patients brought back to life and reveals the surprising memory they all have in common…

‘I remember everything about my death.’ An intensive care doctor shares incredible stories of patients brought back to life and reveals the surprising memory they all have in common…

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Dr. Matt Morgan spoke with a patient named Summer who remembers a

Summer still remembers the day he died. After years marked by anxiety, depression and anorexia, the troubled 25-year-old student swallowed a handful of sedatives and waited. Her mother found her shortly after, collapsed in her bed.

Her heart stopped three times in the hospital’s emergency department as she traveled back and forth over the threshold of death and staff shoved plastic tubes into her lungs and pressed on her ribs, a last attempt to return her to life. life.

Summer’s parents were devastated when, on that day in 2020, they were told she might not survive. But, extraordinarily, Summer says that just as they were telling her parents this, and despite being unconscious, she remembers experiencing a “burst of life”, when her heart stopped, started and stopped again.

The events of his life, he later told me, flashed before his eyes. She felt an intense sense of clarity wash over her, a searing awareness: “People are important,” she told me three years later, “not things.”

Because in that vivid flash, Summer saw her mom, her dad, good friends she hadn’t spent enough time with, lying laughing on the grass on a hot day and staying up late to watch the stars sink into the horizon.

I have been an intensive care consultant for over a decade and have met hundreds like Summer, whose hearts stopped, died, but were then resuscitated. I firmly believe that what these people remember when they teeter on the edge of life (and what they learn about the meaning of life after they have experienced death) contains much that we could all benefit from.

So much so that, after a year working in the ICU, I began collecting the thoughts and words spoken by these patients when they regained some form of consciousness. In a little red book I always carry with me at work, I scribbled what I call his “life whispers.”

From these words I have been able to gain a greater understanding of my purpose as a critical care physician and, perhaps more significantly, as a human being.

Dr. Matt Morgan spoke to a patient named Summer who remembers a “burst of life,” when her heart stopped, started, and stopped again after she was found unconscious in her bed.

Summer’s ‘whispers’, the memories of her life flashing before her eyes, are such a common scene in movies that it is a tolerated cliché.

However, it has a real scientific basis. The fact is that life probably flashes before your eyes in some form when you die.

We know this thanks to a landmark study conducted in 2022, which involved an 87-year-old epilepsy patient who suffered a heart attack and died unexpectedly while neuroscientists were recording his brain waves.

The recording, which covered about 900 seconds of his brain activity, was the first recording of a dying human brain.

When they analyzed it, the neuroscientists saw a brain wave pattern typical of recalling memories and visions (this pattern also occurs during meditation, dreams, and even drug-induced hallucinations).

“The brain may be making a final memory of important life events just before dying,” said Ajmal Zemmar, one of the neurosurgeons who participated in the study.

He continued: “One thing we can learn from this research is that even though our loved ones have their eyes closed and are willing to let us rest, their brains may be replaying some of the best moments they had in their lives.”

It’s a comforting thought. And these findings might help explain why, in my experience, it’s almost frighteningly common for people who come back to life to describe very similar sights, sounds, and sensations.

When the heart stops pumping blood, it cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain, which can cause unusual experiences such as seeing bright lights, vivid memories, or even a feeling of peace.

When the heart stops pumping blood, it cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain, which can cause unusual experiences such as seeing bright lights, vivid memories, or even a feeling of peace.

Bright white light is a particularly common memory, as one patient I treated later told me: ‘It was like walking into the brightest sunlight I had ever seen, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It wasn’t scary. It felt warm; The light surrounded me.

While I am not religious (I would describe myself as spiritual), I know people who have experienced “touching death” in this way and feel it as an absolutely transcendent experience.

However, medically, his memories can be attributed to the biological process of neurological brain death.

When the heart stops pumping blood, it cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain. Brain cells, which are very sensitive to oxygen loss, can quickly become damaged or begin to die. This process can lead to unusual experiences, such as seeing bright lights, vivid memories, or even a feeling of peace.

Scientists believe this happens because the brain does not completely shut down at the same time. Instead, some parts of the brain remain active for a short time, releasing a surge of energy as they lose oxygen.

This means that as we approach the end of life, our brain can undergo notable changes.

But the fact that I can explain some of these sensations and memories in a logical and scientific way does not take away from the amazing things these people describe, nor from how amazing their experience is. And what I’ve learned is based on the same ritual I perform every time I’m called to confirm a death: a ritual that could be said to be rooted partly in science and partly in basic humanity.

First I talk to the dead. In intensive care, patients often have their eyes closed, either due to sedation or illness. However, I always talk to them and explain who I am and my actions.

We are often surprised when patients in recovery remember fragments of their unconscious time, so I begin by saying hello and introducing myself, and apologize if anything I am about to do might be uncomfortable for them.

“I’m feeling your pulse,” I say. Placing my index and middle fingers on his neck, I feel the characteristic tapping of the carotid artery. At the same time, I place my stethoscope on his chest, listening for the sound of his heart valves.

Then I wait: five long, silent, slow minutes. I listen to the silence. Then I open his eyes and shine my flashlight into the depths of his pupils, the black space between the front and back of his eyes. In life, the pupils would shrink to a small black speck, but in death they remain large and dark, like windows that no longer face the outside.

Finally, I press firmly on the bony ridge over the eye, an area of ​​the body most likely to experience a reaction in life, and say quietly, “I’m sorry.” No problem. The patient is dead.

Despite all the multiple potential causes of death, all the painful paths one can take, from a medical point of view one could say that there are only two forms of death: circulatory death, where the heart stops, and trunk death. encephalic, where the brain stops working.

I’ve often been asked what happens first when you die: how long does your heart have to stop before your consciousness ends?

The answer is that it is enormously variable. A period of minutes may pass between the cessation of blood circulation before irreparable damage is caused to the brain.

In fact, it is always surprising to see how people who have received CPR for a long time recover. However, there is a risk that we see the stories of patients who have come back to life as entirely festive. But it’s not all milk and honey.

Even patients who have “just” been seriously ill in the ICU have very frightening memories. For example, some remember dogs licking their toes, a warped memory of the sensation of the pumps we sometimes put on their feet to prevent blood clots.

But not everyone who dies and then comes back has such cinematic memories. For others, it is more of a slow process of disappearance.

One man I spoke to, Chris Lemons, a deep-sea diver, died for 45 minutes when his oxygen supply was cut off in a horrific accident.

About death, Chris told me: ‘You know it’s okay, right? It’s like falling asleep. I was sad for a while. I was cold and a little numb, but then it was like falling asleep.’

Other patients, however, remember absolutely nothing about the moment they died.

One of those patients I treated had been a judge for several decades until, while presiding over a case, he began to feel unwell. He collapsed and stopped breathing. He was rushed to the hospital and, over 12 overtime hours, his heart stopped and came back to life no less than 20 times.

He doesn’t remember anything about this time. No lights, no flashes, no images of happy moments.

But his first memory from this period is no less encouraging: he was traveling from our hospital to a nearby rehabilitation center when, out the window, he saw some yellow daffodils swaying in the breeze.

Today he says that those humble flowers were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. This, then, is the “whisper of life” of the judge.

Only after touching death and being confronted with our own mortality can we truly turn up the volume on these whispers. So if life flashed before your eyes, what would be in your flash?

Think about it now while you are alive; maybe it will help you make a change.

  • A Second Act: What Almost Dying Teaches Us About Really Living by Dr Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster, £20) is available now.

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