I’m not talking about the “typical” ones…like when some guy flatlines on the operating table, and the attending doctors restart him.
I am talking about someone who is declared dead by a physician, and gets packed off to the morgue…and later revives.
Obviously, this is a lot less common-but has it ever happened? What do these people report seeing/experiencing?
I had to be revived after surgery at U of M. I believe it was the result of too much anesthetic. At first I was hyperventilating and felt anxious. Then I was completely at peace as everything stopped. I’d have been OK with them letting me go, but the usual stimulation and resuscitation worked.
Yeah it looks like it does happen, there is this case of a man waking up during his own autopsy and this case of a woman who has been pronounced dead three times due to a rare condition where she loses all muscle control, vital signs drop but she can still hear and is conscious. Must be terrifying.
While responses to the OP may be factual answers, this really isn’t a General Questions type of thread. Moved to MPSIMS.
samclem Moderator
Jon Pertwee wrote in his autobiography about how as a sailor in WW2 he was hit by shrapnel, declared dead and woke up in the mortuary.
The story is repeated here:
I think our member **BigT **falls in this category. Apologies to him/her if I’ve mis-remembered who it was.
Something to think about - how long between the toe tag is applied and the autopsy begins?
How many people were alive when the big knife ripped from crouch to neck (or the classic “I” or “H” incisions)? How many were immediately trottted off to the mortuary where they were promptly drained of all blood?
Yea, I’m a barrel of laughs…
I cared for a woman who had been declared by 'medics, transported to a funeral home and scared the poo out of the night cleaning staff when she started to moan and move around. She was transported to the ER then the ICU where she died two days later.
It happened on Halloween so when we got the call from ER, we thought it was a prank. We scrambled to get a bed ready when they rolled through the door.
She was a perfect example of why the saying “They’re not dead, until they’re warm and dead.” is so very true.
Billions of people have had “near-death” experiences; the vast majority went on to have “smack-dab-in-the middle-of-death” experiences, so accounts are scarce.
I just startedthis threadin Cafe Society about French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne. An episode central to his life and his writings occurred when he was in his mid-30’s: he was on his horse in a forest close to his estate when a member of his entourage, a much bigger man on a much bigger horse, basically galloped right through Montaigne, sending him some distance away and thought dead for a couple of hours until he began to revive.
While the whole concept of “near death experiences” didn’t have the recognition and language that they have come to have today, he describes many attributes that have come to become common - a sense of floating above the situation, being enveloped in light, etc.
What is most fascinating is that Montaigne uses this experience to ground his writing - “you should not be afraid of Death because when it comes, Nature will make it clear exactly what you need to do”…