Tuesday, July 15, 2025
This will be our final discussion of near-death experiences.
Pam Reynolds underwent surgery to repair a massive aneurysm in her brain. Because this was brain surgery, all brain activity had to be shut down. To do that, they lowered her blood temperature by 50°, taped her eyes shut, put clicking noise makers in her ears and covered the rest of her body with cloth. She could not see, could not hear and all brain activity had ceased. The only way they kept her alive was by putting her on a heart-lung machine.
There was no way she could know anything that was going on in the operating room. She was as close to death as anyone can be without actually being dead. However, while in that state she claims that her spirit popped out of the top of her head. She found herself hovering just above the surgeon’s right shoulder. She saw something that looked like an electric toothbrush in his hand. She was surprised. She knew they were going to open the top of her skull with a bone saw and had assumed it would look very much like a saw, but what she described looked like a drill instead.
While she was observing the surgeon, she heard one of the nurses say something about the artery being too small. The surgeon then told the nurse, “Try the other side and see if that works better.”
After returning to life, she told others about what she had seen. Dr. Michael Sabom decided to investigate her story. He contacted the hospital and sure enough their bone saw did look like an electric toothbrush. He also asked about the nurse, and the surgeon responded by saying the vein in the left leg had been too small to attach the heart-lung machine so they had used the right leg instead.
Everything Pam heard turned out to be accurate, and yet her body temperature had been lowered by 50°, her eyes taped shut, clickers put in her ears, and all the blood drained out of her brain. She could not have heard anything, but somehow she did hear. There is only one explanation. She was not a body that had a spirit, but rather a spirit that had a body and that spirit was observing what her body was going through.
What a remarkable story about life after death and the certainty that death is not the end.
