ICU Doctor Sees Series of Medical Miracles, Says Phenomenon Is an Invitation to Be Critical but Open

(Shutterstock)

Death is a phenomenon that instills fear in people, because no one knows what happens after death, and death is often linked to pain.

Dr. Laurin Bellg is a critical care physician, and throughout her career she has come across several patients who died but came back. From the patients she talked to, she concluded that death was not just seeing bright light at the end of a tunnel or crossing over a threshold. These patients all shared a somewhat similar narrative. They came out of their body and experienced things that would otherwise have been impossible to experience.

First Encounter

The first time she came across a patient who experienced being out-of-body was when she was an intern after graduating from medical school. She met a patient named Samuel who was refusing surgery to fix his twisted bowel. 

His reason? He had unpleasant memories of his last surgery. Not the recovery after the surgery; the part when he was under anesthesia.

“Oh, no, I will never do that again. Because the last time I did surgery on me, I saw the whole thing. I saw them cut me open. I saw my guts laid out. So you will never do surgery on me again.” 

This statement struck Bellg as odd since patients are put under anesthesia for surgery. But Samuel confirmed that he didn’t feel pain—he just saw it all happen—and he wasn’t about to witness his body opened up again. Unfortunately, Samuel died of this illness.

This kind of experience can’t be explained by science and was considered taboo in the medical world, but Bellg confirmed through Samuel’s medical record that he did not experience physiological distress during his last surgery, meaning he couldn’t have possibly have been awake for the process. It had to have been an out-of-body experience which Bellg sometimes refers to as the consciousness phenomenon, though she hadn’t known what it was at the time.

Being trained to focus on the science, or as Bellg put it, “the world of left-brain medicine,” she left this in the back of her mind until she met Kyle, 10 years later.

‘I Started Floating Up’

Kyle was an athletic young man who ran into some trouble while he was parasailing. According to Kyle, he was having a good time when he saw two bikini clad women on a boat. 

“I was having a good time, when I noticed these two babes hanging out on a boat. I caught some wind. And I started floating up. And I thought, this is great. I’ve never been this high before. And then I happened to look down and see this guy falling down toward the water.”

The next thing Kyle knew, he was lying on a boat, looking up at the two women.

What Kyle didn’t know at the time was that as he was watching the women, he had drifted near some utility wires and was tangled in the wires before falling into the water. He entered cardiac arrest and was drowning. Fortunately, one of the women on the boat was a nurse and she was able to perform CPR and saved his life.

The guy that Kyle saw falling was himself, and he recognized that. “I am not afraid to die, especially if it means diving headfirst into a bunch of bikini clad women,” he told medical staff afterwards.

There was another patient who saw outside of his body after suffering from a cardiac arrest. Howard was a heavy drinker and was going through withdrawal. Heavy drinkers are more vulnerable to cardiac arrests due to low magnesium levels in the blood. When he woke up days after being resuscitated, his ventilator was removed and he was finally able to talk.

What he described was seeing Bellg and the entire medial crew working over him while he was unconscious. He remembered seeing Bellg in a green shirt. He knew something was out of the ordinary, and he shared seeing Bellg trying to fish a stethoscope from her pocket, pens and granola bars being dragged out of the doctor’s pocket along with the stethoscope. But he saw all of this from above. 

Everything he saw was confirmed by Bellg to be true, Bellg said at an International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference.

Becoming Aware 

With these three cases of out of body experiences, Bellg was intrigued and she began to seek out these stories from patients. She went with a rather neutral question: “Did anything unusual happen when you died?”

She also observed that the more she sought out these accounts, the more patients were willing to share these experiences with her unsolicited.

When a patient named Diane had a cardiac arrest, Bellg asked her this question. Diane began to cry as she relayed her experience of having another cardiac arrest 10 years ago. She was in a serious car accident suffering from severe head trauma. She became aware that she had died and she met a being who let her feel loved. The being told her that she had to return to life.

But Diane didn’t just come back to consciousness. She came back with an ability to tell when someone was going to die or be in grave danger. This new found ability made her family very uncomfortable, so Diane stopped sharing. She was relieved when Bellg asked her if anything out of the ordinary had happened while she was unconscious.

A Transformation

Having an out of body experience is transformative. One patient that Bellg met, Chester, had four confirmed cardiac arrests. He realized after this first one that being in that state allowed him to go out of his body, and so he let it happen again and again. 

After recovering, he shared that he had gained a sense of hearing that spanned beyond the normal distance and this was stronger with people with whom he shared a stronger heart connection with.

His sight had improved as well. After a cardiac arrest, Chester was free from him glasses and his hearing aids. Bellg clarified here that this return to youth only lasted around three to four weeks, but it inspired Chester and his family to become more inclined towards spirituality.

All of these patients were aware that there was something out of the ordinary going on when they had their out-of-body experience. But there was one patient in Dr. Bellg’s care history who had no idea what was happening.

Being Unaware

Carol was suffering from septic shock and kidney damage. When someone is recovering from kidney damage, they tend to urinate a lot. When Carol was disconnected from the ventilator, she described how she had tried telling the nurse that she needed to use the restroom but was ignored.

“I had to go to the bathroom. I kept trying to tell the nurse I had to go to the bathroom. And she just ignored me.”

“She would just pretend like she didn’t hear me. When she turned around and listened to me with her stethoscope, she was just this far from my face. I said ‘Lady, I have to go to the bathroom.’ And she ignored me,” Carol recalled.

She decided to find the bathroom herself and exited her room and out of the ICU (through the hydraulic door) but was unable to find a bathroom and, in frustration, decided to go back to her room.

“Fine. I‘ll just go back to bed. I’ll use the bathroom and they'll have to clean it up. That’s what they get for ignoring me,” said Carol.

When Bellg carefully suggested that she had experienced an out-of-body experience, Carol gave her an incredulous look and said she wanted to file a complaint against the nurses. Fortunately, the nurse manager who received the complaint knew of Bellg and the consciousness phenomenon and the complaint traveled no further.

Healing as a Family

When a loved one speaks of having out of body experiences, how should we react?

Helen and her kids came to see Bellg one day. Helen was in a car accident and she was stuck in her car. Yet, she told the story of getting out of her car and walking around to check on other people involved in the accident. When she heard sirens, she returned to her car to see herself unconscious and trapped in her car.

At the appointment, Helen’s children wanted Bellg to tell their mother that there was no way she was walking around at the accident scene with broken ankles.

It can be difficult to have a profound experience one can’t share with loved ones.

Keeping her cool, Bellg said, “Your mom experienced something that seems very important to her. She can’t prove to you that it happened. You can’t prove that it didn’t happen.” Could they perhaps leave it at that? 

Bellg found that in many cases the source of conflict was the family members’ worry that their loved one could not fully recover. Assured this was not the case, when they could accept that their loved one had had a transformative personal experience, the relationships were repaired.

Conversing With Cancer

These consciousness phenomenon did not only occur in the moment of an accident or cardiac arrest.

Cancer’s unpredictability makes it scary. But Dr. Bellg spoke to a patient, Warren, who was able to see his cancer even before he was diagnosed of it.

One morning, an image appeared in Warren’s mind while he had his eyes shut. The image he saw was pulsing and it even spoke to Warren. 

“Warren, I’m your cancer. What are you going to do about it?” it asked. 

Warren drew the image he saw. He went to his doctor who fortunately agreed to give him a check up for cancer and found a mass in his chest. It turned out to be lung cancer. While going over the CAT scan, he showed the doctor his drawing—the image on the CAT scan and the image Warren drew had an eerie similarity.

Warren realized from this experience that if he could see and talk to his cancer, he had a degree of control over it.

Lung cancer can be fatal and quickly so, but Warren saw his cancer shrinking. The cancer had transformed him, and months after entering remission, he no longer feared death. He began to ask questions like “If I survive this, what am I to do?” He gained a sense of purpose.

Societal Acceptance

These experiences cannot be fully explained by science—at least not yet. So quite often people don’t dare to believe or even listen to patients who need an outlet and someone to believe them. 

A belief in the divine is universal. So why is an out of body experience, a connection to the other side, so unbelievable?

Bellg has published a book “Near Death in the ICU” and publishing it made her nervous. Since its publication, it has helped opened up this topic for discussion among medical professionals. A fellow doctor approached Bellg and shared his own out of body experience—drowning and seeing his own body from above. He had never felt comfortable talking about it until after reading Bellg’s book.

“So as we move forward, all of us, the invitation is to be continually critical to understand the phenomenon, but to have an open heart to the possibility that the near-death experience, the out-of-body experience due to severe physical stress, and everything else we have yet to learn about, is all possible. Because we don’t know the whole story yet,” Bellg said.