My near-death experience

Today, on my 53rd birthday, 7 August 2012, it is five years to the day that I woke up from a week-long coma, with someone else's heart. On the 31st July 2007, Prof. Rodrigus performed transplant surgery on me, and I remain grateful to her and to all the medics and paramedics at UZA (university hospital Antwerp) for giving me a new lease of life. For most of human history, I should be dead, but clearly somebody up there didn't want me to come just yet. The time is right to speak of an experience I had while technically unconscious.

Before the surgery, visitors had been telling me excited stories about people floating to the ceiling while operated upon and faithfully reporting afterwards about what the doctors were saying and doing during the operation. And about the "near-death experience" of patients who had seen their deceased loved ones in the great beyond, or the beckoning presence of a light or a messiah's face at the other end of a tunnel. Afterwards these patients would live happily and without any fear of death because the experience was so uplifting.

I was skeptical of their stories. A lack of oxygen in the brain (or some similar chemical circumstance) could explain the hallucination of a tunnel, the exact face people see at the end of the tunnel turns out to be culturally determined, and going through an aptly called "near-death experience" affects only people who are still alive, hence just as ignorant about death as the rest of us. And indeed the experience of floating to the ceiling, of seeing deceased family members or of sensing the presence of a messiah didn't happen to me. Instead, something else occurred, either during surgery or during the artificial coma.

Another line of stories, specific to heart transplantations, was that the patient would get the individual memory of the donor. He would remember things that hadn't happened to him but to someone else, viz. the former owner of the organ being transplanted. The heart would be especially sensitive, being rich in symbolism and allegedly even being part of the consciousness apparatus along with the brain. The was even an account of a murder that got solved because the receiver of the victim's heart had a dream in which he saw the whole murder scene and afterwards identified the murderer. And at the least, receivers would get a change of personality under the impact of the donor. As I expected, the doctors said they were presented with these beliefs and these stories at every operation, but they had never seen these phenomena with their own eyes. To my knowledge, they didn't happen to me either.

What happened instead was that, sometime during the coma, either during or after the operation, I became conscious, though the thought of opening my eyes was far from me. This was long before I really woke up from the coma, a long and unpleasant process of mixing real perceptions with hallucinations, so that first my mind and then my room seemed filled with all manner of animals; a bad dream that overwhelmed me at the time but then turned out to be easy to discard and to forget, leaving only awareness of the room and of the smaller medical problems I had yet to face. No, this was a distinctly clear mental perception.

At first I saw very vivid colours. That wasn't me, a Northern European with misty blue-grey eyes, I would be more for hazy colours, right? Maybe this said something about the donor, a painter or simply a Mediterranean? Then everything became black, pitch-black, black like I had never seen. Was this perhaps what being dead was like? Maybe the operation had failed and I had died, right? After all, I didn't know about life after death, there were varying opinions about it, and I remembered a believers' joke about the atheist who died and found to his dismay that he had an eternal soul surviving death. I didn't think of checking empirically whether my body was still there, I only realized that my mind was working, frantically philosophizing away.

And then I realized it. I didn't know if I was dead or alive, but my mind was at any rate still alive. It was seeing and thinking things, therefore it was in existence. Cogito ergo sum! Suddenly the old line from Descartes became existentially meaningful: I was conscious, therefore I was.... well, not necessarily alive in the physical sense, but I was there in some sense of the word. Either I was still alive and in my body, or I was not but then the individual consciousness survived death. At any rate, I was still there. Happy at being reassured about this, I fell into the coma again.