Chapter 2

When I woke up, I could see a team of doctors and nurses crowded around a body in an operating room and the guy’s stomach was sliced open. I’d never seen so much blood in my life. They were suctioning it into a tube.

I felt sorry for the unfortunate guy on the table. He looked like he was in pretty rough shape.

Then I looked at his face and I realized it was actually me on the table.

I was out of my body, right above them, looking down.

Strangely, this didn’t trouble me. I was glad not to be in that ravaged body. The whole situation looked rather gruesome.

“Spleen is shattered,” one of the surgeons said. “Grab the artery here, put pressure on it until I can clamp it ... Another one, Susan. Keep them coming. We’ve got lots more bleeders.”

Some kind of alarm went off on one of the beeping monitors, and the anesthetist said, “We’re losing him, we’re losing him.”

I continued to watch the scene with an unemotional curiosity. I felt nothing. I was surrounded by a warm peacefulness.

“I know, I know,” the surgeon replied, digging deeper into my guts.

He reached in and clamped down on the artery to my spleen.

He took the scissors and made a few snips, then pulled out my spleen and dropped it into a steel bin. “This should do it, release the clamp ... slowly...”

They all watched in anticipation.

The blood started to stream again. “Shit.”

Another alarm sounded. I hoped, for their sake, they could work out the problem. As for my own, I didn’t really care.

“Get me another six units.”

A nurse ran out of the room. The heart monitor began to hum in a high-pitched, unbroken tone, and everyone moved about in a panic.

“We need chest compressions now. Clamp what you can to stop the bleeding.”

A nurse dropped the chart to the floor, pulled on a pair of gloves and rushed to help. She began pushing on my chest under the sterile drapes.

The surgeon yelled, “More clamps ... now!” as the suction machine rose to a crescendo.

I understood that I was dying. Oddly, I was indifferent to that. Then I felt a loving presence behind me. Slowly, I turned.

There was a bright light in the back corner of the operation room. I felt the physical sensation of being drawn toward it. None of this seemed out of the ordinary, not even to me, the most spiritually skeptical person in the universe.

The next thing I remember, after moving through some sort of dark, wide tunnel, was being met by a number of people. Well, ‘people’ wasn’t exactly the right word because they weren’t really human. They seemed to be made of light, so it was impossible to recognize them in a physical sense. However, they felt familiar. Somehow I knew one of them was my grandma.

Then the vast, open space all around me began to spin like a tornado. I found myself standing in the center of it, reliving every moment of my life from the time I was born, through childhood, adolescence and young adult. I felt everything as if it were happening in real time, except that I could reflect upon it and comprehend every ripple effect of every choice and action, with the wisdom and hindsight of a man who has lived his life a thousand times over.

One particular moment of my life, got stuck in my mind.