Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [90]
“I said I thought it was hogwash,” Sabom told me.
But his friends challenged him to ask some of his patients whether they had experienced this phenomenon or not.
“I fully expected that they would not report anything like this. I went in and the third patient I talked to had had a classic near-death experience.”
As he related his story, Sabom was sitting in a big brown leather chair in his brilliantly lit, uncluttered office in north Atlanta. His thick gray hair was as unruly as a Brillo pad, and his voice was southern and drowsy. He wore a white lab coat, a reminder that his day job was fixing people’s hearts, not tracking their spiritual experiences. But he had cleared two hours in his afternoon for me. For more than three decades, Sabom has enjoyed a passionate affair with near-death experiences.
As a scientist, Sabom sought some proof of their existence. He realized you cannot verify the drama in someone’s brain during a near-death experience, any more than I can confirm the veracity of the daydream you claimed to have enjoyed yesterday afternoon. Even if you had been lying in a brain scanner at the time of your alleged daydream, I still could not verify it, since we have not developed the technology to peek into your thoughts.
No, Sabom needed external evidence, something that could be corroborated. He settled on testing out-of-body experiences. Those are the moments before the famous “tunnel” and the white light and the conversations with dead relatives, when the heart has stopped, the patient is comatose, and, as he later claims, he leaves his body and hovers near the ceiling to watch the chaos below as doctors try to resuscitate him. If the patient’s visual description of those events matched what actually occurred on the table, Sabom figured, that would go some distance to proving that a person’s consciousness and identity do not depend on three pounds of tissue called the brain. It might throw a very heavy wrench into the materialists’ position.
Between 1976 and 1981, Sabom conducted what is still considered the most meticulous research on near-death and out-of-body experiences. 1 At the time he was a cardiologist at the University of Florida Health Science Center in Gainesville, and he interviewed every one of his patients who had suffered a cardiac arrest. His sample included others who heard about his study. Of the 116 patients who reported near-death experiences, thirty-two claimed to recall details of their resuscitation during an out-of-body experience. Sabom queried them about their memories, and because he had access to their records, he could check their descriptions against the reports of what actually occurred when they were revived.
Some patients gave descriptions too generic to be of value. But other patients remembered striking details. One man, a security guard, described his collapse in the hospital hallway, the doctors’ attempts to defibrillate him, how they plunged a needle into his heart “like an Az tec Indian ritual,” how they tried to start an IV on his left wrist, but, realizing that hand was broken, switched to the right. The records confirmed this scenario.
Another man described his experience from a few years earlier, when he was caught in a firefight with the Viet Cong. He said he watched from above his body as the enemy soldiers left him for dead, surveying the carnage of his lifeless buddies. He described the Army medics placing him in a body bag, transferring him to the truck and depositing him in the morgue. He watched as they cut off his bloody shorts and made an incision in his left groin, to inject the embalming fluid into his femoral vein. He recalled the relief he felt when the medic noticed he had a pulse and resuscitated him.
“At the end of the interview I said,‘Do you mind if I examine your left groin?’ ” Sabom recalled.“And so he said,‘Sure, that’s fine.’And sure enough, there was a scar right there