Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [93]
She gave up on her shoes, and I noticed she was struggling to breathe as well.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, baby, I’m just fine. A little vertigo.You’re spinning in circles right now. And the adrenaline makes it hard to breathe. It’s a fight-or-flight thing—vertigo telling you you’re gonna fall, and the adrenaline kicks in, makes my heart beat too fast. It’s worse to watch it than experience it.”
Pam relaxed happily on the bed, not eager to move. She was fifty and looked far too young to have five children and four grandchildren. Her hair had turned gray after her near-death experience, she confessed, and now she dyes it reddish brown.
I asked if she ever goes on the road anymore, performing. She said she travels but can’t perform. She gets vertigo, faints easily, walks with a cane. Then we settled at the table by the kitchenette with a cup of tea and she told me about the time she died and came back.
“At twenty-five I was a singer, songwriter, did some production, classical composition,” she began.“I was busily being a mother and doing the suburban thing and working, and I began to experience excruciating headaches.”
They grew worse each year and medication brought no relief. In the summer of 1991, when Pam was thirty-five, she and her husband, Butch, were promoting a new record in Virginia Beach, “and I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I’ve got a big mouth and I never forget how to talk. I forgot how to talk.”
Pam and Butch rushed back to Atlanta. Her neurologist found a basilar artery aneurysm that was smack in the middle of her brain stem, the area that controls basic life functions, such as breathing and swallowing. And the wall of the aneurysm—like a bulge on a tire—was thinning. It was already leaking blood into her brain. As Pam put it, “there was a bomb in my brain that had already begun to explode.”
The doctor suggested she get her affairs in order. But Pam’s mother happened to hear of a “brilliant young man” in Phoenix who had pioneered a remarkable new procedure, and gave him a call. Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler urged Pam to fly out to Arizona. He would perform the surgery for free. Two days later, Pam arrived at the Barrow Neurological Institute early in the morning.4 By seven-twenty on that August morning in 1991, a team of doctors had wheeled her into the operating room and the anesthesiologist was administering a cocktail of drugs.
Pam then began a surgically driven journey to the edge of life and back, called a “standstill operation.” In the next four hours, Dr. Spetzler, assisted by twenty doctors and nurses, taped Pam’s eyes shut and placed cooling blankets around her body, packing her with ice to put her in a deep freeze. As her body temperature began to plunge, the cardiac surgeon inserted a Swan-Ganz catheter—like a long piece of spaghetti—into her jugular vein and threaded it to her heart, then attached Pam to a heart-lung machine.
When her body dropped to around 80 degrees, Pam’s heart began to falter, at which point the doctors administered massive doses of potassium chloride. This stopped her heart completely, and left her wholly dependent on the machine. Pam’s body temperature continued to plummet.
“As the temperature gets colder and colder,” Dr. Spetzler told me in an interview, “we get to a point—usually around 60 degrees—where we can turn off the machine, and actually drain blood out of the body.”
They drained all the blood from Pam’s head into “reservoir cylinders,” similar to draining oil from a car. The aneurysm sac collapsed for lack of blood. “We can then expose the aneurysm and clip it.”
“At this point,” I asked, “could Pam see or could she hear? Could you describe her state?”
“She is as deeply comatose as you can possibly be and still be alive,” Spetzler replied.