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To: yonif
Only thing close to this I have to share was with my last delivery. I had been given an epidural too high in my back and it supressed the sensation of respiration(which I worked very hard to keep breathing although it was weird not to feel the breathing).
My blood pressure dropped dangerously low, while my heart rate was increasing dramatically. I was very near death and probably moments from cardiac arrest. While everyone was rushing around me and my husband was upset, I just remember this feeling of peace and I gotta tell you, I am one that despite a deep belief in God, I'm still scared of the unknown and here I was on death's door and in peace. I did not feel panicked at all. Some might say it was the anesthetic, but I had been put under in a general anesthesia before(which the epidural isn't) for a surgery and I still was pensive up to the last moment that I remember...this just wasn't the same. I had no fear.
Anyway, big deal. Not quite as neat as the others, but it stuck with me how peaceful I was even faced with death. With how anxious I get over that stuff, I really felt such a warm hand of calming reach down to me and let me know that either way, things would be ok.
359 posted on 02/06/2004 10:55:25 AM PST by cupcakes
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To: cupcakes; All
Some years ago I wound up in the cockpit of a crashed helicopter on its side in flames with fire coming into the cockpit from the cabin like a blow torch and my dead crewmember blocking the only emergency exit. The situation was so overwhelming that I had an 'out of body experience' looking down on myself trapped in the cockpit, being burnt. The experience was not unpleasant, just a sort of curiosity as to what was happening to my body. Realising I was about to perish, I managed, with considerable effort to 'persuade' myself back into my body. It then all became most unpleasant and I only escaped by crawling down over the pedals and breaking a 'chin' window to crawl out onto the burning tarmac and into the spilled fuel fire. I felt no difficulty with deliberately placing hands and arms into the fire as a sort of 'sacrifice' to ensure that the whole of the remainder of me survived. I eventually managed to stand in the fire and smoke and walked 'calmly' out of the inferno. I suffered severe burns but felt little or no pain at the time, although later on the pain was intense. I was hospitalised, grafted here and there etc and I recovered in due course. The out of body experience I remember vividly and it has left me with no fear now to face the inevitable whenever the time and place comes around. I think I experienced the 'safety mechanism' that the mind and body put into effect in such dire circumstances to face the unfaceable. I have no particular faith, but I do love the experience of mornings and evenings, I relate more closely to animals for some reason, and I appreciate more fully all the things which I had taken for granted previously.
362 posted on 02/06/2004 12:10:57 PM PST by 5050 no line
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To: cupcakes
I did not feel panicked at all. Some might say it was the anesthetic

It was the drugs. Ask anyone who's ODed on heroin, and they'll tell you they knew they were about to die, but could care less. The brain's normal thinking response to death is a sense of "impending doom". Ask anyone who has had their heart stopped by adensoine (to then soon after correct an irregular rythm with an lectrical shock) and they will tell you that the brain knows when the heart stops, and it doesn't like it one bit.

374 posted on 02/08/2004 7:57:00 AM PST by realpatriot71 (It's time to build a freakin' wall!)
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