We return to the point where I am in the pre-op prep room on Tuesday, July 15th. I had just seen two nurses wheel a bed through the prep room, evidently with the corpse of someone who had just expired on the operating table minutes before.
As the psychologists’ well-worn cliché goes: “How did that make you feel?” I shall respond with an equally worn-out cliché: This was not my first rodeo. I had experienced excellent care two years ago when I had my gall bladder removed. That had also entailed being put to sleep for the surgery.
Nonetheless, I must confess that the sight of the corpse being wheeled by me caused my mind to be immediately confronted with the reality of my own mortality.
Yes, I presently had a serious problem with these gall stones. I had pondered in bed during the night before how grateful I am that our modern medical technology takes care of this condition in a relatively safe and routine manner.
It occurred to me that 150 or 200 years ago, if this blockage of the bile duct had occurred, it is highly likely that I would have experienced perhaps a week of severe pain and my pancreatitis would have triggered multiple organ failures and I would have died.
So, despite my biblical and prophetic teachings about the reality of the hidden global empire which has deceived and enslaved all nations via their sorceries (Mystery Babylon the Great in Revelation 18:23), that even in the midst of that reality, God still blesses us with wondrous medical technology and with anesthesia to make for a reasonably good path back to health.
I had queried a nurse in the prep room about how many of these ERCP surgeries were performed in the Pardee operating rooms on average per week. She thought for a moment and replied that they probably averaged about five per week.
So while the surgical procedure itself was not considered life-threatening, and while I am in quite good health—except for this immediate problem—seeing the corpse being wheeled a few feet away from me and over to the morgue, brought to mind that there is always the possibility that something could go drastically wrong while I am on the OR table and that I literally could die in the next hour.
I did not allow myself to dwell on that morbid possibility but refocused my attention in prayer again to the heavenly Father for His guidance of the minds and hands of all who were participating in the attempt to bring me back to very good health.
In the course of my hospital stay, I had also been thinking of NDEs and OBEs—Near-Death Experiences and Out-of-Body Experiences.
In reflecting upon my life path, there was a period which I call my “heathen” years. Since childhood, I had always believed in God and in Jesus Christ as God, but there was a period of years in my late teens through mid-20s when I was searching for answers to many things.
So during those heathen years, which was after I had left the Roman Catholic seminary and the Roman Catholic system altogether in 1967 until 1976 when I surrendered my life to God/Jesus and got baptized in a fundamentalist church in Columbus, Ohio, and became a serious Bible student, I was searching for answers to the “big” questions.
These included: who am I? why am I here on the earth in this life? …at this time? …in this family? What happens when I die? Is heaven real? Is hell real? …and numerous other important questions. (To which I now have the true biblical answers, praise God.)
Well, after those nine years in heathendom, I had searched and dug heavily into what was then called psychic studies, and which soon became lumped in with numerous other intellectual and pseudo-spiritual pursuits and the whole conglomeration labeled as the New Age Movement.
I had become a Rosicrucian for a time, but never met any members in person. It was merely a correspondence course and I never advanced beyond the novice stage. They talked a lot about the ancient mystery schools of Egypt.
I bought quite a few of their books and found them interesting, but not enough to “hang my hat on,” by which I mean not sufficient to be a life-guiding philosophy or spiritual path for me.
I had also read every Edgar Cayce book then available, so I possessed about 30 of them at one time in my life. I was very intrigued by his remarkable gift to go into a trance and be able to diagnose a person’s malady and offer a cure.
Then, one day the entity speaking through the “sleeping prophet,” as he was called, suddenly spoke about one of Cayce’s client’s past lives here and there throughout history, going all the way back to the ancient continent of Atlantis.
So, between the Rosicrucian order’s material and the Edgar Cayce books, and others I accumulated about reincarnation, I became a believer in reincarnation. The Rosicrucian books in particular asserted that reincarnation used to be in the Bible until wicked people removed those “truths” from the Bibles which Christians have today.
As our readers are no doubt aware, I made a multi-year study of Bible versions and their history, and it is still available as two-album set of 20 CDs, called Which Bible? Which Version?
Needless to say, shortly after becoming a committed Christian believer, I jettisoned the idea of reincarnation; I rejected it wholly and completely, and still do. … However… I had found a number of Bible passages which indicated some weird experiences by various Bible personages, and ultimately I dealt with all of them in another series called The Wheel of Reincarnation. Here is a link to a descriptive flier for that series.
How this ties into this tale of my experiences at Pardee Hospital returns us to the subject of NDEs and OBEs. Here is an excerpt from our flier linked above.
Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) refer to when people are very close to death (e.g., having a heart attack, undergoing life-risking surgery, during traumatic injuries such as in an auto accident, etc.) and they apparently seem to “go to the other side.”
There they sense the presence of other beings (whether God/Jesus, angels, or relatives who have passed away). These beings give the NDE-er information. “On the other side” they travel down a tunnel of light, or sometimes darkness; and for one reason or another they recover and can recall much of what they experienced.
Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE’s) refers to the apparent transfer of one’s consciousness outside the physical body, whether during NDE’s or other traumatic experiences. …Without doubt, there are biblical passages in which saints went out-of-body.
Therefore, people say, “Don’t NDE’s and OBE’s prove that life goes on immediately after death?” Not so fast there! Let’s examine the whole context of saintly OBE’s and then factor-in the possibilities of multiple time dimensions. What could God do with that?!
Two years ago when I was about to undergo the gall bladder removal surgery, the thought occurred to me that what if I have an OBE while I’m on the operating table? I did not, so that was that.
Last Tuesday, as I was minutes away from being wheeled into the OR and within a couple minutes I would be put to sleep, the same possibility again occurred to me, and my immediately subsequent thought was that “I surrender to my Father.” Whatever He wants me to see/experience is okay with me. Amen.
Perhaps the reader is familiar with those stories of people who have experienced an OBE on the operating table. They are later able to describe, with medical staff verifying, that yes, the surgeon did this or that particular thing, and nurse so-and-so sneezed, and one of the nurses joked that…whatever, I am making this up.
But it illustrates that the patient did have a legitimate out-of-body experience and the medical personnel verified the truth of his/her observations while in the surgery and being wholly unconscious—or so we are assured.
So that kind of scenario was racing through my mind as they are now ready to wheel me across the hall to “my” OR. Call it “gallows humor,” or whatever, but I do sometimes turn to humor to deal with serious situations.
Thus, as I visualized myself floating outside my body in the OR and looking around the room as the staff are doing their assigned tasks, I had this humorous fantasy of watching the surgeon skillfully guiding the endoscope down my throat.
He works diligently with the fluoroscope showing the exact position of the end of the tool. Ah, there it goes; the tool has arrived at the place of “the invasion of the gall stones.” Again, a silly reference to what might be the title of a horror movie.
Then, as I am watching it all from up near the ceiling where my “astral” body had floated up to, suddenly, the surgeon goes “Oops…” End of my fantasy imagining. All that took a few seconds as I am entering the OR. I quickly changed my prayer request to, “Father, if You don’t mind, I’ll just pass on the OBE, thank You just the same.”
(To be continued.)
~END~
