Pam Reynolds has a company in the music industry that records and promotes clients like Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and REM. She's a dynamic person who, one summer day in 1991, hit a brick wall.
As recounted by Barbara Hagerty in her book Fingerprints of God and reported on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Pam recalled "We were promoting a new record and I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I've got a big mouth. I never forget to talk."
She had a huge aneurysm with a huge risk of rupture that was in a location where what's called a "cardiac standstill" provided the best chance for success. It required "chilling her body, draining the blood out of her head like oil from a car engine, snipping the aneurysm and then bringing her back from the edge of death."
The procedure involved taping her eyes shut and enclosing her ears with molded speakers emitting loud sounds that enabled the surgeons to monitor her brain activity. With her senses impaired, Pam says "I was lying there on the gurney...seriously unconscious...when - I don't know how to explain this, other than to go ahead and say it - I popped out of the top of my head."
Looking down at herself surrounded by 20 others, she saw the bone saw and drill bits, observed a doctor working at her left groin, heard someone say "Her arteries are too small" and another voice reply, "Use the other side." As her body temperature dropped to 60 degrees, the blood was drained and she flatlined.
Her body "looked like a train wreck, and she didn't want to return." As her heart was revived, she recalled hearing the song "Hotel California" with the Eagles singing, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
Pam thought the whole episode was a hallucination until a year later, when she talked to the neurosurgeon about it. Despite being anesthetized, with closed eyes, noisy earphones and no heartbeat, she accurately described the equipment used, the people in the room and the procedure - including using the alternative arteries. Even the music was correct.
Gerald Woerlee is a "near death experience debunker" who has "easy" explanations. He claims that "when they cut into her head, she was jolted into consciousness" and that she "experienced anesthesia awareness, in which a person is conscious but can't move." He says she could hear either because the earpieces fit loosely or her aural memories were "due to sound transmission through the operating table itself."
We could disregard the facts that anesthesia awareness is a terrifying experience people remember, that even loose speakers would have impeded hearing because "they made clicking sounds as loud as a jet plane taking off," that it's tough to discern conversation or lyrics from vibrations transmitted through a stainless steel table, and that Pam's eyes were taped closed the entire time. If we can ignore these things, then I guess the explanation is easy.
On the other hand, cardiologist Dr. Michael Sabom and the operating neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, have a different view. "They believe the combination of anesthesia and the sluggish brain activity caused by hypothermia meant that Reynolds could not form or retain memories for a significant part of the operation. At the very least, the story raises the possibility that consciousness can function even if the brain is offline."
Sabom asks, "Is there some type of awareness that occurs from a nonfunctional, physical brain? And if there is, does that mean there's a soul or spirit?"
You think?
Christians believe there is an eternal soul that is separated from the body at death. Pam Reynolds flatlined and her soul took temporary flight, as it has for many others. Observers with a conviction that there is no God and no soul can invent scenarios that deny this. But they just don't make sense.
And all the while, God is demonstrating His presence. Believers see their faith confirmed, while skeptics are left trying convince themselves that their rationalizations hold water.
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