Initially I didn’t think too much about remembering my Near Death Experience. I thought to myself, “wow, that was a fucking crazy hallucination.” It wasn’t until I saw a number of doctors in the first 3 months after my return that I started to understand, it wasn’t a halucination. The shock on one particular doctor’s face started to resonate with me, “you went septic, stage 3, you shouldn’t be here.”
I apparently died from stage 3 sepsis created by a gallstone that got stuck in a duct. Bile backed up, then went septic, and the sepsis attacked all of my internal organs causing failure. I didn’t feel the gallstone because doctors later found out that I have a DNA mutation in which I don’t feel pain like a normal human, it’s dulled, and in some cases missing.
Sepsis can lead to organ failure and death in as little as 12 hours from the earliest signs of infection. The risk of dying from sepsis increases by as much as 8% for every hour of delayed treatment. Even with treatment, which requires heavy doses of antibiotics, 30% to 40% of people with septic shock still die. It had been 2 weeks since my collapse in the grocery store. I never received the treatment I would have needed to fight the sepsis infection. It progressed to the point of no return and I passed in my bathroom. It wasn’t an allergic reaction after all. The real miracle is, to this day I have never received any treatment for sepsis or organ failure. Everything came back and has been healing on its own.
The skeptic in me said, “well, maybe you were just really, really, lucky and by some miracle you managed to live through a fatal infection and organ failure.” I sat with that excuse for a good month or so. The idea of a Near Death Experience was so far removed from who I had been up to that point in my life, that I didn’t want the experience to be real. It was just too woo-woo for me to wrap my head around. But then an EMT I was joking with said that I also survived emergency hypothermia because my body temperature was 94 degrees, and the look on his face said I shouldn’t be here as well, and I just stopped fighting the fact that it happened.
It took me the first 3 months of being back in my body to come to terms with the fact that I had a Near Death Experience. It was seared into my mind, I couldn’t shake it, the things I had seen and felt, the teachings. It was all taking affect as I continued to recover and heal. I started taking note of the many changes within me and my life that had no explanation whatsoever. The day it really sank in was the day I saw a picture of myself prior to my experience. My stomach sank.