Dying to Wake Up Introduction The Frozen Man By all indications, the patient on the operating table was dead. His heart was stopped, and his body drained of blood. There was no respirator turned on to keep him breathing and no oxygen being fed to his lungs. The EKG machine that would ordinarily beep in time with his heartbeat was silent because there was nothing to beat in time with. All of his organs had stopped functioning, and his brain revealed no waves on the EEG machine. In fact, the patient wasn't dead, not really. He was in suspended animation through a surgical procedure known as hypothermic cardiopulmonary bypass and circulatory arrest, a procedure that replaces the patient's blood with a cool fluid that lowers body temperature to approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit and stops all bodily functions. Just like death, but not quite. The purpose of the surgery in his case was to repair a tear in the aorta, the main artery leading from his heart. This is a dangerous surgery, but there was little choice. Without it, his weakened aorta would eventually burst and kill him instantly. If the surgery didn't kill him, he would have a normal life span. He was almost damned if he did, but definitely damned if he didn't. I was the anesthesiologist on the case. As chief of the department of anesthesiology for the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, I was trained for these difficult and dangerous surgeries. It was my job to administer anesthesia to the patient while the surgeons opened his chest to expose the heart. Then, after the surgery, when warm blood was returned to his body, my role was to keep him safely and deeply anesthetized as we brought him back to life. In between, when the cooling solution filled the circulatory system and the patient's vital signs appeared as flat lines on the monitors, I had little to do but observe the deft hands of the surgeons as they performed their delicate and complex patchwork on this king of all arteries. They had only sixty minutes to work their magic. After that the patient would likely die or suffer neurological damage. When we brought this patient to the operating room, he was already heavily sedated. I spoke to him momentarily when we transferred him to the operating table, but he didn't have much interest in conversation. The sedation and the realization of what was about to happen had sunk in and he remained silent, wondering, I am sure, if I was the last person he would ever see. I didn't give him much time to think about it. I injected propofol and other anesthetic drugs into the saline tube placed in an arm vein and watched him drop off to sleep. After placing an endotracheal tube into his windpipe, I watched carefully as the patient's chest was opened and his heart prepped for the surgery. Then a surgical specialist administered the cold perfusion fluid, and another carefully drained his blood into an oxygenator that would keep it primed with oxygen and clot free. Before long the patient was in suspended animation, and the surgery had begun. Over the years I have worked on several of these operations, and they always amaze me. The genius of the research that led to this surgery, the deep concentration of the skilled surgeons--to me this procedure took medicine to a new frontier. From my place at the head of the table, I looked down at the patient. He seemed as dead as any dead patient I have ever seen, yet he would make it back to life and be among the living for many years. For the next hour, I watched the chief surgeon work with speed and urgency, racing against the clock to repair the damaged artery. The room was filled with controlled tension and fear, and not just because of the delicate nature of the operation. A good percentage of patients undergoing this surgery do not survive--not because of the surgery, which is almost always successful, but because the human body is not always capable of returning from the dead. The surgery was successful but the patient died is not considered the punch line of a joke with this operation; rather, it is a reality that we in the operating room are all too aware of. When the surgery was completed, we moved with great efficiency to bring the patient back to life. As the blood was transfused back into his body, I administered more anesthesia so he wouldn't awaken too quickly. Then the ice was unpacked from around his head so his brain could warm up. As the cold blood was slowly warmed, platelets were added to enhance clotting, and then cardioversion paddles were activated on either side of his heart in hopes of jolting it to a start. This was the point at which we all held our breath. If the cardioversion jolts did not restore the heartbeat, the patient would die. On the third try, this patient's heart began to thump regularly. After several minutes observing the heartbeat, a closure surgeon stepped forward and sewed his chest together. Then this resurrected patient was taken to the intensive care unit (ICU) for recovery. I was one of the first to greet him when he awoke. He was groggy, but he knew where he was and he was glad to be there. I think he didn't expect to be alive. When he saw me, he cracked a smile. "I was watching you guys in the operating room," he said. What he said clearly didn't register, and I must have looked puzzled. "I said, I was watching you guys in the operating room," he repeated. "I was out of my body, floating around by the ceiling." How can that be true? I asked myself. He was frozen! "Yeah," he said. "I saw you just standing at the head of the table, I saw the surgeon sewing the patch on my artery, I saw that nurse . . ." And then he went on to describe the number of surgeons in the operating theater, where they were positioned, the actions of the nurses, and other events that made it clear he had been observing events from somewhere above us. I could hardly believe what he was saying. Over the course of my twenty-five-year career, I had attended to hundreds of patients, many of whose hearts were barely beating when they arrived in the operating room. There had been patients who claimed to see deceased friends during their cardiac arrest, or who saw lights at the end of tunnels, or who claimed to see people made of light, but I chalked that off to some kind of fantasy and referred them to the psychiatrist. As one of my medical school teachers had said, "If you can't touch it, hear it, or see it on a monitor, send it to psych." But what had happened to this man was different. He had accurately described the operating room I was working in with great clarity. He not only showed signs of being alive when his heart and brain were inert but also of being awake. "Your heart was stopped," I said to him. "Your brain didn't have any activity. You couldn't have seen anything. Your head was packed in ice." The frozen man challenged me again by describing details in the operating room he hadn't mentioned earlier--information about surgical tools and comments about things that took place well into the surgery. He was interested in talking more, but I stopped him and ordered a shot of Haldol, a strong antipsychotic drug. The stock market had just closed, and I wanted to see how my investments had done that day. I didn't tell him that, of course. I told him a sort of truth, that I had other patients to see, and promised I would come back later to talk about his experience. I quickly made my rounds of the ICU and then hurried to my Hummer in the parking lot. Driving it made me feel like a king of the road. No car dared cross me, and if anyone did, I would tailgate them so close that I could see the fear in their eyes as they looked back at me through the rearview mirror. A half hour later, I pulled into the driveway of our Mediterranean-style mansion and ran to my home office to check the stock market on my computer. Before long, I had forgotten about the frozen man and any indications that his consciousness had left his body. I can't remember if the story of the frozen man made it into our family dinner conversation that night. It probably didn't. I was somewhat ashamed at not staying to listen to his story. By the next day, I decided not to visit with the frozen man. He had been moved to another department and was no longer my charge anyway. And after all, time is money. That's how materialistic I was. Within a few days, he had become just another anecdote. The day after Christmas 2010, the curious memory of the frozen man came rushing back. At the age of fifty-three, I found myself lying in the recovery room of the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center talking to an anesthesiologist about my own near-death experience (NDE) that had just taken place during surgery. The problem was that he didn't believe me, or else he didn't care. Like the frozen man whose NDE I had ignored myself, I now had ventured into a spiritual world and felt more alive than ever before. Not only had I completely left my body and brain behind and gone into another realm of consciousness, I had returned with an astonishing amount of wisdom that was readily available to me. I knew the other place I visited was completely real, and later it would prove itself again. Yet as I tried to share all of this information with my colleague, I could tell he wasn't the least bit interested. In fact, when he promised to return later so I could tell him the entire story, I knew that karma, the idea that you reap what you sow, had now taken place. Just as I had promised to return to the bedside of the frozen man and listen to his story, so too was my colleague making the same promise to me. And like me, he never returned. It has now become my life's mission, my dharma, to bring the message of consciousness-based healing to the world, to heal diseases of the soul. I deliver that message to you now in this book. A dream of spiritual peace is a common one. I want to show you how to attain it. Excerpted from Dying to Wake Up by Rajiv Parti All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
