My Near-Death Experience: I said “I Don’t Think So,” To God

Life is so random.

About six years ago, I had open-heart surgery.

It was a total fluke thing that caused it, too.

I’d decided to up my game from walking on my treadmill to joining the YMCA because I was finally starting to feel fit again. The chronic fatigue I’d suffered for years after having my daughter was finally beginning to lift.

I went to a class, a sort of hybrid of pilates and weightlifting, and while pulling the apparatus down behind my head, I felt a snap.

Instantly I felt...weird.

No pain, though, nothing dramatic like when somebody on TV has a heart attack. I just became filled with a sense of foreboding. Like that last calm moment in a movie when someone realizes the killer is in the house.

It was a generalized feeling of dread that came over me. My sympathetic nervous system must have registered the injury.

I felt in one painless instant, everything changed.

Fast forward three days, and I’m in the emergency room after an overnight of inconclusive tests.

It had taken me two nights just to realize I had a problem. I was so used to being fatigued, I just thought I’d overdone it.

Two nights in a row, I woke up with what I thought was asthma.

On the second night, I called telehealth.

Where I live, we have a hotline you can call before you go to the hospital that will let you talk to a nurse about your symptoms.

I told the nurse that I heard a “crackling” sound when I was breathing out. I thought she’d say to me to take my Ventolin, go back to bed and call my doctor in the morning.

Instead, she said I had life-threatening symptoms, and I should call an ambulance immediately. She asked if I wanted her to call one as we spoke.

The next day, during the echocardiogram, the cardiologist showed my daughter, my husband, and me what they’d just discovered. I’d damaged my mitral valve.

The reason I’d been exhausted and out of sorts the last couple of days was because my blood wasn't circulating properly, the valve wasn't fully closing.

I thought it was odd that I had no pain, and fatigue was my only symptom.

But I later found out that I had a severe arrhythmia in the ambulance that caused them to give me nitroglycerin and to ask me repeatedly about my heart condition.

Fast forward two more days, and saying goodbye to my husband as they’re wheeling me into surgery. I wasn’t scared exactly, I was in more of a disassociated state. It’s how I coped as a child and it still happens when I'm under traumatic stress.

I thought I was just being calm, but the PTSD I had for the next few years says differently.

The next time I woke up was in intensive care.

They took me out of the induced coma for a few minutes, so I could see my husband. I had a breathing tube down my throat, and apparently, I tried to pull it out, I don’t remember that.

What I do remember is floating up and out of the back of my head, into my eyes, and seeing my husband.

Being in that coma was weird.

I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it was like being shoved in the very back of a dark room. I was asleep for a lot of it, but not all, and even though I couldn’t find my way out of my head, I knew I was in it.

I stayed back there for two days, surfacing now and again to listen to the room.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a wire in my heart and drainage tubes under my ribs as well as the breathing tube.

At one point, I became conscious enough to hear someone in another bed was having an emergency. At that exact moment, my breathing tube popped off of the mask that was over my face, but my nurse was indisposed.

All I could think was, “great, I’ve survived the surgery but am going to die in ICU.”

It took all of the strength I had to reach down and grab the oxygen tube that was now beside me on the bed and try to lift it to the mask, in my head I was screaming for help. In reality, I was just breathing.

I was hooked up to monitors, and there was more than enough staff, I should have known they would notice what had happened, but imprisoned inside my body, I panicked.

Eventually (probably seconds) later, the nurse came back to reconnect me, and everything was fine. I went back into my head and swam around in random thoughts, memories, and dreams for the duration of my time in ICU.

Oddly, my near, near-death experience didn’t happen there.

I made it out of ICU in one piece and on the mend but getting out of there wasn't fun. I had wires and tubes that needed to be removed.

Pulling the drainage tubes out from my lungs is as close as I've come to torture. The nurse snipped two little stitches and then told me to take a deep breath.

The pain was so deep I hallucinated they were trees being ripped out of my body by the roots.

I made a noise I've never heard before and couldn't recreate for a million dollars. It was a guttural, involuntary sound, somewhere between agony and terror.

It’s weird when pain bypasses your brain and makes your body do things you have no control over.

Then there was the feeling of the wire being pulled out of my heart through a vein that ended in my arm. It was bizarre - not painful exactly, but indescribably uncomfortable.

I am eternally grateful for modern sedation and pain medication.

I lived in and out of the back of my head for about five days. Between the pain meds and the pain, it was the place to be.

It was so painful to move, I’d lay in an uncomfortable position for hours, gathering the strength to make that last adjustment so I could sleep.

When your chest is freshly cracked open and wired shut, you come to realize what an interconnected miracle you are. An injury in the center of your body means you can’t escape the consequence of any action no matter how small.

I remember bursting into tears feeling a sneeze coming on because I thought it would kill me.

It was a grueling test of my endurance and spirit.

So one day lying in my hospital bed, neither asleep nor awake, I felt myself drifting to the back of my head again - to the place I lived during my coma.

Down and down, I floated, although it might not have been actually down. It was sort of like falling asleep, in that, I just start floating, not sinking really, just becoming weightless.

I felt like I was floating backward, but not in the room, just in my head like going through a tunnel on the same level but to a different area.

I remember looking up and seeing complete blackness. So black it was dense like oil. Out of that darkness, clouds began to form. They weren’t white or glowing, it was more like the black outline of black clouds forming on a blank canvas. Like a cartoon.

Seeing it culminate was like watching a show. It was fascinating.

Then, all of a sudden, out of the cartoon clouds, a small hole appeared and opened up. It was just a pinprick at first. Tiny and miles away.

Then it got bigger and closer. Then the pinprick became a hole and then the light. I saw it. It was there.

Pearlescent and fluid. I was awestruck, it was as it grew.

When it got to be about the size of a softball a bright light started shining through it. It was a shimmering light, with rays poking through the blackness. It was so interesting, I couldn't look away.

Then it dawned on me, holy crap, this is the light — THE light.

This is that thing that people talk about when they have near-death experiences. Everyone describes it and now I'm seeing it...

Wait! Hang on here! If I'm seeing this, what exactly is going on??? Why am I having a near-death experience? Am I near death???

Hang on here, I don't like where this is going.

I didn’t want it to be my time, my daughter was only six, and it was two weeks before her birthday. So even if someone else thought it might be time for me to go, I was positive that wasn't going to happen.

I chose to inform god, or the grim reaper or whatever thought they were coming for me that I was not interested.

I looked up and in a voice that was more a command than a suggestion, said, “I don’t think so!”

And in that second, it disappeared, and a nurse was at my bed, shaking me to wake me up telling me that my heart rate had just gotten dangerously low.

What the hell?

Either that was a weird coincidence or something extraordinary happened at that moment.

My husband the atheist, thinks it was a simple hallucination, but I’m not so sure.

I don’t really know what to make of it.

It was real in my head. It was a weird coincidence that my heart rate was dangerously low at the moment the clouds opened up and the light appeared.

I don’t have any deep religious beliefs to make me wish this up. I wasn’t out there looking for God. If that was “God,” it came to me.

But I’m a spiritual person, and this gives me a bit of comfort and perspective, especially when dealing with the losses of my own.

A wonderful, former boss died of cancer a couple of years ago.

Near the end, she was imprisoned in a wasted body wracked with pain, filled to the brim with painkillers. I hoped she could hide out in the back of her head while she waited for the end.

I’m sure she wanted to hang on as long as she could for her children, who were young adults at the time but hanging on takes a toll.

So I'd pop in and sit with her now and again. She was too far gone for visiting but I just wanted to be near her. She'd done so much for me when I worked for her, I wanted to be able to give back, even in a small way.

As I sat with her, I imagined her floating in her mind. Diving deep for respite, bearing the pain now and again to come back up for moments with her children.

I know how it feels to swim through pain to hold your child.

I hoped she could find peace in the temporary home inside herself.

I imagined how relieved she'd eventually be to see the clouds forming in the darkness, the pinhole becoming bigger and bigger, light brighter, more opolescent and shimmery, until one day she'd realize she was ready to embrace the beauty of the light.

I wondered how many times she shooed it away in her last days and what it was that finally allowed her to let go.

I thought about my own brush with the light and how lucky I was to have the luxury of shooing it away.

Life is full of mysteries, and what happens after death is the biggest one. I’m still not sure exactly what happened to me that day.

My husband is convinced that it was a coincidental dream, and he may be right.

But at that moment, when the blackness turned to clouds and the light pierced the darkness, I felt that there was something so beautiful on the other side that I couldn't even allow myself to look.

I forced my mind’s eye to turn away.

Somehow I knew that the danger was in the beauty and getting swept up in it was a bad idea if I wanted to see my daughter again.

So I said, “I don’t think so,” to God and came back to my family.

I wasn't ready to take that journey.

But looking behind the curtain, and lifting the veil has calmed the part of me that mourns for the beautiful people I've lost in my life.

If they've gone to the place beyond the black clouds, I'm convinced they're somewhere wonderful and that gives me comfort.

🔅 🔅 🔅 🔅

Erin King is the author of How To Be Wise AF: A 30-day journalling adventure to your inner Guru.