My NDE
Wreckage of my black supercharged T-Bird
I ducked beneath the dashboard as the trees, standing in stark white light from my headlights, seemed to come hurtling to the car.
I don’t remember what happened next.
I knew I had crashed. I knew the car was totaled. I knew I had one hour to live.
I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.
The car was laying on its side in a ditch.
I crashed because I was running from the cops.
People knew me as a hard partier.
I partied every weekend, I got drunk, and I drove home.
Yeah, stupid I know.
More stupid than I realized.
I had been at a party but I only drank part of one beer.
I should have, would have, had several beers by then, but I wasn’t feeling well.
So at 11:30 PM, I excused myself and left the party, stepping into my supercharged T-Bird.
I had traveled about five miles to home, just another two miles to go.
I was thinking about my warm comfy bed and sleeping and then just resting until I could get over whatever it was I had.
The last two miles begins with an S-curve and then straightens out into a series of shallow, gentle S-curves.
And now I had come up behind somebody who was just put-putting along at 35 miles an hour in a 50 mile an hour zone.
As the first set of S-curves came to an end, I gunned the accelerator and my car leapt forward.
Just as I was passing the car, I saw blue lights come on behind me. The cops! Where had they come from?
I didn’t stop. I was sick, I was annoyed, besides I had long experience with losing the police while driving — often insanely fast.
As my car sped up, I saw the blue lights of the police car drifting farther and farther behind.
When you’re running from the cops, you can’t really run from the cops — not usually in a straight line anyway.
You have to take side roads, right angle turns — that’s how you lose a cop.
So just to cement my escape, I took a right angle to my left to turn onto a side road.
The first quarter-mile was fairly straight. The next quarter mile had a sharp S-curve.
I roared through the first quarter mile and started to brake as I entered the S-curve. Only.
Only the back wheels of my car hit some dry sand.
It was like driving over ice.
My car began to spin and all I could do was hang on for the ride — until I saw the trees looming for the windshield.
I ducked beneath the dashboard. What happened next is blank.
I don’t remember the crash itself at all.
Probably a good thing since the police and the doctors agreed that I had been tossed all around the interior of the car like a dog shaking a rat.
If you look carefully in the photo above, you will notice that the passenger door has a bulge outwards. If you look even more carefully you will notice that bulge is in the shape of a human body.
Yep, me.
And I had one hour to live.
I knew I had to get out because in this rural area — on an even more deserted road, there probably would be no traffic on this road until people started going to work around 6 AM or so. 5 or 6 hours from now.
I couldn’t feel my left arm.
I was guessing it had been severed so I felt around the interior of the car with my right hand trying to locate my left arm.
I couldn’t find it.
Then I searched in the one place I hadn’t searched — my left arm.
Yep, there it was, still attached, no apparent injury, other than that I couldn’t feel it or move it.
I grabbed my left hand with my right hand and jammed my left hand into my jacket pocket. I knew I had to get out of the car to get help and having a useless arm flopping around would just multiple the problem of escaping this automobile.
The car was laying at a 45 degree angle in a ditch, the driver’s side of the car planted firmly against a berm of earth. I couldn’t open the door nor crawl out the window on the driver’s side.
I crawled to the passenger door and at first it wouldn’t budge. Then after some struggle, it swung open far enough to squeeze my body through the opening.
The passenger side of the car was suspended 2 or 3 feet above the road. I fell onto the pavement and proceeded to stand.
Quickly patting myself down for any critical bleeding, I began walking to a house I had seen a couple of hundred feet away.
I didn’t detect any further injuries, but I knew I was in bad shape. Walking to this house just a couple hundred feet away had winded me.
Something was dreadfully wrong.
I pounded on the door. No movement inside.
I pounded again, still no movement.
Then I began pounding on the door frantically with both hands because my one hour to live was slipping away.
I still have scars on my knuckles from that night.
A light came on and a woman came to the door.
She said she would call 9–1–1.
I said “No,” insisting that she take me to the police station. I don’t know why I insisted.
As we arrived at the police station, I lost consciousness.
The next thing I remember was that the EMTs had just arrived and they said they were going to cut off my leather bomber jacket.
It took all my strength to say “No” and I began to struggle my way out of my favorite jacket.
The struggle caused me to lose consciousness again. But they didn’t cut off the bomber jacket.
I looked down.
I saw my body.
Laying on a hospital gurney.
It appeared that nearly a dozen doctors and nurses were rushing around me, trying to stabilize my condition.
I looked up as I began to rise through the floors of the hospital.
I could see each floor clearly as if I was actually standing on that floor.
I rose faster and faster.
I then rose into space hovering for just a split second over Planet Earth.
Next, I was hurtling along at a faster and faster speed.
It seemed like I was hurtling through a tunnel. Now I understood why other NDE experiencers say they traveled through a tunnel. But I recognized it for what it was.
I was moving so fast that the stars appeared to be zipping past me, resembling a tunnel, but it was just my speed of travel that gave my journey the illusion of moving through a tunnel. “Just like Star Trek,” I thought.
It seemed that perhaps 15 or 20 minutes passed as I was hurtling through endless space when I began to notice a distant golden glow on the horizon.
I immediately knew this was heaven.
But then I began slowing to a stop.
Heaven was the location of endless love, unconditional acceptance; I wanted to keep going.
But then I thought, “Uh oh, maybe someone made a mistake and I’m supposed to be traveling in the opposite direction?” I tried to look down to see hell, but saw only stars.
As I slowed to a full stop, I could see heaven Right There.
I could even discern a few large buildings.
But as I stopped, I saw a blob of the whitest white I’d ever seen come arcing toward me.
It stopped just above and ahead of me to my left.
It said I had to go back.
I said “No.”
It repeated that I had to go back.
I repeated no.
I looked back and I could see my body so very far away.
I turned back to the angel and tried to plead with it.
“That body is broken and bruised. It will go through such physical (and a glimpse of my future was revealed) and emotional pain that I may not survive.” I begged to go to heaven.
Once more the angel said “No” and with that final No, the doctors applied the paddles to my chest and jump-started my heart.
My injuries were extensive.
Getting slammed around in a car that had crashed at between 60 and 80 miles an hour was no joke.
I had a head injury, there is still a quarter-inch depression on the back of my head. My neck was broken, my back was broken.
I had suffered nerve damage in my right arm and I couldn’t get my right hand to work properly, sometime I couldn’t get it to do anything at all.
I still couldn’t feel my left arm — or anything below my waist.
My collarbone, the acromion process and my shoulder blade were broken.
All the ribs on the left side of my body — where I had slammed into the passenger door-were broken. Three of these had splintered into a dozen or more pieces. One of those ribs had punctured and collapsed my left lung.
Both lungs had filled with blood. Essentially my death was the result of drowning in my own blood.
My hip was injured and worst of all, my spleen was damaged causing extensive internal bleeding.
I required 11 pints of blood that night.
The doctors informed my parents that it was “touch and go,” that I may not survive the night, unless I was tough. “Is he tough?” the doctor asked my mother. “Yes, he’s tough,” she replied.
The next day my brother and his wife came to see me. My condition remained critical; “touch and go.” My brother counted 11 tubes going into my body.
My lungs were full of coagulated blood so I couldn’t use my lungs to breathe.
The doctors came up with an ingenious solution.
Take my blood out, aerate it and put it back in.
It worked.
The next day I gestured for a pencil and a pad of paper to write on.
A nurse brought me a small white board and a grease pencil.
In chicken scratch writing, I wrote, “I will be out of here 14 days after I came in.”
Obviously, the drugs were working thought the doctors.
With the extent of my injuries, I was looking at no less than a one-month hospital stay, probably much more.
15 days later, not 14, I missed it by a day, I met my sister as I wheeled out the front door of the hospital and then slowly, painfully stood up to walk toward her car.
