Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander Page A

also quickly moving from desperate to hopeless. The doctors simply didn’t have an answer for how I could have contracted my illness, or how I could be brought back from my coma. They were sure of only one thing: they did not know of anyone making a full recovery from bacterial meningitis after being comatose for more than a few days. We were now into day four.
    The stress took its toll on everyone. Phyllis and Betsy had decided on Tuesday that any talk of the possibility of my dying would be forbidden in my presence, under the assumption that some part of me might be aware of the discussion. Early Thursday morning, Jean asked one of the nurses in the ICU room about my chances of survival. Betsy, on the other side of my bed, heard her and said: “ Please don’t have that conversation in this room.”
    Jean and I had always been extremely close. We were part ofthe family just like our “homegrown” siblings, but the fact that we were “chosen” by mom and dad, as they put it, inevitably gave us a special bond. She had always watched out for me, and her frustration at her powerlessness over the current situation brought her close to a breaking point.
    Tears came to Jean’s eyes. “I need to go home for a while,” she said.
    After determining that there were plenty of people to continue my bedside vigil, all agreed that the nursing staff would probably be delighted to have one less person in my room.
    Jean went back to our home, packed her bags, and drove home to Delaware that afternoon. By leaving, she gave the first real outward expression to an emotion the whole family was starting to feel: powerlessness. There are few experiences more frustrating than seeing a loved one in a comatose state. You want to help, but you can’t. You want the person to open his or her eyes, but they don’t. Families of coma patients often resort to opening the patient’s eyes themselves. It’s a way of forcing the issue—of ordering the patient to wake up. Of course it doesn’t work, and it can also further damage morale. Patients in deep coma lose the coordination of their eyes and pupils. Open the lids of a deep coma patient, and you’re likely to find one eye pointing in one direction, the other in the opposite. It’s an unnerving sight, and it added further to Holley’s pain several times that week when she pried my eyelids open and saw, in essence, the askew eyeballs of a corpse.
    With Jean gone, things really started to fray. Phyllis now began to exhibit a behavior I’d also seen countless times among patients’ family members in my own practice. She started to become frustrated with my doctors.
    “Why aren’t they giving us more information?” she askedBetsy, outraged. “I swear, if Eben were here, he would tell us what’s really going on.”
    The fact was that my doctors were doing absolutely everything they could do for me. Phyllis, of course, knew this. But the pain and frustration of the situation were simply wearing away at my loved ones.
    On Tuesday, Holley had called Dr. Jay Loeffler, my former partner in developing the stereotactic radiosurgery program at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. Jay was then the chairman of radiation oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Holley figured he’d be in as good a position as anyone to give her some answers.
    As Holley described my situation, Jay assumed she must have been getting the details of my case wrong. What she was describing to him was, he knew, essentially impossible. But once Holley finally had him convinced that I really was in a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis that no one could explain the origins of, he got started calling infectious disease experts around the country. No one he spoke to had heard of a case like mine. Going over the medical literature back to 1991, he couldn’t find a single case of E. coli meningitis in an adult who hadn’t recently been through a neurosurgical procedure.
    From Tuesday on,