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

Jay called at least once a day to get an update from Phyllis or Holley and give them feedback on what his investigations had revealed. Steve Tatter, another good friend and neurosurgeon, likewise provided daily calls offering advice and comfort. But day after day, the only revelation was that my situation was the first of its kind in medical history. Spontaneous E. coli bacterial meningitis is rare in adults. Less than 1 in 10 million of the world’s population contracts it annually.And, like all varieties of gram-negative bacterial meningitis, it’s highly aggressive. So aggressive that of the people it does attack, more than 90 percent of those who initially suffer from a rapid neurologic decline, as I did, die. And that was the mortality rate when I first entered the ER. That dismal 90 percent crept toward 100 percent as the week wore on and my body failed to respond to the antibiotics. The few who survive a case as severe as mine generally require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives. Officially, my status was “N of 1,” a term that refers to medical studies in which a single patient stands for the entire trial. There is simply no one else to whom the doctors could compare my case.
    Beginning on Wednesday, Holley brought Bond in for a visit every afternoon after school. But by Friday she was starting to wonder if these visits were doing more harm than good. At times, early in the week, I would move. My body would thrash around wildly. A nurse would rub my head and give me more sedation, and eventually I’d become quiet again. This was confusing and painful for my ten-year-old son to watch. It was bad enough that he was looking at a body that no longer resembled his father, but also seeing that body make mechanical movements that he didn’t recognize as mine was particularly challenging. Day by day, I became less the person he’d known, and more an unrecognizable body in a bed: a cruel and alien twin of the father he once knew.
    By the end of the week these occasional bursts of motor activity had all but ceased. I needed no more sedation, because movement—even the dead, automatic kind initiated by the most primitive reflex loops of my lower brainstem and spinal cord—had dwindled almost to nil.
    More family members and friends were calling, asking ifthey should come. By Thursday, it had been decided that they shouldn’t. There was already too much commotion in my ICU room. The nurses suggested strongly that my brain needed rest—the quieter, the better.
    There was also a noticeable change in the tone of these phone calls. They too were shifting subtly from the hopeful to the hopeless. At times, looking around, Holley felt like she had lost me already.
    On Thursday afternoon, Michael Sullivan got a knock on his door. It was his secretary at St. John’s Episcopal Church.
    “The hospital is on the line,” she said. “One of the nurses taking care of Eben needs to speak with you. She says it’s urgent.”
    Michael picked up the phone.
    “Michael,” the nurse told him, “you need to come right away. Eben is dying.”
    As a pastor, Michael had been in this situation before. Pastors see death and the wreckage it leaves behind almost as often as doctors do. Still, Michael was shocked to hear the actual word “dying” said in reference to me. He called his wife, Page, and asked her to pray: both for me, and for the strength on his part to rise to the occasion. Then he drove through the cold steady rain to the hospital, struggling to see through the tears filling his eyes.
    When he got to my room the scene was much the same as it had been the last time he had visited. Phyllis was sitting by my side, taking her shift in the vigil of holding my hand that had been going on without a break since her arrival on Monday night. My chest rose and fell twelve times a minute with the ventilator, and the ICU nurse went quietly about her routine, orbiting among the machines that surrounded my bed and noting