Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife (19 page)

My heaven-sent birth family, and especially my departed sister, also named Betsy, whom I never met in this world.

My blessed and capable doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital (LGH), especially Drs. Scott Wade, Robert Brennan, Laura Potter, Michael Milam, Charlie Joseph, Sarah and Tim Hellewell, and many more.

The extraordinary nurses and staff at LGH: Rhae Newbill, Lisa Flowers, Dana Andrews, Martha Vesterlund, Deanna Tomlin, Valerie Walters, Janice Sonowski, Molly Mannis, Diane Newman, Joanne Robinson, Janet Phillips, Christina Costello, Larry Bowen, Robin Price, Amanda Decoursey, Brooke Reynolds, and Erica Stalkner. I was comatose and had to get names from my family, so forgive me if you were there and I have omitted your name.

Critical to my return were Michael Sullivan and Susan Reintjes.

John Audette, Raymond Moody, Bill Guggenheim, and Ken Ring, pioneers in the near-death community, whose influence on me has been immeasurable (not to mention Bill’s excellent editorial assistance).

Other thought leaders of the “Virginia Consciousness” movement, including Drs. Bruce Greyson, Ed Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Jim Tucker, Ross Dunseath, and Bob Van de Castle.

My God-sent literary agent, Gail Ross, and her wonderful associates, Howard Yoon and others at the Ross Yoon Agency.

Ptolemy Tompkins for his scholarly contributions from unparalleled insight into several millennia of literature on the afterlife, and for his superb editorial and writing skills, used to weave my experience into this book, truly doing it the justice it deserved.

Priscilla Painton, vice president and executive editor, and Jonathan Karp, executive vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, for their extraordinary vision and passion to make this world a far better place.

Marvin and Terre Hamlisch, wonderful friends whose enthusiasm and passionate interest carried me through at a critical time.

Terri Beavers and Margaretta McIlvaine for their brilliant bridging of healing and spirituality.

Karen Newell for sharing explorations into deep conscious states and teaching how to “Be the love that you are,” and to the other miracle workers at the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia, especially Robert Monroe for pursuing what
is
, and not just what
should be;
Carol Sabick de la Herran and Karen Malik, who sought me out; and Paul Rademacher and Skip Atwater, who welcomed me into that loving community in the ethereal high mountain meadows in central Virginia. Also, to Kevin Kossi, Patty Avalon, Penny Holmes, Joe and Nancy “Scooter” McMoneagle, Scott Taylor, Cindy Johnston, Amy Hardie, Loris Adams, and all of my fellow Gateway Voyagers at the Monroe Institute in February 2011, my facilitators (Charleene Nicely, Rob Sandstrom, and Andrea Berger) and fellow Lifeline participants (and facilitators Franceen King and Joe Gallenberger) in July 2011.

My good friends and critics, Jay Gainsboro, Judson Newbern, Dr. Allan Hamilton, and Kitch Carter, who read early versions of this manuscript and sensed my frustration in synthesizing my spiritual experience with neuroscience. Judson and Allan were critical in helping me appreciate the true power of my experience from the viewpoint of the scientist/skeptic, and Jay the same from the standpoint of the scientist/mystic.

Fellow explorers of deep consciousness and the Oneness, including Elke Siller Macartney and Jim Macartney.

My fellow near-death experiencers Andrea Curewitz, for her excellent editorial advice, and Carolyn Tyler, for her soulful guidance in my understanding.

Blitz and Heidi James, Susan Carrington, Mary Horner, Mimi Sykes, and Nancy Clark, whose courage and faith in the face of unfathomable loss helped me to appreciate my gift.

Janet Sussman, Martha Harbison, Shobhan (Rick) and Danna Faulds, Sandra Glickman, and Sharif Abdullah, fellow travelers whom I first met on 11/11/11, gathered together to share our seven optimistic visions of a brilliant conscious future for all of humanity.

Numerous additional people to thank include the many friends whose acts during that most difficult time, and whose thoughtful comments and observations have helped my family and guided the telling of my story: Judy and Dickie Stowers, Susan Carrington, Jackie and Dr. Ron Hill, Drs. Mac McCrary and George Hurt, Joanna and Dr. Walter Beverly, Catherine and Wesley Robinson, Bill and Patty Wilson, DeWitt and Jeff Kierstead, Toby Beavers, Mike and Linda Milam, Heidi Baldwin, Mary Brockman, Karen and George Lupton, Norm and Paige Darden, Geisel and Kevin Nye, Joe and Betty Mullen, Buster and Lynn Walker, Susan Whitehead, Jeff Horsley, Clara Bell, Courtney and Johnny Alford, Gilson and Dodge Lincoln, Liz Smith, Sophia Cody, Lone Jensen, Suzanne and Steve Johnson, Copey Hanes, Bob and Stephanie Sullivan, Diane and Todd Vie, Colby Proffitt, the Taylor, Reams, Tatom, Heppner, Sullivan, and Moore families, and so many others.

My gratitude, most especially to God, is unbounded.

1
Seventy percent is “dark energy,” that most mysterious force discovered by astronomers in the mid-1990s as they found incontrovertible proof based on Type Ia supernovas that for the last five billion years the universe has been falling
up
—that the expansion of all of space is
accelerating
. Another 26 percent is “dark matter,” the anomalous “excess” gravity revealed over the last few decades in the rotation of galaxies and galactic clusters. Explanations will be made, but the mysteries beyond will never end.

As an infectious diseases specialist I was asked to see Dr. Eben Alexander when he presented to the hospital on November 10, 2008, and was found to have bacterial meningitis. Dr. Alexander had become ill quickly with flu-like symptoms, back pain, and a headache. He was promptly transported to the Emergency Room, where he had a CT scan of his head and then a lumbar puncture with spinal fluid suggesting a gram-negative meningitis. He was immediately begun on intravenous antibiotics targeting that and placed on a ventilator machine because of his critical condition and coma. Within twenty-four hours the gram-negative bacteria in the spinal fluid was confirmed as
E.coli
. An infection more common in infants,
E. coli
meningitis is very rare in adults (less than one in 10 million annual incidence in the United States), especially in the absence of any head trauma, neurosurgery, or other medical conditions such as diabetes. Dr. Alexander was very healthy at the time of his diagnosis and no underlying cause for his meningitis could be identified.

The mortality rate for gram-negative meningitis in children and adults ranges from 40 to 80 percent. Dr. Alexander presented to the hospital with seizures and a markedly altered mental status, both of which are risk factors for neurological complications or death (mortality over 90 percent). Despite prompt and aggressive antibiotic treatment for his
E.coli
meningitis
as well as continued care in the medical intensive care unit, he remained in a coma six days and hope for a quick recovery faded (mortality over 97 percent). Then, on the seventh day, the miraculous happened—he opened his eyes, became alert, and was quickly weaned from the ventilator. The fact that he went on to have a full recovery from this illness after being in a coma for nearly a week is truly remarkable.

—Scott Wade, M.D.

In reviewing my recollections with several other neurosurgeons and scientists, I entertained several hypotheses that might explain my memories. Cutting right to the chase, they all failed to explain the rich, robust, intricate interactivity of the Gateway and Core experiences (the “ultra-reality”). These included:

1. A primitive brainstem program to ease terminal pain and suffering (“evolutionary argument”—possibly as a remnant of “feigned-death” strategies from lower mammals?). This did not explain the robust, richly interactive nature of the recollections.

2. The distorted recall of memories from deeper parts of the limbic system (for example, the lateral amygdala) that have enough overlying brain to be relatively protected from the meningitic inflammation, which occurs mainly at the brain’s surface. This did not explain the robust, richly interactive nature of the recollections.

3. Endogenous glutamate blockade with excitotoxicity, mimicking the hallucinatory anesthetic, ketamine (occasionally used to explain NDEs in general). I occasionally saw the effects of ketamine used as an anesthetic during the earlier
part of my neurosurgical career at Harvard Medical School. The hallucinatory state it induced was most chaotic and unpleasant, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to my experience in coma.

4. N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) “dump” (from the pineal, or elsewhere in the brain). DMT, a naturally occurring serotonin agonist (specifically at the 5-HT1A, 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C receptors), causes vivid hallucinations and a dreamlike state. I am personally familiar with drug experiences related to serotonin agonist/antagonists (that is, LSD, mescaline) from my teen years in the early 1970s. I have had no personal experience with DMT but have seen patients under its influence. The rich ultra-reality would still require fairly intact auditory and visual neocortex as target regions in which to generate such a rich audiovisual experience as I had in coma. Prolonged coma due to bacterial meningitis had badly damaged my neocortex, which is where all of that serotonin from the raphe nuclei in the brainstem (or DMT, a serotonin agonist) would have had effects on visual/auditory experience. But my cortex was off, and the DMT would have had no place in the brain to act. The DMT hypothesis failed on the basis of the ultra-reality of the audiovisual experience, and lack of cortex on which to act.

5. Isolated preservation of cortical regions might have explained some of my experience, but were most unlikely, given the severity of my meningitis and its refractoriness to therapy for a week: peripheral white blood cell (WBC) count over 27,000 per mm
³
, 31 percent bands with toxic granulations, CSF WBC count over 4,300 per mm
³
, CSF
glucose down to 1.0 mg/dl, CSF protein 1,340 mg/dl, diffuse meningeal involvement with associated brain abnormalities revealed on my enhanced CT scan, and neurological exams showing severe alterations in cortical function and dysfunction of extraocular motility, indicative of brainstem damage.

6. In an effort to explain the “ultra-reality” of the experience, I examined this hypothesis: Was it possible that networks of inhibitory neurons might have been predominantly affected, allowing for unusually high levels of activity among the excitatory neuronal networks to generate the apparent “ultra-reality” of my experience? One would expect meningitis to preferentially disturb the superficial cortex, possibly leaving deeper layers partially functional. The computing unit of the neocortex is the six-layered “functional column,” each with a lateral diameter of 0.2–0.3 mm. There is significant interwiring laterally to immediately adjacent columns in response to modulatory control signals that originate largely from subcortical regions (the thalamus, basal ganglia, and brainstem). Each functional column has a component at the surface (layers 1–3), so that meningitis effectively disrupts the function of each column just by damaging the surface layers of the cortex. The anatomical distribution of inhibitory and excitatory cells, which have a fairly balanced distribution within the six layers, does not support this hypothesis. Diffuse meningitis over the brain’s surface effectively disables the entire neocortex due to this columnar architecture. Full-thickness destruction is unnecessary for total functional disruption. Given the prolonged course of my poor neurological function (seven days) and the severity
of my infection, it is unlikely that even deeper layers of the cortex were still functioning.

7. The thalamus, basal ganglia, and brainstem are deeper brain structures (“subcortical regions”) that some colleagues postulated might have contributed to the processing of such hyperreal experiences. In fact, none of those structures could play any such role without having at least some regions of the neocortex still intact. All agreed in the end that such subcortical structures alone could not have handled the intense neural calculations required for such a richly interactive experiential tapestry.

8. A “reboot phenomenon”—a random dump of bizarre disjointed memories due to old memories in the damaged neocortex, which might occur on restarting the cortex into consciousness after a prolonged system-wide failure, as in my diffuse meningitis. Especially given the intricacies of my elaborate recollections, this seems most unlikely.

9. Unusual memory generation through an archaic visual pathway through the midbrain, prominently used in birds but only rarely identifiable in humans. It can be demonstrated in humans who are cortically blind, due to damaged occipital cortex. It provided no clue as to the ultra-reality I witnessed, and failed to explain the auditory-visual interleaving.

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Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul.
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Near-Death Experiences: The Rest of the Story.
Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2011.

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Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deeper Ecology of Mind
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