Back from the dead: science returns the gift of life
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/back-from-the-dead-science-returns-the-gift-of-life-20130727-2qry8.html
Garry Organ says dying was the most relaxing sleep he had
ever had.
Like drinking 12 beers and falling into a dreamless slumber,
but even better.
Since dying at a truckstop in the middle of one night last
December, the 59-year-old has no longer been afraid or worried about death.
He is one of the few people who walk the streets of Canberra and the city's
surrounds who can tell you what it's like to kick the bucket. The number of
these people might be small but it is growing because of advancements in
medical technology and each has their own story of death. Numerous people have
been brought back to life after cardiac arrests.
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What makes Organ's story a rarity is that he was driving a
B-double at the time his heart started failing and a sharp pain twisted in his
neck. And he probably only lived to tell the tale because of a cup of coffee
and the day he died: December 28, 2012.
''Are you having a coffee, Garry?'' asked the console
operator when he walked in that night to the truckstop at Marulan, a small
Southern Tablelands town north of Goulburn on the Hume Highway.
''No, I think I'm having a heart attack,'' was Organ's
reply.
He did sip a coffee and get some gear from his truck parked
out the front while the console operator called an ambulance.
Apart from the swift actions of the ambulance officers, he
believes it was this activity - drinking the coffee and walking to his truck
and back again - that did a lot to save his life.
Because as soon as he lay down, he died.
''It was the most comfortable I'd ever been,'' he says,
describing the seconds before his death.
The grandfather woke up in the ambulance after being dead
for a few minutes but not long enough for brain damage to set in.
He had been shocked back to life before being put in the
vehicle. The ambulance and the people inside were speeding past Lake George, he was told.
The fact the ambulance was heading south to Canberra Hospital
and not north to a Sydney
hospital is important.
For if he had died the day before - or mere hours earlier -
he would have been taken to Sydney
and the drive would have been longer.
Instead, he died at 2am and by 5am was sitting in a bed at Canberra Hospital with a stent in one of his
arteries.
''I've got to try to spend the kids' inheritance before I
tail it,'' he jokes when asked how long he plans to live.
More seriously he adds: ''I'm not afraid of death any more.
It's given me a broader outlook on life.''
The Goulburn truckie exercises more but does not worry about
his health. And he maintains there is no heaven or hell or anything on the
other side.
He cannot recall anything about being dead, only the moments
immediately before and after he was revived.
There were no bright lights or tunnels of light for him in
the 180 seconds or so he spent as an expired human body. He can only repeat the
famous words of Kerry Packer: ''There's nothing there.''
Although he did report one common description of a deathly
experience: peacefulness.
These moments, called near-death experiences even when the
person technically dies, have been labelled by some, such as researcher Lakhmir
Chawla of George Washington University,
who studied critically ill men and women, as a final electrical storm in the
brain.
Others, including author Dr Jeffrey Long featured in Time
magazine in 2010, argue scientific evidence is unequivocally strong. Medicine,
he argued, could not account for the consistencies in the testimonies of those
across the world who had had near-death experiences. These included
descriptions of light and serenity as well as feelings of detachment from the
body or levitation.
Steve Williams is one man who remembers floating above and
looking down at his body.
At age 26, the Canberra
public servant was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and informed he would die
without a transplant.
He says he did not get a lung transplant until the age of 33
and the last three years of that time were spent on an oxygen tank and in a
wheelchair.
It was during these tough days he says - when death loomed
so close he was almost taken off the transplant waiting list - that he had the
near-death experience of being detached from his body.
Organ donation is one of the many advances in medical
science that enables people to skirt closer to death but survive and talk about
the experiences it brings.
For people with serious or life-threatening illnesses, an
organ or tissue transplant could mean a second chance at life. About 1700
people are on Australian organ transplant waiting lists at any one time,
according to the federal government.
A donor could save the lives of up to 10 people and improve
the lives of dozens more.
For Williams, 50, his out-of-body experience was a turning
point in his life. ''I'm not scared of death after experiencing that,'' he
says.
''I remember how nice it was.
''It was a weightless feeling. A very light, beautiful,
peaceful state and stark white all around me. It wasn't until it sank in that
it was my body I was looking down upon that I was startled and awoke, so to
speak, once again feeling the heaviness of my body.''
These days, Williams encourages people to become registered
organ donors, although he finds himself needing to destroy people's
superstitions about organ donation.
Vast numbers of people believe, for some reason, they will
die as soon as they put their names down on any organ donors' list.
Williams' first set of lungs lasted 13 years and he was
fortunate enough to get a second pair donated, which should last him the rest
of his life.
The woman who encouraged him to go on the donor list, his
dietitian, later became his wife. And when he survived and married her, they
had twin boys.
His out-of-body experience may have changed his perspective
about dying, but his story of life after near-death is perhaps an even better
testimony about another topic: the joys of living.