Out of Body

Whether you’re religious or not anyone who has seen a dead person can tell you that there’s something missing, something that’s just not there – and I’m not talking about good colour, rise and fall of the chest, a heartbeat and a good strong pulse. I mean, even if you watch a patient who is in intensive care and is being ventilated, you can tell that there’s something different with them when they die (even if the ventilator keeps mechanically breathing for them)…

I’m not particularly religious, and I honestly don’t have answers for the experiences that I have witnessed or heard about from some of my patients who have been near death, but I think a lot of paramedics can tell you that they have seen or at least heard of some of these out of body experiences in their time as paramedics.

These are some of the out of body stories that I heard during my time as a paramedc. All names are fictional to ensure privacy and confidentiality, but the experiences are true.

We were called to  a 49 male who had developed chest pain and dialled  dialled “OOO” for an Ambulance. My partner and I were the first Ambulance on scene to treat a patient with chest pain. By the time we had arrived the man had collapsed and had stopped breathing. We assessed him and found that he was in cardiac arrest. We applied a monitor and found that he was in assytole (the line which means that there is absolutely no electrical activity – and is ussually a sign that the person has been in cardiac arrest for a while, and has little hope of survival). We called for back up and commenced CPR and the rest of the cardiac arrest drill, including intubating the patient and administering IV adrenaline. Our back arrived shortly and we continued the resuscitation efforts. 

We ended up working on the patient for 20 minutes without any change. One of the senior paramedics said “Okay, what do you guys reckon? Shall we call it?” I was working with a new probationer (Rookie Paramedic) and said, “No, he can use some more experience with CPR, lets run this until we finish the assystole protocol all the way through” (at that stage, included 30 minutes of CPR). The senior paramedic laughed and said, “Hey, if you want him to get more experience in CPR, there’s a maniquien back at the station, he’s got just as much chance resuscitating it than this guy…”

Almost as though the out of body person had heard that and decided, hey, no I don’t want to die just yet… we had a miraculous spontaneous return of circulation (this virtually never happens – and patients still rarely live long term after this much down time). We expedite him to hospital. Two days later we found out that they had stented his heart and that he had been extubated and was neurologically intact in cardiac ICU. No way, we think – good for him!

That was the last we really thought about it… and probably would have been the last we ever thought about him… if it wasn’t for the knock at our station door one early morning…

“Hi… Frank…” The man looks at me “My name’s John… I believe we met a couple months ago…”

I look at him… and try and work out when I treated him and what for – usually, its previous patients who are telling me that they met me a few months ago and often assume that because they had a life-threatening injury they would stand out in my memory… they don’t always… but I did remember something about this guy… I just couldn’t place it?

The man sees my confusion.

“Last time we met my heart wasn’t working… in fact, they tell me it had stopped completely…”

Now I know who he is…

I invite him in and we get chatting…. and find out about how he’s doing. Finally he turns around and says.. “I want to thank you for giving me an extra 10 minutes of CPR… even if it was only so that your rookie could practice CPR…”

“Sorry, I say…” instantly aware of how close this man was to dying because we were going to quit early…

“I was there… you see… I saw the whole thing… and I remember Jack saying that he wanted to ‘call it’ and you saying that your probationer needed extra work on his CPR anyway, so you may as well keep going…”

I’m shocked and fascinated at the same time…

“Really… what else do you remember…”

“Well, I remember that the other paramedic suggested that there would be just as much likelihood of resuscitating the manequien back at the station as resuscitating me…. and it was about then that I realised that this was serious and that if I wanted to live… I was going to have to get back in that body… and the next thing I know… I’m in hospital a few days later…”

I called the other paramedics who I had done the job with… those who weren’t working today… and they all came around to hear this story…

The lessons of this story is this – always do your best as though someone is watching (because sometimes someone is watching), never say things about dead people that you wouldn’t say to them if they could actually hear…