my NDE storytime...

[missmetal]

Hi all, I am new to this forum and boy, do I feel right at home here!

Anyway, let me talk about my NDE....

I was 20 years old and had to get my gallbladder removed due to gallstones.
I was admitted to hospital, settled in comfortably and before surgery they were going to offer me a nebuliser for asthma to help stabilize my breathing and clear my lungs a little before surgery.
However, the nurse never came back to do so.
I didn't really think too much of it, I could breath fine and didn't has any signs of asthma at all anyway.
But, that nurse probably should have come back to do that, because then maybe I wouldn't have had a NDE.

I had an awful feeling that something was going to happen, I just felt very uneasy about the whole experience and felt that I was going to die.

The anesthesiologist kept poking me with needles trying to find a vein, and it took him roughly 5 attempts to do so, and at this stage I started to panic. I said to him on his 3rd attempt "if something happens to me in there, I wont be happy". He just shrugged it off and was like "meh, you'll be fine... Routine surgery, nothing will happen."

I soon fell asleep, surgery went fine, all is well and good. Surgery took 3 hours extra however, due to gallstones lodged in my bile duct, so the keyhole surgery ended up being an intrusive surgery through my mouth, into my stomach and bile duct to push them out.

I woke up from surgery, my mother was there and I was excited to be ok! I asked her for my phone so I could update my family and friends on facebook and messages, but shortly after getting my phone, I started feeling reallllly tired, and I "fell asleep" with my phone in my hand.

At this time (from my mums side of the story), my mum was just casually looking out of the hospital window, thinking I fell asleep from the medications and just exhaustion from surgery.
But after 10 minutes, she heard my lungs make the dreaded sound of the "death rattle".
I was blue. I wasn't breathing and I was at risk of dying completely.

She went to the nurses desk and told them "something is wrong with my daughter, she needs help", my mum used to be a nurse many years ago herself, so she was very calm about the whole situation, which is why I think the nurses didn't seem to think it was an urgent situation, as apparently the nurse rolled her eyes, as if to think "hmm, she probably just threw up from the surgery or something".

The nurse came to my room, and by now, I have turned purple and black in skin colour. She yelled out loud "oh ****!", and paged nurses, doctors and even my surgeons rushed down to help me.

During this whole ordeal, my experience was a very peaceful one.
I felt like I was an astronaut floating through space, however there were no stars or planets, it was black.... and what I say black, it was absolutely the darkest thing I could ever imagine, it was so dark, it's almost impossible to explain how black it was. But I felt a sense of peace, I was so happy and relaxed just floating through this void, it was the most amazing feeling I have ever experienced, and I don't think I will ever experience it again until I do ultimately meet my maker and travel through this again.
There was no sound, no light, just me....floating through absolutely emptiness.

I was then rudely awoken from this experience, it wasn't a gradual waking up, it was from pure darkness - to pure white lights, 8 people standing around my bed, I was naked from the neck down to my pelvis with sticky things attached to me all over, I have breathing tubes in my nose, a nurse was using a hand pump for oxygen manually on my mouth... It was awful.

They started asking me questions to check if I had brain damage from the lack of oxygen I had. "do you know where you are?" .... "what day is it?" ... "do you know what year it is?".... I got most of the questions right, except the dates, but after a 2nd attempt I was ok.

They told my mum "we wouldn't have done our rounds in the ward for another 10 - 15 minutes... If you weren't there by her side, she would have died in another 2 minutes".

My mum was tired, she was at the hospital all day with me and exhausted after waiting an extra 3 hours surgery time. But she wanted to stay to make sure someone was there when I woke up so I wasn't alone or scared.
And I will be forever thankful to her for staying, because if she didn't, I wouldn't be here telling my story today.

End result; My breathing was suppressed due to being on anesthetic longer than expected + morphine post op, which suppressed my breathing 2x more, resulting in not being able to breath. They took me off morphine and placed me on a general paracetamol drip. (they really should have given me that ashtma preventative pre-op like they said they would!!)