Call me Lazarus…

**The trouble with explaining near-death experiences is that they're so much like other experiences. We've all felt faint, had fantastic dreams, been knocked unconscious or had limbs fall "asleep." NDEs can feel like some combination of these. And that's because they all involve more or less the brain's sensory apparatus, which is susceptible of all kinds of tricks rendering unreality "seemingly" real.

From what I've been told, there was a moment recently when my heart stopped pumping. It was the moment a surgeon threaded a tiny catheter, a long wire inserted in an artery in the groin, into a a main artery feeding the heart. The opening was at the time 99% occluded, meaning it was only 1% of its normal size. This apparently had been causing me some problems with chest pain and shortness of breath because the heart itself was not getting enough oxygen. The introduction of even the tiny catheter into this space produced a 100% blockage, which caused the heart to shut down, its lifeblood literally choked off. Mind you, this is only my very ignorant layman's interpretation of what I've been told, but as far as "near-death" this was as close as I've ever come.

When all the alarms went off, apparently the crew switched to resuscitation mode and eventually brought me around sufficiently to continue with the installation of three stents.

These tiny metal mesh tubes prop open the artery so that blood can flow through normally. I was flushed with a powerful diuretic, so much so that the only thing I can remember of the experience is that of drowning. Nurses in the ICU told me that my color was completely grey when I was wheeled in. There was so much diuretic that I voided over 5 liters of urine in the next 24 hours. And there was still fluid in my lungs, prolonging the experience of drowning and suffocation over the next few days that I could not get to sleep. More diuretics were prescribed and the problem eventually eased up enough for me to get some sleep.

The serious part of this experience came only a few days after leaving the ICU. Apparently, I had a susceptibility to nose bleeds in my left nasal area. When one has the kind of coronary procedure I had, powerful blood thinners help to keep the body from attacking the stents and forming clots. The problem with this of course, is that blood can no longer clot normally. In other words, a "normal" nosebleed turns into a life-threatening torrent of blood that takes extraordinary measures to stop. Three trips to the ER managed to stem the tide, for awhile but the solutions were all temporary -- and ugly. I had a bloody plug protruding from my left nostril for several days. I was sent to an ENT who introduced exquisitely painful cautery and inflatable nasal tampon.

This involved shoving a tool into my nose, around the septum and into the sinus cavity whereupon it "burned" the susceptible blood vessels causing them to scar up and thereby strengthen the area from further breakages. Then a long nasal tampon shoved into the area and inflated so as to form a strong compress against the blood vessels that had been rupturing. Aside from the area being naturally sensitive to pressure and burning, the expanded plug generated much more pain as it worked to allow the affected vessels to heal. This remained in place for five days. Five days of headaches so bad that a strong painkiller had to be used every 4-6 hours just so I wouldn't scream. (It also helped me get a little bit of sleep.) It also produced a shiny dark red "tusk" of hardened fabric that protruded from my nose like a killer booger. After the five days the object was removed and I got a few minutes of relief as I breathed normally for the first time in a week. But that pleasure was soon thwarted in favor of more precautionary measures to ensure that the area wold heal strongly and not be the site of future catastrophic nose bleeds. Yet another fabric object was insisted far up into the sinus, coated with some kind of coagulant gel, and I was asked to live with the resulting pain for another five days. Today promises to be another bright one as I have the last of these invasive object removed. My strength has been coming back and my spirits have brightened since I haven't had to take the painkillers. I can finally sit down at a keyboard and type up these even-now-receding memories of what is has been like being a heart patient for the first time, and a near-death survivor.

To be sure, there's nothing "spiritual" about this experience, either the dying or the recovery. Ten or fifteen years ago these techniques were unknown and people died quickly. Only the relentless pursuit of knowledge led to this kind of healing. All the breathing techniques, herbal teas and goop, all the positive thinking and prayers cannot substitute for this plodding path of progress. I still have people telling me I am in their prayers, that they are praying for my recovery. I don't have the heart to tell them that their prayers affect only themselves, make them feel there is some larger force acting on their requests. I don't have the heart to tell them that if prayer were such a potent tool, it should have been used BEFORE any of these harrowing events and not after.

It's true, being alone without a big Imaginary Friend in the sky, is not the most ideal world one can imagine. That kind of idealism belongs to fools who attribute their great luck to it. But it is the real world, and for all their many faults, those in the medical profession, have my respect for the relentlessness with which they pursue their chosen art. It's senseless to imagine that there will come a time when all of this concern for health will be obviated by a 100% perfect system. But having lived from the perilous perspective of Christian Science and the "alternative healing" schools of medicine I would rather any dear friend of mine have the best medical care they can find and use "spiritual means," like prayer, as a kind of pain killer and comforting reality distortion field. Any connection between spiritual means and healing is purely conjectural, driven mostly by a pathetic need to affirm one's beliefs in front of others. I'm one of the lucky ones, the very lucky ones. I had the luck of a wife's insistence on checking me into the ER in an era when so many life-saving techniques are available. A brother-in-law who dropped dead a couple weeks after having received a perfect physical exam, wasn't so lucky. Doctors didn't know what to look for twenty years ago. He's dead, fully dead, and I'm alive, though having been momentarily dead, all because of good timing. Two brothers are also alive because of the advancing progress of the medical establishment. One had a bypass several years ago, and the other had a procedure similar to mine (but without the bloody apocalypse).

Again I continue to support the right of anyone to delude themselves with whatever idealistic theories give them any comfort. What I don't want is anyone suggesting that if I took up their delusions I'd be more lucky than I am.

The folly of prayer

**Whenever there's a high-profile tragedy, especially if it involves kids and guns, there are two voices that rise to the top of the clamor. The gun advocates. The prayer advocates. Many of my friends and family are in the latter category so I'm reticent to be more public with my opinions about that silly and useless practice. But here, in the safe confines of blogscurity, I can rant all I want and only those die-hards may know.

I practiced prayer for over 35 years. Not just prayed but advocated it, taught it, explained it, actually believed it myself. True, my brand of prayer was the Christian Science variety, which has a veneer of intellectuality about it. "Scientific prayer" was seen as not an appeal directly to a deity but as a way to neutralize "erroneous beliefs" in the minds of those who are experiencing or witnessing bad things. The underlying assumption is that everything in existence is in good harmony everywhere and that disharmony is the perceptual result of conclusions that assume the possibility of disharmony. The standard scapegoat is "matter," or that which the senses perceive. In other words, the physical world – the constituents of everything from the sub-atomic to the astronomical realms. Furthermore, these illusory items are considered to be only the phantasmagoric projections of something called "mortal mind," or a mental state so limited that the possibility of evil, or "error," can seem to exist. In other words, you'd see everything as perfectly good and happy if it weren't for your mental state, which you inherited from the false beliefs that your parents gave you by causing you to be conceived and born in the first place. A loser from the beginning, you have no hope except through the use of "scientific prayer." Such prayer, by focusing on the concepts of goodness, benevolence and perfection that refer to the "real" spiritual world you can break the spell of illusion that makes you believe that somebody shot a lot of kids in an elementary school. You will not only feel better, but the effect of this "prayer" can ripple out and help sway the receptive minds of everyone so that they will in turn believe in evil less and feel better and – eventually in some vague future – all false belief will be corrected and the world will appear in its naturally perfect state. Which, by the way, is also the definition of heaven.

Yes, it's convoluted and tautological and unverifiable –in other words, not really as "scientific" as it claims to be. But because it comes dressed in intellectuality, it is believed in by those who consider the kind of prayer everyone else practices to be plebeian . Also, because it lets the pray-er feel better and often has a placebo effect. Countless "testimonies" of "healing" are based on this gut feeling that because the pray-er did the right thing by thinking the right thought then a bad situation was "healed." Oh, and if an individual victim of evil isn't spiritual enough to do it for themselves, they can hire someone else, a "practitioner," to do it for them and in some way nudge their mentality in the right direction. That's what I used to do, and teach, and preach about. And which for the past ten or so years have come to know is pure bullshit.

This doesn't mitigate the folly of prayer as the hoi polloi views it. Theirs is a much simpler, and probably more natural response to evil. It's based on the power structure in families. Kids learn that there are people out there who have the power to do them good or do them harm. Parents, at first. It's natural for a kid to run to a parent for comfort and healing when bad things happen, and that's because parents usually feel compassion and obligation to take care of their kids. As adults, many still cling to the habit, but instead of their too obviously fallible and undependable parents (and other adults) they run to a Super Parent figure, the conventional "God." But it's still folly. When people call for prayer at times of ghastly tragedy, like Sandy Hook, what are they actually expecting? That their divine friend will suddenly change the situation so that it didn't really happen (a la Christian Science)? Probably not. That their Big Friend will stop what It's doing and run over to the "souls" of the kids killed and make them feel better (assuming they exist in a state where they still have conscious feelings) or save them from Big Friend's nemesis, the Devil)? Probably some do. That their Big Friend, who didn't or couldn't stop the tragedy in the first place will now rush into the feelings of everyone else grieved by the event and make them feel better? Probably many.

Folly. All folly.

Instead of going into a dreamy state of wishing, people should get off their knees and do something practical. Like raise hell with legislators and stop the gun lobby's warping of the 2nd amendment to allow practically untrammeled commerce in the sale of weapons (we don't need citizens with assault rifles protecting us against a government with drones and cluster bombs and all sorts of mayhem-producing products from that same industry.) An interesting story surfaced recently where a madman in China broke into an elementary school and wounded a number of children with a knife. Guns are illegal in China. And the kids were WOUNDED and will recover. Not quickly KILLED en masse by a nut with guns made available by a warping of the 2nd amendment by a huge industry that profits from the mass marketing of weapons.

So, stop with the pious folly and realize we don’t live in a perfect world and probably never will. DO stuff, not just believe stuff.

The bone-on-boneness of living in only one world

Having done it myself for over 35 years, most Christian Scientists attempt to live in two worlds at the same time - the ideal and the real - though they won’t admit it. I would take every opportunity to deny the less-than-ideal facts of the real world, calling it just a dream or delusion, or at most a “temporary” accommodation to inferior understanding, while asserting that the world of the “spirit” was tangible and real, even though our sensory apparatus cannot detect it. By “real” I mean the world where scalpels get the job done, even though believing in a perfect other dimension may provide comfort and may induce relaxation that aids the physical process.

Now that I am out of it, I readily notice that giving this freebie to CS is a trait that seems indelible in people who were raised in that system. As often, and in whatever way possible, they rise to give credit to their religion for every good outcome regardless of simpler material explanations.

But the tyranny of a “lifer’s” indoctrination may be no worse than the chronic agony of a jilted convert, like me. I find it difficult to shake the resentment of the mental abuse I suffered from the ideas I ingested. I know I should forget about it and move on, but I still have a pain whose cause needs to be fully excised. Or else I should learn to live with it, the same way I used to live with the physical difficulties that didn’t get resolved through prayer. Some Christian Scientists I know eventually turn to medicine - and the older they get the more readily they turn to it - and get the relief they’ve been postponing out of loyalty to the theory of spiritual healing. They even conclude that prayer and spiritual forces had something to do with it, if only to enable acceptance of and peace with themselves afterward. Good for them. But it’s all still out of reach for me. I don’t have the alternative of an ideal, spiritual world to explain away the bone-on-boneness of walking around in the real world. The only one.