i watched my Mother die. in the beginning the body wanted to die but the mind didn't. in the end, the mind begged to die but the body refused...
Posted on 09/11/2016 6:14:34 PM PDT by BunnySlippers
A week or two after we spoke to the nurse, my mother sank into a state where she was rarely conscious. When she was awake, it was only the most basic part of her that was there: the part that told her legs to move to get her to the bathroom, the automated steps in brushing her teeth and then wiping the sink afterward. Her mind turned away from her children and husband for the first time.
I wanted to know what she was thinking about. I wanted to know where her mind was. Being at the bedside of an unresponsive dying person can feel like trying to find out whether someone is home by looking through thick-curtained windows. Is the person sleeping, dreaming, experiencing something supernatural? Is her mind gone?
For many dying people, “the brain does the same thing that the body does in that it starts to sacrifice areas which are less critical to survival,” says David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. He compares the breakdown to what happens in aging: People tend to lose their abilities for complex or executive planning, learning motor skills—and, in what turns out to be a very important function, inhibition.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I was going to Real Clea Politics for the polls and the computer segued to this article.
Was this the latest Hillary interview?
i watched my Mother die. in the beginning the body wanted to die but the mind didn't. in the end, the mind begged to die but the body refused...
My aunt’s last few days (she had a brain tumor) she thought she was on a cruise liner in the middle of the ocean. She apparently was having a good time.
Read the whole article. Wanted to print it but my printer said 12 pages. Too much advertising.
So many stories of floating...
A doctor put a sign on top of the cabinets in the room near the ceiling. No floaters were ever able to tell him what the sign said.
I’m thinking suffocation might be a relatively painless way of dying. I’ve had several incidents of passing out while sleeping from sleep apnea. Feeling myself sinking into oblivion wasn’t all that unpleasant. Waking up gasping for air left me with an appreciation that we don’t have to suffer when we pass on.
Well written and researched article.
This is why I volunteer at hospice. It is a sacred thing to help someone from this veil of tears
My wife was literally the-girl-next-door and lost a battle to breast cancer at 28.
Her last 5 days was in a coma and we never had a chance to say good-bye so these articles are always very fascinating to me.
Only 7 pages, no ads, here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/what-it-feels-like-to-die/499319/
Dying is merely and illusion.
Thank you for what you do!
Thank you for providing us a much better format.
Two days after surgery, I was rolled over in bed in the intensive care unit for an x-ray. I threw a pulmonary embolus and I stopped breathing, followed almost immediately by my newly repaired heart arresting. Luckily there were plenty of medical personnel close by. They cut open my chest again, cut the wires on my breastbone and the chief cardio-pulmonaryy surgeon of the hospital, proceeded to hand massage my heart for ten minutes before it started beating again on it's own. I had died and now I was alive again.
Instead of five days after heart surgery, I spent almost 6 weeks in the hospital trying to get well enough to go home. Fortunately, I made that 64th birthday and, with a lot of hard work, I have now fully recovered. I have lost 75 lbs and feel 20 years younger than my 68 years. I walk daily, do Bowflex strength training again and am able to work around our cattle farm with few problems.
This last summer I happened to run into the surgeon who started my heart again, in the hallway of the VA hospital. We had a short conversation about my "event". He told me in his almost 40 years of practicing medicine, he had attempted to revive only a handful of patients whose hearts had stopped in the hospital by hand massaging their hearts. He said I was the only one of those who had survived. I burst into tears, I was so overwhelmed with emotion. This man had saved my life and there was no thanking him enough.
I am so lucky to be alive and to be given another chance to go around the block again a time or two. I don't really know how it felt to die because I was never really fully conscious during any of it. But one thing I do know about is how wonderful life is when you've been given a second chance.
God Bless.
Thank you for your very inspirational story. I know these stories are out there. They help the rest of us to go on.
It was probably illegible.
Very interesting, thank you.
“Read the whole article. Wanted to print it but my printer said 12 pages.”
I copy and paste to Word, delete the unnecessary crap, and save what I want to hard disk.
Formatted at 12 point, this one was 4 pages.
That URL isn’t working; sorry.
Just use CTRL+P, if you’re using a Windows machine.
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