Near Death in the ICU Quotes

“Perhaps both mechanisms – the lack of recall at the moment of trauma as well as the ability to witness our surroundings and our injured body from outside of it – are natural phenomena that evolved to protect us from the vivid impact of trauma and also help us cope.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“the brain is not a producer but a receiver/transmitter of consciousness,”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“NDErs reported both wonderful and horrible disclosure experiences in each of the four categories of confidant, and no category was significantly better or worse.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“I received the information neither from sensory information nor from rational deduction.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“I’ve come to realize, though, that I don’t have to be able to explain something in order to acknowledge it and support the person reporting it.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“PTSD – recurrent and uninvited memories that are distressing, all-too-real flashbacks to traumatic events, and severe emotional distress (or even physical reactions) when they are reminded of the event.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.” – Douglas Adams”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Alexander Fleming’s response when he returned to London from vacation in September of 1928 was not that his petri dishes cultivating Staphylococcus aureus – a common bacterial source of human infection – were contaminated and needed to be discarded, but that they were contaminated and needed to be investigated.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” – Winston Churchill”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Finally, it was a hospice nurse, a gentle black woman, who broke the silence and said, “Now that is only the second or third time in all my years that I have heard that trumpet right after somebody died.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Do we always have help? I decided right then and there – and still I feel this way – that probably we do.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“we knew she had both streptococcal pneumonia and meningitis. She also had a raging sinusitis as well, which was the suspected source of all her troubles.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“specially formulated liquid”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“When choosing is not an act of escape but an act of completion, then you will stay.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Then when the event would happen, they would become angry with her as if she had caused it.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Perhaps because she had no doubts about the soul surviving beyond the physical, she didn’t need a transformative near-death experience – an experience that often flips a person’s conception about life and death”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“antibacterial solution”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“radiographic images”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“To say, “It reminds me of something I’ve dismissed before, therefore I dismiss it,” is actually not scientific, but a dogmatic imposition of personal belief.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“recalled a specific moment when she was no longer moving from but going toward.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“In fact, she found that her new nonphysical reality didn’t seem new at all but that the longer she was in her now state, as she put it, she seemed to be more who she really was than when she was in her then state, when she was in the physical.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“One may be tempted to say that these experiences are simply a kind of dream,”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Learning from the nurse that the patient was a chronic alcoholic, this made sense. Magnesium levels are frequently quite low in everyday, heavy drinkers.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” – Mark Twain”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Apparently, neither did my colleagues, for they neatly sidestepped it – and I was encouraged to do the same.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“No one should be so afraid of something they don’t understand that it limits their choices.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“It’s humbling, especially for those of us firmly rooted in scientific training, to realize that there are things in this universe that are important and true whether or not we have a good explanation for them.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“the tenuous edge between life and death – directly in the flight path of mystery.”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein”
― Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them