Pam

Crossing Over Business owner Pam Reynolds is dying to tell about her trip to the other side...and back, featured in Atlanta Woman Magazine.Pam Reynolds comes from four generations of writers and musicians. Her family owns a record company and a publishing business. She has a Masters degree from Julliard in classical composition and is a published author and former editor and chief of Songwriter magazine. She?s a well-educated and talented professional—and she?s careful whom she talks to about the time she was dead. That?s right, dead.Pam was dead on the table for an hour.In August of 1991, this young mother of five was diagnosed with a basilar arterial aneurysm in her brain. Surgery is her case would be risky, yet not having the operation could be fatal since the aneurysm could spontaneously rupture.Dr. Robert F. Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix recommended a specialized operation known as hypothermic cardiac arrest. Also called “standstill.” In this groundbreaking surgery, Reynolds body temperature was lowered, her heartbeat and breathing were stopped, the blood was drained from her head and her brainwaves were flattened. Clinically she was dead. “They took my life in order to save my life,” Reynolds says.“The noise was awful!” she remembers. “Irritating ? like the drill in a dentists office. I felt a tickling at the top of my head before I popped out, like the popping of a suction cup. Then I was above the operating table.” Reynolds describes seeing the doctors around the operating table; in Dr. Spetzler?s hand was the instrument making the offensive noise.“I began to sense a presence that was aware of me. I turned and saw a tiny pinpoint of bright light,” she says. “It got bigger and bigger and started to pull me. I had a physical sensation, like going over a hill very fast or a roller coaster. Then I heard my grandmother calling me.” Reynolds describes seeing her late grandmother and uncle and being surrounded by a thousand or more other people, all looking as though they were clothed in light. She felt intimately connected to them. She felt safe, as if she?d gone home.“Then I thought, ?I hope I deserve to be here. I?m not a perfect person.? There was great laughter.” She says her late Grandmama compared to a child who?d been sent away to school and had made mistakes, but she had cleaned them up, too. “That was a huge lesson for me, that mistakes are different than calculated wrongdoing.”Sharing the details of her experience, Reynolds finds it difficult to order the sequence of events. It seems to her everything was happening simultaneously, and communication was done with the whole body. “Everyone had a tone,” says Reynolds. “I?m a musician, and I know that if you put certain tones together it causes discord. These tones were close together, yet unique and individual, playing all at the same time… It was beautifully harmonic.”Reynolds says that her uncle escorted her back to her body and told her that getting back in was like jumping into a swimming pool. “I didn?t want to go back. My uncle pushed me. I wasn?t kicked out of heaven, I was pushed,” she says, laughing.Reynolds would tell doctors, relatives and friends about the wonderfully vivid “hallucination” she had while in surgery, thinking it nothing more than that. Two years later, however, one of her doctors in Atlanta recommended she speak with Dr. Michael Sabom, a local cardiologist studying Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Reynolds then realized the impact of what had happened.Like many medical professionals, Sabom was skeptical when he first read of NDEs years earlier. Nonetheless, he began talking to his patients in hopes of discovering a medical explanation for the occurrences. The Atlanta research project was his second in-depth study of NDEs, and he now is convinced that these experiences are real.“Near Death Experiences are very common,” says Janice Holden, Ed.D., president of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS). According to a 1982 Gallup study, an estimated eight million people in America have had NDEs. The IANDS Web site reports that as many as 35 to 40 percent of people who?ve come close to death say they?ve had an NDE.Reynolds has the only case that occurred while the EEG was recording brain waves, says Sabom. “It is the best documented case on record.” During his research, Sabom pulled records, interviewed the surgeon and compared what Reynolds reportedly “saw” with actual medical records. She mentioned seeing and hearing things impossible for her to know.During the operation, Reynolds? ears were plugged in order to check brain stem activity, her eyes were taped shut and she was deeply anesthetized; yet Reynolds affirms that she witnessed a tool resembling an electric toothbrush. It turned out to be the “bone saw” used in the surgery. Secondly, she describes a box that looked like her father?s socket wrench case-this was where the attachments to the saw were kept. In addition, Reynolds says she heard a conversation between the cardiovascular surgeon and the neurosurgeon in reference to her small arteries. “These three things were details supporting the fact that she perceived what was happening when she physically could not have seen or heard this,” Sabom says.When asked if he believes the reports of Near Death Experiences, Spetzler says he prefers to stay neutral. He says that although he has no reason to doubt patients? accounts, he isn?t comfortable without scientific data. “I don?t think we have all the answers,” he says.Reynolds says the experience has changed her positively in several ways. Like most people who report NDEs, she now has absolutely no fear of death. She also has a clear perception that life is about learning. “I used to enjoy doing the things that I did best,” she says. “Now it?s more pleasant to work on my weaknesses than to revel in my strengths.”The most significant difference is that Reynolds is more reclusive now, spending her time with family and friends rather than going out because of a heightened sensitivity; she describes it as communication beyond language.” This sensitivity means that she literally feels the sadness and pain of the people around her. “I?m more concerned about how people feel because it impacts me directly, their pain is my pain and their joy is my joy,” she says. When she?s in a public place, feeling these emotions can be overwhelming. But now, Reynolds says, she feels more compassion and understanding for others. “I live life more carefully now,” she reflects. “I?m slow to anger and have the patience of Job. LISTEN TO MP3 SAMPLES IF I LIVE THROUGH THISYOUNG AVENUECRYING FIELDSWHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?COMING BACK TO LIFEPLASTIC PEOPLEYOU'RE FREESHUT UP AND SINGBRAND NEW KIND OF LOVESIDE EFFECTS OF DYINGDRAGON (IRVING'S THEME)Powered By MonsterCommerce Shopping Cart Software