A patient born blind "sees" during her NDE

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey reports: “The surgery had gone smoothly until the later stages of the operation. Then something happened. As her physician was closing the incision, Sarah’s heart stopped beating. . . . The cardiac monitor suddenly showed ventricular fibrillation, a wild, chaotic, electrical storm in the heart in which no effective beat takes place. But the emergency was all over in a minute, for it took no more time than that for the anesthesiologist to defibrillate her with the LifePak device that was always at the read in the OR, the operating room.  

“Yet Sarah had something else to show for her surgery besides the ache in her side where the stone-filled gall bladder had been removed and the concentric, reddish rings on her chest left by the sting of the defibrillator’s paddles. She had something else to show that amazed her and the rest of the surgery team as well—a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the OR layout; the scribbles on the surgery schedule board in the hall outside; the color of the sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the names of the surgeons in the doctors’ lounge down the corridor who were waiting for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that her anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the cardiac arrest.

“But what made Sarah’s vision even more momentous was the fact that, since birth, she had been blind.” Her surgeon dismissed her visual memories during her cardiac arrest, but the critical care nurse told Sarah: “It happens pretty often around here after anesthesia. People come back with the strangest stories. A couple of years ago one guy had a cardiac arrest, and when he came to he told his cardiologist what the specific levels of all his cardiac enzymes in his blood would be for the next three days. The doctor didn’t believe him, either, but he hit it right on the money!”

Sarah’s visual near-death experience during her surgery left her without a doubt: “There’s more than one way to see!” Sarah now knew that the world worked differently than anyone supposed, that there were principles operating beyond the common view. No matter how poorly these ideas and her experience fit her previous model of reality, she could not dismiss them. She felt the impact of the event changing her. My vision cannot be completely in my body, she told herself, and it cannot really all be in my eyes and my brain. When my body was least functional during the arrest, my senses were most functional!”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 17-19.