Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

25. Not There Yet

Bond wasn’t the only one having difficulty accepting the decidedly kooky person I was during those first days back. The day after I recovered consciousness—Monday—Phyllis called Eben IV on his computer using Skype.

“Eben, here’s your dad,” she said, turning the video camera toward me.

“Hi, Dad! How’s it going?” he said cheerfully.

For a minute I just grinned and stared at the computer screen. When I finally spoke, Eben was crushed. I was painfully slow in my speech, and the words themselves made little sense. Eben later told me, “You sounded like a zombie—like someone on a bad acid trip.” Unfortunately, he had not been forewarned about the possibility of an ICU psychosis.

Gradually my paranoia abated, and my thinking and conversation became more lucid. Two days after my awakening, I was transferred to the Neuroscience Step-down Unit. The nurses there gave Phyllis and Betsy cots so that they could sleep next to me. I trusted no one but the two of them—they made me feel safe, tethered to my new reality.

The only problem was that I didn’t sleep. I kept them up all night, going on about the Internet, space stations, Russian double agents, and all manner of related nonsense. Phyllis tried to convince the nurses that I had a cough, hoping a little cough syrup would bring on an hour or so of uninterrupted sleep. I was like a newborn who did not adhere to a sleep schedule.

In my quieter moments, Phyllis and Betsy helped pull me slowly back to earth. They recalled all kinds of stories from our childhood, and though by and large I listened as if I were hearing them for the first time, I was fascinated all the same. The more they talked, the more something important began to glimmer inside me—the realization that I had, in fact, been there for these events myself.

Very quickly, both sisters told me later, the brother they had known became visible again, through the thick fog of paranoid chatter.

“It was amazing,” Betsy later told me. “You were just coming out of coma, you weren’t at all fully aware of where you were or what was going on, you talked about all kinds of crazy stuff half the time, and yet your sense of humor was just fine. It was obviously you. You were back!”

“One of the first things you did was crack a joke about feeding yourself,” Phyllis later confided. “We were prepared to have fed you spoonful by spoonful for as long as it took. But you’d have none of it. You were determined to get that orange Jell-O into your mouth on your own.”

As the temporarily stunned engines of my brain kicked back in ever further, I would watch myself say or do things and marvel: where did that come from? Early on, a Lynchburg friend named Jackie came by to visit. Holley and I had known Jackie and her husband, Ron, well, having bought our house from them. Without my willing them to do so, my deeply ingrained southern social graces kicked in. Seeing Jackie, I immediately asked, “How’s Ron?”

After a few more days, I started having occasional genuinely lucid conversations with my visitors, and again it was fascinating to see how much of these connections were automatic and did not require much effort on my part. Like a jet on autopilot, my brain somehow negotiated these increasingly familiar landscapes of human experience. I was getting a firsthand demonstration of a truth that I’d known very well as a neurosurgeon: the brain is a truly marvelous mechanism.

Of course, the unspoken question on everybody’s mind (including mine in my more lucid moments) was: How well would I get? Was I really returning in full, or had the E. coli done at least some of the damage all the doctors had been sure it would do? This daily waiting tore at everyone, especially Holley, who feared that all of a sudden the miraculous progress would stop, and she would be left with only a portion of the “me” she had known.

Yet day by day, ever more of that “me” returned. Language. Memories. Recognition. A certain mischievous streak I’ve always been known for returned as well. And while they were pleased to see my sense of humor back, my two sisters weren’t always thrilled with how I chose to use it. Monday afternoon, Phyllis touched my forehead and I recoiled.

“Ouch,” I screamed. “That hurts!”

Then, after enjoying everybody’s horrified expressions, I said, “Just kidding.”

Everyone was surprised by the speed of my recovery—except for me. I—as of yet—had no real clue how close to death I had actually been. As, one by one, friends and family headed back to their lives, I wished them well and remained blissfully ignorant of the tragedy that had been so narrowly averted. I was so ebullient that one of the neurologists who evaluated me for rehab placement insisted that I was “too euphoric,” and that I was probably suffering from brain damage. This doctor, like me, was a regular bow-tie wearer, and I returned the favor of his diagnosis by telling my sisters, after he had left, that he was “strangely flat of affect for a bow-tie aficionado.”

Even then, I knew something that more and more of the people around me would come to accept as well. Doctors’ views or no doctors’ views, I wasn’t sick, or brain-damaged. I was completely well.

In fact—though at this point only I knew this—I was completely and truly “well” for the first time in my entire life.