During my 1st open heart after the asked me to count from 10 to 1 with the anesthesia,I somehow ended up out of my body,suspended in the top corner of the O.R. and watched the surgery going on and listened to Bob Seger And The Silver Bullet Band cause that's what the Surgeon played.After the 4th day after when they pulled my next apparatuses out the Surgeon asked me how I was feeling and I told him everything and he asked what music he played,I told him,he.started looking strange and I didn't recognize the facial expression he had but I told him I was sorry his wife left him because he was never home.He said,"Where did you hear that?".I said,"You were telling the anesthesiologist while you were sawing my breastbone".He agreed and said that what I experienced happened in 1 in about 500 thousand people.Anyway..it was weird but the music was nice.
As a paramedic, I had a patient who had experienced a heart attack and had no pulse or respirations when we arrived. When we hooked him up to the monitor, he was in ventricular fibrillation (V-Fib), which does not create blood flow. It took quite a while to get a pulse back, and that was only after defibrillating (shocking) him a few times and giving him a couple of rounds of drugs, with CPR going on throughout. We did get a viable rhythm back before arriving at the hospital, which included a pulse, although he was still unconscious when we left the hospital after the transport. Usually, when that occurs, we learn later that our patient was declared dead within a few hours. This guy not only survived, but he went back to work, and, the last time I saw him, about fifteen years later, he was still doing fine. Interestingly, he remembered the whole thing. He could tell me as much of what we had said while working on him as any conscious person might have been able to remember. He couldn't see anything during this time, but his brain and his ears were working. He remembered how many times I had shocked him although he didn't feel the shocks. He just remembered me saying "clear," and knew that that would have been followed by a shock. I would later invite him to my class to talk to my paramedic students, as a way of emphasizing the importance of behaving like a professional even when you don't think your patient is aware of what you're saying. That was the first full arrest that I worked as the primary paramedic on the scene, and he was a member of the city council, so that was nice. That's not the same thing as an out-of-body experience but it does illustrate that the brain might still be up even when everything else is down.
In open heart you're on a heart/lung machine and you're actually dead because they can't operate on a beating heart so lots of similarities there Mr.Anderson.I respect what Paramedics can do.