Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And we're back with Alan Pierce, journalist, broadcaster, former BBC
Speaker 2: correspondent and co author of Coma and Near Death Experience,
Speaker 2: The Beautiful, disturbing and Dangerous World of the Unconscious. Before
Speaker 2: the break, Alan, we were talking about, you know, well,
Speaker 2: I was asking you why I've never heard about these stories,
Speaker 2: why this phenomenon of uh, you know, drug induced coma
Speaker 2: survivors has not been you know, widely made known, and
Speaker 2: whether it was being deliberately suppressed by the medical community.
Speaker 2: So we were sort of in the midst of that
Speaker 2: conversation when we we had to break. Is there anything
Speaker 2: else you wanted to add to that?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, The funny thing is, and we couldn't get
Speaker 3: our heads around this rage, is that no one has
Speaker 3: actually researched the subject comperly before. No one's examined white
Speaker 3: people being pasted into goma, and no one's examined the
Speaker 3: events within coma and also what happens to people posted
Speaker 3: coma because they're never the same again. Part of the
Speaker 3: reason is that critical care today has become a conveyor
Speaker 3: belt of care where ione's so busy, they don't get
Speaker 3: the chance to look over their shoulder the product coming
Speaker 3: off the other end. They simply do not see the damage.
Speaker 3: If you've been on a mechanical ventilator, for example, within
Speaker 3: a coma, you've got terrible damage to your vocal cords.
Speaker 3: I mentioned that with Nick earlier. And when you come
Speaker 3: to let's say within your coma, from your coma, you're
Speaker 3: not in the position to discuss anything you've experienced with anybody.
Speaker 3: You're moved down the line, invariably to some care facility.
Speaker 3: Everything that happens next comes with such a shock, the
Speaker 3: inability to hold a spoon, You can't stand up, You
Speaker 3: keep getting these appording flashbacks. You don't recognize anybody, You've
Speaker 3: forgot language. One person told me she didn't recognize humans.
Speaker 3: So you've got this scenario. And when a doctor or
Speaker 3: a nurse is ever confronted with a patient, which is
Speaker 3: extremely rare, who presents these symptoms or talks of all
Speaker 3: term at life, that there's two quick who dismiss these
Speaker 3: things has effectively a form of mental illness. As I
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier, Why no one's investigated this in terms of
Speaker 3: is it a conspiracy? A large part of This is
Speaker 3: that when people come out of the coma and they've
Speaker 3: got these massive holes in their memory, they've got a
Speaker 3: shocking muscle wastage, joints of calcified nerves are disconnected, and
Speaker 3: they just i know, entirely on their own, and when
Speaker 3: they try to talk to somebody about it, the doctors
Speaker 3: and nurses will just simply sell these are temporary blips
Speaker 3: your memory. Don't worry about it. It will come back
Speaker 3: as you move further down the line and you get
Speaker 3: to speak to other doctors and you mentioned in your
Speaker 3: memory problems. They then start thinking you've got early onset Alzheimer's,
Speaker 3: and possibly you're unaware that other people have been through
Speaker 3: the same experiences as yourself, and you just think, yes,
Speaker 3: it's the luck of the draw. I've now got onset
Speaker 3: early onset to MENSI. People don't seem to realize the
Speaker 3: vast damage that is being caused. And again a lot
Speaker 3: of this, as I say, is because these the hospital
Speaker 3: quiet conditions, and the people that need to know most
Speaker 3: i e. The staff in intensive gear appear to be
Speaker 3: the last people being informed of just even making an
Speaker 3: effort to find out what happens to their patients in.
Speaker 2: The book Comma and Your Death Experience, there is one
Speaker 2: particularly disturbing story. It's a woman who experience experiences what
Speaker 2: seems to be an ongoing nightmare that and I don't
Speaker 2: know how long she was in a drug induced coma,
Speaker 2: perhaps weeks or months, but she when she comes to,
Speaker 2: she recalls this living nightmare while in the coma that
Speaker 2: seemed to go on for years. Can you share that
Speaker 2: story with us?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that there's several within the burg. Let
Speaker 3: me give you the example of Isabelle. Isabelle is a
Speaker 3: medical professional in she works in one of the finest
Speaker 3: hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa, and she contracted COVID
Speaker 3: very early on in the pandemic and this started turning
Speaker 3: to sepsis. So her colleagues said, I think the best
Speaker 3: thing we can do is to put you into a
Speaker 3: medically induced coma. And she was completely up for it.
Speaker 3: She was thinking, yeah, okay, fine, I don't remember any
Speaker 3: of this. Put me down. Well, Isabelle wakes up within
Speaker 3: her coma, and this is a common thing that people
Speaker 3: say they woke up within their coma coma as in,
Speaker 3: we fell asleep on the sofa, We just woke up
Speaker 3: and here we are in this level of reality. Isabelle
Speaker 3: wakes up within her coma and finds herself in an
Speaker 3: organ harvesting facility. She says she was kept there for
Speaker 3: four years. They learned how to grow her organs, harvest them,
Speaker 3: kill her, regenerate her, grow her organs over and over again.
Speaker 3: For example, she said she had a uterus removed seven times.
Speaker 3: This is just one set of things that happened to her.
Speaker 3: She then listed a whole bunch of lives, one after
Speaker 3: another after another, all of which ended in murder or rape,
Speaker 3: her murder, or just some appalling event, and just one
Speaker 3: after another after another. She also said that she spends
Speaker 3: ten thousand years on the bottom and top levels of existence.
Speaker 3: Down on the bottom of it was all mild and
Speaker 3: funny creatures, and at the top it was all ones
Speaker 3: and zeros, and that she could flip between the two.
Speaker 3: She was utterly exhausted within her coma with all these
Speaker 3: events that she just wished she would die. And she
Speaker 3: found herself dying, And she found herself in a beautiful
Speaker 3: field of tall green grass, and the breeze is blowing.
Speaker 3: There's a horse nearby, and it's the most perfect summer's day.
Speaker 3: This is very clearly a near death experience. And she
Speaker 3: walks for a while and she finds some stairs going
Speaker 3: up into the sky, wooden, gnarred stairs. As she climbs
Speaker 3: these stairs, and she says she was four steps from
Speaker 3: the top when she heard her name being called, Isabel, Isabel,
Speaker 3: you have to come back, she said, Oh, I was
Speaker 3: so pissed off. I just stomped back down those stairs. Eventually,
Speaker 3: when she's out of her coma and she's on the
Speaker 3: road to recovery, she goes back to ICU and she
Speaker 3: speaks to her colleagues and she tries to tell them
Speaker 3: about the events she experienced within coma and they're like, oh, yeah, really,
Speaker 3: that's weird and not taking it remotely seriously. And these
Speaker 3: are the doctors not taking seriously. A colleague has had
Speaker 3: these experiences who desperately came to tell them what's happened
Speaker 3: to her, and they won't listen. And if they won't
Speaker 3: listen to a medical colleague and not get to listen to.
Speaker 2: A patient, do the experiences of drug induced coma survivors
Speaker 2: differ greatly from people who are in a coma as
Speaker 2: a result of some kind of a trauma or accident,
Speaker 2: brain injury, et cetera. Do they have any experiences that
Speaker 2: are similar to drug induced comma survivors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a good question that they do appear similar. Within
Speaker 3: the book, I think two or three of the coma
Speaker 3: survivors were in a situation where one case, Alvey guy
Speaker 3: called Rory, he was in a home invasion and he
Speaker 3: got battered about the head with a hammer, and he
Speaker 3: was in a spontaneous coma, as it were, and within
Speaker 3: that he was having events. He did actually come to
Speaker 3: within the hospital, but he was what they call agitated.
Speaker 3: He was fighting desperate to pull all the tubes and
Speaker 3: things out of them that they just put him back
Speaker 3: down again. Somebody else was in a motorcycle accident and
Speaker 3: she went into a spontaneous coma and she had events
Speaker 3: within that, and again she came to within a hospital,
Speaker 3: was agitated, was then placed into a medically induced coma,
Speaker 3: and they'd have a whole range of experiences pretty much
Speaker 3: like being in Alice in Wonderland in many respects. In
Speaker 3: other respects, she was entirely in the dark, completely conscious,
Speaker 3: unaware of her body or anything around her, but in
Speaker 3: the dark, and she was there for what thought like
Speaker 3: an eternity when this happened to her. She's only just
Speaker 3: turned fifteen, and she's in her mind calling out, mommy, mommy,
Speaker 3: please come and wake me up. I've been sleeping too long.
Speaker 3: Something is wrong and this is just not understood. Doctors
Speaker 3: think it's that some people are analyzed, they'd locked in syndrome,
Speaker 3: and yet they're completely conscious of events around them. And
Speaker 3: when that happens, oftentimes events within the hospital award get
Speaker 3: transferred into some other kind of event, such as and
Speaker 3: Isabel mentioned this. She said, the nurses with no doubt
Speaker 3: cleaning her teeth, but to her mind, she was being
Speaker 3: held by a kidnapper who's melted a toothbrush and inserted
Speaker 3: razor blades and was slicing into the teeth and guns.
Speaker 3: That's how she perceived just having her teeth cleaned. When
Speaker 3: people have a bedbarth within conor, oftentimes that's perceived as
Speaker 3: a form of sexual assault or rape. And another thing
Speaker 3: that happens is doctors will talk over the patient the
Speaker 3: coma patients not aware that a patient in some cases
Speaker 3: can hear them, so they're saying things like, I don't
Speaker 3: think she's going to survive the night, we'll try this
Speaker 3: one last drug. But I don't think her chances are good.
Speaker 3: No one wants to hear that is she kind of
Speaker 3: discussed these things do it outside. These things now to
Speaker 3: me are so relatently obvious. I'm staggered that they're not
Speaker 3: obvious to the medical profession.
Speaker 2: And again, these people are showing no our little brain
Speaker 2: activity while they're in a drug induced comma.
Speaker 3: Okay, so it's extremely rare, as you've had a brain
Speaker 3: brain injury of some kind, that they monitor your brain
Speaker 3: within a medically induced coment exceptionally ran one of the
Speaker 3: doctors that's been helping us with the book, Dr Wezi Lee.
Speaker 3: He's professor of medicine at Vanderbilt. Some time back, he
Speaker 3: was becoming concerned that his patients were dying too. Many
Speaker 3: of them were dying within comer and when he got
Speaker 3: to see them afterwards, he was really worried about what
Speaker 3: have happened to them and the things that do happen.
Speaker 3: For example, he had a thirty five year old woman
Speaker 3: who's with his patient. She was a mathematical whiz, absolute genius.
Speaker 3: After her coma, when she went to see Eli, she
Speaker 3: couldn't even add up her checking account now she had
Speaker 3: an impressive IQ of one hundred and forty prior to
Speaker 3: the COMA. Doctor Eely has another test taken and her
Speaker 3: IQ came up at one hundred, just shockingly low. They
Speaker 3: then put her into an MRI scanner and instead of
Speaker 3: the brain of a thirty five year old woman, she
Speaker 3: had the brain of an elderly woman with dementia. Parts
Speaker 3: of her brain had absolutely shriveled. And this is what's
Speaker 3: happening to people within COMA. Part of the reason is
Speaker 3: lack of sleep, which seems ironic because coma effectively comes
Speaker 3: from an ancient Greek word meaning deep sleep. So from
Speaker 3: the get go everyone's thinking of sleep, but you're not sleeping.
Speaker 3: When you switched the brain off. When you switched the
Speaker 3: brain off, absolutely nothing happens within the brain. It's a
Speaker 3: bit like having a desktop computer and unplugging it from
Speaker 3: the mains and then expecting it to work. The brain
Speaker 3: will not go through its circadian rhythms. As a result,
Speaker 3: he will not experience rem sleep. When Dr Wes Eedy
Speaker 3: put his patients on an EG brain scanner, he was
Speaker 3: horrified to see that they were flatlining. As close to
Speaker 3: death as you did get he had no idea people
Speaker 3: were being sent down to those depths.
Speaker 2: So the brain is unconscious, if you will, or completely offline,
Speaker 2: but the mind, wherever that resides, is incredibly.
Speaker 3: Active, incredibly so because the medical world seems to think
Speaker 3: that the mind and the brain are the same thing,
Speaker 3: or somehow that the brain produces the mind. Although these
Speaker 3: are any theories that never been proven, we are clearly
Speaker 3: showing here that somebody who would be flatlining on an
Speaker 3: EG brain scanner is having a rich inner experience. It
Speaker 3: might be a lovely one, or it might be something
Speaker 3: ghastly like like you said, those experiences, but these things
Speaker 3: are happening and moment one understands it, and no one
Speaker 3: has investigated it until we came along. One of the
Speaker 3: reason is no one takes it seriously. Because I'm a
Speaker 3: journalist and be as a PI. We came to the
Speaker 3: subject with completely open eyes. Whereas modern science, materialistic science
Speaker 3: as it's called, actually limits itself. The only things that
Speaker 3: they can weigh, measure, slice up, and put under a microscope. Consciousness,
Speaker 3: which they can't do any of those things too, is
Speaker 3: best ignored. So when people have events within coma they
Speaker 3: can't explain, They just ask them over. They fog them off,
Speaker 3: which is the best way of describing them.
Speaker 2: Did anyone in the book have a predominantly let's say,
Speaker 2: beautiful experience while in a drug and induce coma. Were
Speaker 2: they in a you know, in paradise?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Many, many, many are. And I think the longer
Speaker 3: you're in one, and perhaps the closer you get to death,
Speaker 3: the lovelier it will become. One of the nicest stories
Speaker 3: in the book. A hospital chaplain from Birmingham, Alabama, Corey Agricola,
Speaker 3: fantastic guy. He was working at the UAB Hospital in
Speaker 3: Birmingham and it's vast place and he thinks that over
Speaker 3: the years he's been there, he's ministered to something like
Speaker 3: fifteen thousand people. And that's the reed Familist people are
Speaker 3: approaching death and all the rest of them. And he
Speaker 3: was burning out. He completely had it crank and he
Speaker 3: got some mystery infection. They didn't know what it was.
Speaker 3: They put him in a coma. He went to heaven.
Speaker 3: Okay is Christian, but he went to heaven. He didn't
Speaker 3: see God, he didn't see Jesus, didn't see anything like that.
Speaker 3: He just sort a mountain of light. He could hear
Speaker 3: praise music, beautiful music that he'd never heard before or since,
Speaker 3: and he just had the most exquisite time. And he
Speaker 3: said that God was showing far more grace as you
Speaker 3: approach death than you could ever possibly imagine. That this
Speaker 3: is easing once passing. It's the most beautiful experience. When
Speaker 3: he came back and recovered, and he actually recovered very well.
Speaker 3: He's now able to minister the people within hospital families
Speaker 3: who've got a patient within coma, he can talk to
Speaker 3: them about that, talk to them about you know what
Speaker 3: you can do in the room. In many cases you
Speaker 3: can talk to them and hold their hand. They will know.
Speaker 3: Other cases they won't have the first clue. But he's
Speaker 3: now able to tell people, particularly those who are approaching death,
Speaker 3: what he's seen. He can give them an eyewitness account.
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