Near-Death Experiences

A Professor of Pediatric Physical Therapy had totally repressed the memory of her near-death experience (NDE) as a child, until at a conference, she laid on a table during a practice session for a cranial-sacral technique. Suddenly she began to smell ether. She asked her standing partner whether she smelled ether, which she did not. Then this memory rushed into her consciousness, and she ran out of the room weeping.

When she was about 8 years old, she had an emergency appendectomy. The doctor used ether as the anesthesia commonly used at the time, which has since been discontinued because of dosage uncertainties. During the surgery, this little girl floated up above her body and drifted toward a stairway she saw, up the steps until she saw an older man whom she vaguely recognized. He held up his hand and told her it was not her time, and she had to go back. So, “as a dutiful little Catholic girl,” she said, she went back to the surgery. She watched what the doctors and staff were...