My name is Shannon and I am an ICU nurse. I have been an ICU nurse since December of 2000. I mostly work in pediatric intensive care but around 2013 I did a few years in adult ICU, and that is when I witnessed a man have an NDE shortly after open heart surgery.

It was just a regular day. I came to work, got my assignment and started caring for my patients. There was a man named John in another room that was NOT my patient. I had never seen or met this man before. During my night shift, I heard the code bell go off. I ran to the room and saw an older gentleman that for all intents and purposes looked deceased sitting up in the chair next to his bed. He wasn't breathing and his heart had stopped. He was fluctuating beween asystole (flat line) and v-fib. There were about 30-40 people that came to his room for the code. There was barely space to move about. Luckily whomever put him in the chair had put a bath blanket underneath him. The adrenaline hit all of us and we used that blanket to lift him quickly into the bed and start CPR. The respiratory therapist (RT) was managing his airway and bagging him as other RT's ran and grabbed intubation supplies and prepared a ventilator. Other nurses and RT's switched on and off every 2 minutes doing chest compressions.

I ran and grabbed the crash cart, at the same time all of this was happening. One nurse began preparing code meds. My role at that point became operator of the AED or defibrillator. I placed the pads on the man's chest. His analyzed rhythm was vfib. The treatment of vfib is to shock the patient, continue CPR, and give epinephrine. My sole job was to safely deliver the correct joules to shock him and to make sure I kept the other staff safe while doing so (ie, clearing them and not shocking them). Somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, we had the patient intubated and had gotten a perfusing rhythm back. He was placed on the ventilator and continuous sedation was started. His eyes were closed the entire time, obviously. He never saw me. A few hours later, I had left as my shift had ended.

I was off for a couple days and then returned to work. While walking into the unit I poked my head in John's room. I was surprised to see that he was already awake, alert, extubated (breathing tube removed) and he was back in the chair he coded in. I was actually surprised because I had expected after that code for him to still be sedated and on the vent. I felt caught off guard by that, so I just said, "Hello." He said, "Hello" back.

I said, "You don't remember me, but I was here the night that you coded and your heart stopped." He said, "Yes, I know." I said, "No, you must think I am someone else because I wasn't your nurse that night and we never met." He said, "No, it was you."

I thought he was just mixing me up with someone else because there were so many people in the room. At this time in my life, I wasn't sure what happened when you died but I had been told by many that when you're dead, that's it. You're dead. Because of this, John and I kept going back and forth about whether it was possible for him to remember me or not. I kept telling him it wasn't possible but he kept insisting.

When he realized that I just wasn't understanding, he said, "You are the one that shocked me." I said, "What?” Even though I had heard what he had said, my mind was in disbelief. He said again, "You are the one that shocked me. You were standing right here," and he pointed to the left side of his bed where I had been when I shocked him. I froze. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I needed to understand how he knew this. My badge was underneath my zipped-up, long sleeve shirt. Somehow, he had recognized my face even though we had never met. My mind filled with questions.

I asked, "How do you know this?" and he stated, "I was watching from up there," and he pointed to the upper corner of his room. Questions began to fill my mind. I asked him if he had any pain because we were doing chest compressions on a fresh sternotomy, as he was in the ICU after open heart surgery. He went on to tell me that he had no pain at all. None what so ever.

I then asked if he was scared while watching us perform CPR on him. He said no. He stated that he was just observing and was at complete peace. I was very freaked out. I said, "Well, if you were at peace, had no pain and were just observing, then what were you thinking?" He smiled and just said, "I thought you were going to burn my nipples when you shocked me." I laughed a little and thought, “Wow! He's very matter of fact about this.” I had expected a different answer.

I don't know what answer I expected, but not that. Here he was very calm and at peace with it and I was the one that was out of sorts. The fact that I was being watched while he was clinically dead was almost too much for me to handle. It was almost 7pm and I needed to go get my assignment for the night and get report from the day shift nurse so that they could leave. I told him that I had to go and he just very nicely smiled and said okay. I left his room and went about my shift. He was not my patient that night, but I couldn't get him and the entire situation off my mind. I had always been scared of death my entire life, so this situation really freaked me out for months.

A few months later, while at work, one of the nurses from the step-down ICU called and said that they needed an ICU nurse to come trouble-shoot a wound vac that a patient had on their chest that just wasn't working. I went to the other unit and when I walked in the patient’s room, it was John. Again. We just smiled at each other and I switched my focus to trying to fix his wound vac. He needed that wound vac because we did CPR on a fresh sternotomy. Neither of us said a word about what had happened in the ICU. We just smiled and looked at each other the same way we did in the ICU.

It took me a long time to get peace after that situation. It had scared me a lot because I had been afraid of death until that point. When people come to the hospital, it is a nurse or a doctor that is supposed to change that person's life. This patient changed mine. Significantly. I will never forget this one patient.

It's been ten years and I think about him all the time. I now know with certainty that once someone dies, that's not the end. There is some sort of transformation in which consciousness continues without the physical body. When this happens, there is no pain. There is no fear. Just an overwhelming sense of peace. Your thoughts are still your own thoughts but the negative aspects of the physical world are gone. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything. Thanks, John!!!