The Day I Died Before I Died - Part I

By Fede Lozano

I woke to the wailing of the siren. “You had a myocardial infarction and cardiac arrest,” the twentysomething paramedic said, visibly shaken as he maneuvered his way around the tight space in the back of the speeding ambulance. “Myocardial what?” I remember mumbling to myself. Hold on a second, did he say that I just had a heart attack and that my heart stopped?

After a few minutes of bouncing around in the stretcher and noticing a bunch of colorful wires attached to my chest, I was speedily wheeled out of the ambulance. I was curious to see exactly where we were. I glanced up a bit, forcing my chest painfully against the tight stretcher belts, which were holding me firmly in place. There stood at the emergency room entrance a line of doctors and nurses immaculately at attention.  They looked proud and alert, like soldiers ready for battle. Their faces and bodies showed all the telltale signs of well-honed, heightened awareness.

The surgical team was headed by Anja, a Norwegian interventional cardiologist in her forties.  She’s trim with straight blond hair and an air of confidence fit for someone with double her experience. Later I found out that Anja is known to give lectures where she operates on a patient while transmitting via live video to large groups of physicians around the globe. It turned out that I was in luck that day: I landed on the operating table of a world-leading surgeon who specializes in the exact kind of operation that my ailing heart required. 

For the next four hours, Anja worked to unclog a fully blocked coronary artery—unkindly yet revealingly known as the widowmaker—by introducing what looked like a thin mechanical serpent up through the right side of my groin all the way up into the left ventricle in my heart. The scene seemed straight out of a sci-fi movie.  Above my chest was this large robot-looking camera that moved loudly back and forth as it scanned different parts of my body. Slightly overhead hung a massive screen with a live X-ray image of my torso. My veins and arteries looked a bit like the twisting trails in my daughter’s ant farm.  Anja managed to skillfully guide the wire through my artery while constantly glancing up at the screen and giving rapid-fire instructions to her colleagues. And as if this amount of cognitive load wasn’t enough, she also managed to carry on an intelligible conversation with me, since I remained wide awake throughout the ordeal. Calm and collected, she kept me updated and reassured me—in an eerily convincing fashion, given the circumstances—that I was doing well.

Around thirty minutes into the operation, I noticed that I began to gently doze off. As I gradually lost consciousness, I remember hearing loud sounds in the background, which I can only ineptly describe as screeching, clattering, and thundering. I also got a vague glimpse of what seemed to be rapidly flashing lights.  After a short moment, I opened my eyes and found myself back on the operating table. I must have passed out, I thought. I did however notice that Anja and her colleagues seemed to have picked up their pace significantly. Why is everyone suddenly so stressed and rushing around?

Another thirty minutes or so later, as the operation ensued, I experienced the same exact sensations—sounds, lights, flashes. This time, however, as I once again came to and opened my eyes, I finally realized from everyone’s frantic body language that I wasn’t simply passing out. I vividly remember seeing a tall doctor peer over the back of my head from behind the operating table. With a strained gesture on his forehead, he said firmly: “Stay with us, Federico, stay with us.” This was the first time it fully sunk in—I was dying.

“Om Benza Sato Samaya, Manu Palaya, Benza Sato Tei No Pa, Tisthira Dridho Me Bawa.” Wait, how did that darn mantra go again? Is this really happening? Am I prepared for this? Dozens of thoughts raced through my mind like speeding freight trains as I tried to recite a mantra and practice a meditation I had learned years ago in Kathmandu during a retreat on death and dying with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche.  As I lay there clumsily trying to remember the instructions of Rinpoche, who he himself had a near-death experience, the thought of my wife and daughter flooded my mind. As I anguished over what it would be like to never see them again, I began to feel the same sensations as before: the dozing off, the thundering sounds, the oh-so-enticing flashing lights.  This time the experience seemed to last even longer.

I remember being in a pitch-dark place, which felt totally foreign yet safe and welcoming. My attention was captivated by the loud, fast, flickering perceptions which, like that of a dramatic Italian opera, seemed to be reaching a magnificent crescendo. I felt as if my entire life was being retold to me at hyper speed through the lights, which by then seemed to be reverberating everywhere. It was like being alone in the center of an enormous 3D movie theater with awesome surround sound. Showing that day: “The Story of Fede.”  Every significant moment of love and connection I’d experienced was being rehashed all around me—flash by flash by flash. I wasn’t only watching the movie, though.  It was like I was simultaneously the watcher and the actor.  And although I couldn’t actually feel my body, I was somehow slowly taken over by a reassuring sensation of warmth and deep comfort. Peace and serenity, two things I had never been very good at harnessing, permeated my every cell. As my life’s show and bright flickering continued, I began to feel attracted by an enticing upwards pull. It felt oh so right and natural, like I was gradually on my way up through a cozy, protective, dreamlike tunnel to somewhere full of compassion and goodness. I remember thinking: If this is what death feels like, then it really can’t be that bad.

Permit me to press the pause button. This is where I insert the oft-recited caveat attached to many other retellings of near-death experiences (NDEs). I grew up in an atheist household hearing adventure stories about my father’s flirtation with Marxist Maoism. “You’re born alone, and you die alone,” my father told me somberly when I was seven. I’m also a badge-carrying business-school academic and MBA thoroughly indoctrinated, to my chagrin, in the church of Peter Drucker. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” goes his famous refrain.  And although Buddhist meditation and philosophy has been a major part of my life for over twenty years, I was initially attracted to it due to its highly neuroscientific approach. Okay, caveat over.  Back to the dying process.

“Fedeeeeeeeeeee!” The shriek was desperate and guttural. It was the unmistakable, high-pitched voice of my wife, Hlin.  Having lived with her for almost two decades, I can unequivocally say that it was her.  But alas, it was not. Hlin was twenty kilometers away at her workplace completely unaware of the dramatic events unfolding.

The next thing I remember was feeling like someone had attached a large rope to the center of my chest and was tugging away with gusto. I opened my eyes to see Anja’s beautiful yet labored face, or the top half of it to be precise. She and her team had just performed CPR and used the defibrillator to resuscitate my heart for the third time in less than two hours. I later learned from meticulous medical records that by then I had been clinically dead for little under ten minutes. As I lay there trying to make sense of the enormity of what was occurring, a deep recognition that I had led a blessed life showered over me. I thought: If this is it, I’m grateful for the life I lived and especially for the people in it. As I soberly pondered my demise, I noticed Anja unexpectedly glancing over at me.  Her slightly squinted eyes hinted of a restrained smile behind her surgical mask. She said calmly: “We’re done here. We’ve cleared your artery and placed a balloon inside. We’ll remove it in a couple of days.  You’re going to be fine, Federico.” She stood up, yanked her blood-soaked gloves off with marvelous flair, and walked towards the exit.