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Dr Shari
Skeptic Friend
135 Posts |
 Posted - 02/18/2002 : 04:04:09
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I posted this on the other thread but as it is a true story and I am here to share what has been my life with people I hope you'll read this and find room to belive me because it happened.
I was about to do surgery on a otherwise healthy woman who needed her gallbladder out and she insisted she was going to die. I asked her then why was she having the surgery she said it was because she could not stand the pain anymore and she believed in Heaven and would rather be there then here in pain. Her family thought she was as loony as I did but said she was an otherwise normal happy person so I went ahead with the Cholecystectomy thinking when she woke up after the surgery she would fine and feel a little silly herself.
I started the operation and it was going smoothly when about 20 minutes in I felt a jolt. I broke out in a sweat and looked across the operating suite where I saw her standing smiling at me. I told the Anesthesiologist she was going to crash and he told me she was fine. I looked across the room again and she was still standing there when she suddenly arrested. We coded her and brought her back, finshed the surgery and I sent her to the ICU. I stayed with her writing up follow up orders to find the cause of her arrest when she came to and told me she had seen me operating on her. I told her I knew but I had promised nothing would happen to her so I brought her back. I never found any reason for her to arrest during a routine surgery.
That is a True Story. As I said before go ahead and pick it apart if you want. I believe it was a self-fullilling prophecy on her part. She convinced herself she would die so she did but I never thought I would see her standing across the room from me.
"There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are thought of in your philosophy." Shakespere: Hamlet
I know there are in mine. Just because I cannot conceive of a thing does not make it impossible.
Death: The High Cost of Living
It is easier to get forgiveness then to get permission!
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James
SFN Regular
USA
754 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2002 : 10:57:16 [Permalink]
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Doc, I have a question for you: When you saw your patient standing in front of you, was she wearing a hospital gown or regular clothes or what?
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." -Buddha |
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2002 : 11:26:18 [Permalink]
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I am not saying that I don't believe you or something like that. As I already said in the other thread most of the time those experiences can be explained without any supernatural forces at work.
I must admit that I am a bit stumped on this one but let me try.
I expect that you often get people who go into a such operations frightend. Since most get out OK you probably don't remember their predictions as much. So the actual prophecy could easily explained by mere chance.
The apperation is a bigger problem.
If the patient made a big impression on you on some level and you were under great stress because of it and other factors during the operation it could go some way to explain a bad feeling that something was about to happen. Especially at a point when your trainging told you that such a thing was most likely. Maybee you even noticed something was wrong but did not conciously realize it.
How such a bad feeling could translate into a jolt and suddenly seeing her standing there I can't explain. Maybee you were affected by her prediction more then you realized. Maybee the shock of the prediction come true let some details stand out clearer and let other details that did not fit so well into the story disapeer. Maybee retelling the story over and over again smoothed it up even more withou you realizing it.
Then again maybee you did see a Ghost and we have to completly rewrite all our science books.
As I already said in the other thread:
There might be things between heaven and earth that my philosophy never dreamed of, but as soon as they show themselves they will get incorporated into it.
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Dr Shari
Skeptic Friend
135 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2002 : 16:07:15 [Permalink]
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I had to stop and think what she was wearing because I was most surprised by the smile on her face. I believe she was in the hospital gown I had seen her in last.
I don't know if she was really there or and this is a very possible thought I read the underlying signs that she was in trouble physically through the unconscious use of my medical and natural skills to read people and I put her there. I just know what I remember.
Hey, it has never happened again and I have had other patients tell me there were afraid of dying and people die and not seen them so...any guess is as good as mine.
Death: The High Cost of Living
It is easier to get forgiveness then to get permission! |
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VVolfe347
New Member
Canada
22 Posts |
Posted - 02/24/2002 : 23:28:17 [Permalink]
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quote:
when about 20 minutes in I felt a jolt. I broke out in a sweat and looked across the operating suite where I saw her standing smiling at me. I told the Anesthesiologist she was going to crash and he told me she was fine. I looked across the room again and she was still standing there when she suddenly arrested............
Question: What do the following symptoms give clue to.... a sudden jolt like feeling, followed by 'seeing things' and sweating, resulting in "NO SHOCK" to the vison of what was seen, as in you are calm even though most people would freak at seeing a ghost or whatever.
quote:
I had to stop and think what she was wearing because I was most surprised by the smile on her face. I believe she was in the hospital gown I had seen her in last.
I don't know if she was really there or and this is a very possible thought I read the underlying signs that she was in trouble physically through the unconscious use of my medical and natural skills to read people and I put her there. I just know what I remember....
I belive in something I call mental mathimatics.... I had several semi-weird experiances in my life which when seen by others gives the impression that I may hold some sort of ESP power, but since it is I who did such and such, I know that i have no such power. But, I think that somewhere within my mind (sub-conscious?) I put together things I had seen, heard, etc... and came to a correct assumption. I think in your case, it was either a ghost, or a minor seizure triggered by some sort of mental math.
"Two thirds of people who have a seizure never have it again. .... Seizures are often preceded by auras, unusaul sensations of smell, taste, or visions."-Merck Manual
My best guess is, your subconscious mind knew she was going to flatline, and couldn't get your conscious mind to deal with the thought, so it jump up and kicked you in the side of the head. ;-)
Dan Foscarini
"The Blind don't lead the blind, People walk around with thier eyes closed" |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 08:20:58 [Permalink]
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I think this thread is an appropriate place to once again link one of my favorite stories relating to ghosts and science:
http://home.edu.coventry.ac.uk/cyberclass/vicweb/ghost1.htm
It's a fascinating read, and goes to show that we should never rule out natural phenomena when we encounter strange experiences. A good skeptic, in fact, assumes strange experiences are due to natural happenings.
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Sum Ergo Cogito |
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 10:38:30 [Permalink]
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That is not the first time I have haered of a standing wave being the explanation for a Poltergeist or similar phenomenon. I always assumed that they occured rather seldom in nature.
quote:
It's a fascinating read, and goes to show that we should never rule out natural phenomena when we encounter strange experiences. A good skeptic, in fact, assumes strange experiences are due to natural happenings.
Actually a rational and scientific minded person should not even think in terms such as natural happenings. There are no such things as unnatural happenings. If you can observe a phenomenon, reproduce and quantify it, it is science. You might have to work out how existing scientific models can be aplied to explain how it works or in extreme case have to invent new models.
Everything that happens is by definition 'natural' and 'normal'.
Even people who belive in such things as the para-normal, are making pehaps without being aware of it scientific models to explain them. Usually those models are not very good to explain the observed phenomena, but any explanation automatically turns them into natural occurances even if the natural explanation is a ghost.
A better way to phrase the statement would be to say that one never should try to use old scientific models to explain an observed phenomenon before inventing new ones.
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 10:51:31 [Permalink]
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My apoglies if the above seems a bit harsh or to much of a nitpick, but it is in my opinon exactly this misundestending of science and nature that creates many of the topics dicussed in this forum.
The idea that you could proove, examine or explain paranormal events is a contradiction of the very concept itself. People, who say that they are researching something paranormal, usually are trying to explain something, that either is not thought to need any explantion because it did not really happen or trying to give an alternate explanation to something that already has a better suited one. If they were trying to explain something unexplained that actually existed they would be doing science and it would be a natural phenomenon.
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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 13:22:31 [Permalink]
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quote:
A better way to phrase the statement would be to say that one never should try to use old scientific models to explain an observed phenomenon before inventing new ones.
Quite right. However, the distinction comes in the preferred assumption.
A paranormal investigator goes to a "haunted house", observes some unusual phenomena, and jumps to the conclusion that these phenomena are caused by the spirits of dead people.
If he is correct, then we now have a new physical phenomenon to investigate, one which is hard to reconcile with previously well-established principles. We have some tricky questions to answer, such as, how does the spirit survive the death of the body? What is is made of? Why does it hang around the haunted house? How does it affect material objects? But all of these could be open to experimental inquiry - that is, they could be studied using the scientific method and would then become part of a redefined and expanded scientific worldview.
On the other hand, a skeptic enters the "haunted house" expecting to find things that can be explained under existing scientific principles. Sure enough, he finds a troubled adolescent faking the phenomena, or an antique furnace making funny noises, or rippled glass reflecting lights of passing cars. His preferred paradigm is to minimalize new assumptions, and to work within the known framework until compelled to extend it.
Ghostbusting, then, is mostly the enlightened application of Mr. Occam's shaving blade.
Dr. Shari, did you draw anyone else's attention to the apparition? If so, did they see her too? If not, then (like it or not) your experience was entirely an internal one, and the various psychological explanations that others have provided are the most likely ones. Our minds do work in strange ways sometimes.
If your colleagues also saw what you did, and their independent descriptions match yours, then we'd have a much more interesting puzzle. But I suspect you'd have mentioned this if it were the case.
-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!" |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 14:23:12 [Permalink]
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If we skip the ghostly trappings for a minute we find a healthy woman's heart stopping at the very same minute that her surgeon is having a hallucination. I don't think we have to look to Hamlet's Dad moaning across the foot lights, for this closed room mystery.
"The fault lays not in the stars, dear Horatio, but in ourselves"
Well, not actually ourselves, more likely in our Anesthesiologist. We know very well that anesthesia causes both effects and was being used at the time.
"What fools these mortals be," Shakespere: A Midsummers Night's Dream
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The brain that was stolen from my laboratory was a criminal brain. Only evil will come from it. |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 14:29:30 [Permalink]
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quote:
My apoglies if the above seems a bit harsh or to much of a nitpick, but it is in my opinon exactly this misundestending of science and nature that creates many of the topics dicussed in this forum.
I worded it poorly above. What I mean is that we should assume exclusively that strange occurances are due to natural phenomena, as, as you've said, there are no such thing as supernatural phenomena.
I made this position clear in the Mothman Prophecies thread (I hope!).
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Sum Ergo Cogito |
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Wolfgang_faust
Skeptic Friend
USA
59 Posts |
Posted - 03/15/2002 : 15:12:39 [Permalink]
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Hey Doc, You said that she told you she saw you, did you ask her any more about what she saw to maybe add a little more credibility to you story? I am just wondering if you might add a bit more this way.
Add value to every day, Sharpen your skills, your understanding |
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