Bob Schriever, co-founder of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, was refereeing a high school football game seven years ago when he went into cardiac arrest, died and was revived.

He, too, questions the dream explanation (as Laura did in my last Blog post—she had a near-death experience and says she floated out of her body had saw deceased loved ones).

“Why are so many people dreaming the same thing? How can so many people, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced this, how can we all be dreaming the same thing and describe the exact same thing?” Asks Bob.

Bob says these experiences are so profound that only someone who has gone through them can truly understand.

Seven years later, he is still consumed with his own near-death experience.

“I think about that every morning when I wake up, first thing, during the day, I don’t know how many times and every night before I fall asleep. I think about that. People do not understand or appreciate what we go through.”

For Laura, it’s a daily struggle to put the pieces back together again.

“I’ve been someplace that not everybody can go, and there’s not a lot of people you can sit down and have that conversation with,” Laura says. “My own daughter tells me, ‘It’s freaky, Mom.’ I’ve literally lost friends over this the minute they hear it.”

Laura says she became depressed once she left the hospital because her perspective on her entire life changed. She still gets depressed, she says, and is on medication.

“I actually went to my doctor and said to her, ‘I think I’m losing my mind. This can’t be really happening,’ you know, and she said it’s OK, it’s very hard to understand when you’ve been through an experience like that.”

Laura has joined the cardiac arrest group, hoping that connecting with others who understand what she’s been through will allow her to come to terms with what happened to her that day and allow her to heal and move on.

Have you had a near-death experience?

What are your thoughts?

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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