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All Right, we are back live with doctor Jeff O'Driscoll. And before the break, we were talking about the difference between a near death experience and a share death experience. So let's say someone is, you know, a thousand miles away from a loved one who is in the process of dying, and that loved one who's very much alive. They may feel the death throes of the mother again
even though she's thousands of miles away. Or well, in your case, your shared death experience, you would see someone coming into the trauma center passing away and you would you would see their soul leaving their body, and you're the only one in the room that's witnessing this.
Often I was the only one in the room witnessing it on at least one occasion. However, I had a nurse standing next to me who experienced the same thing.
We had a trauma patient flown in from a car crash two hundred miles away, and the patient's wife was deceased at the scene, And when I went into the trauma room with that nurse, we both saw the patient's wife standing in the air above the gurney, observing what was going on and communicating her gratitude for the care that her husband was receiving and her body was still two hundred miles away.
Was this the case of Jeff Olson?
It is the case of Jeff Olson. Yes, He's spoken about it publicly and written a book, and a lot of people have heard of it.
Right, So when this happened to you the first time? I mean, was the incident with Jeff Olson seeing his wife? Was that the first time that had happened to you in a trauma center? Or were there others prior to that.
Well, it's hard for me to remember the exact chronology of events. I had had experiences that began in my teenage years. I had a profound voice that spoke to me one night when I was driving a Volkswagen Bug much too fast after dark on a narrow, windy country road with two friends in the car, not any of us wearing seat belts, and a voice spoke to me and said, you have to slow down. And it wasn't just a voice. I didn't just hear it. It was like something that wrapped around my soul and I felt it
more than I heard. It impressed me enough that I slowed down and went around a corner hit a Cadillac head on. There was a lot of damage to the vehicles, but nobody was injured. I think I probably would have died that night if I had not heard that voice. And I later realized that it was my brother, the one that died in a farm accident in a few years before. That's who was speaking to me on that occasion.
Wow, and you want to can we go back to the incident on the farm when you lost your older brother and the after death communication prior to your hearing this voice that. I believe there were others if I remember correctly.
I don't remember hearing other experiences before my brother's death, but shortly after he died is when I started having the experiences, and a few of them I wrote down, and those are the ones I remember. I suspect I had others that I don't recall now, but I remember about twenty years after my brother passed, he came to me in a form that I saw him and heard him and experienced his presence, and he looked like my brother.
When my brother was in a physical form, he told me he said, you have to go talk with our mother because there's things she's never told you about my death, which caught my attention. As you might imagine, I went and sat down with my mother, spoke to her, and she told me for the very first time, she said, I always knew where you were in the house before Stan died, because I could hear you singing. When your
brother died, you stopped singing. And that was the first time I realized the impact that his death had had on me. It had changed me in some significant way.
So when you're working in the trauma center and you would see a soul leaving a body, what walk us through that? Does that? What does that look like? What does the soul look like as it leaves the body?
For me, I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but for me, I would see what looked like a more refined, more purific fide form of a person's essence or consciousness, and they looked very much like their physical body, except in a perfected form, and frequently, at least on one occasion when it happened with an elderly person, the person I saw exit their physical body appeared to be half the age of the body, they just come out of as if they were in the very prime of
their existence, in their most perfect state, and just filled with this incomprehensible light and love that just radiated and filled the room for me, even though everybody standing around me was unaware of it.
And when the soul leaves the body, does it leave the room immediately, does it hover over the body, does it attempt to communicate with anyone?
When eyewitnessed it, they stayed in the room or near their physical form and communicated, and then when it felt right, they left. In fact, on one occasion, there was a physician that was resuscitating an elderly woman and I was around the corner in a separate room when I felt this presence over my shoulder. I'd had enough experiences by then I intuitively knew it was the soul or the spirit of the person that was being resuscitated. And she asked for help, and I walked around the corner and
into the room. There was another physician there. There was a team of people trying to resuscitate this woman who was indicated and receiving chest compressions and was completely unconscious, And yet I reached over and touched her leg. She asked me if she could leave, which I thought was a very strange thing for her to ask me, and I wondered why she would think I had the answer
to that question. But even as I thought that, the words came to me from some eternal place, and I silently communicated back to her, mind you, she's unconscious, she's got a tube in her throat. They're doing chest compressions. This is all silent telepathic communication. I communicated back to her. I said, listen, if you think it's time to go, and you feel that that's the right thing to do, then I think it's probably okay for you to go. And as I communicated that, she rose up out of
her body, stood in the air above the gurney. She thanked me for the help I'd given, which I didn't really understand or appreciate because I didn't think I had really done anything. And then she left. And a few moments later, as I was leaving the room, I heard the physician in charge pronounce her time of death in military time, and I thought, yeah, I know. I saw her leave.
If the patient is resuscitated, and they do, you see the soul go back into the.
Body on one occasion, I entered a room, and again I was not in charge of this patient. I think when I was taking care of patients, I think I was so consumed with the physical, medical, scientific and necessities of providing the care of the patient. But sometimes I didn't have these experiences. But when another physician was taking care of all that, and I just walked into the room while they were necessitating this woman who had drowned
in a hotel pool. I sensed her presence out of her body as her cardiac activity disappeared from the monitor that she was on, and she was outside of her body, just kind of getting her bearings on what it felt like, what this experience was in this new realm. And then all of a sudden, she was just gone. And I remember thinking, wow, where did she go? And as I thought that, I looked up at the cardiac monitor and she had a heartbeat again. She hadn't gone anywhere except
back into her physical form. I suppose.
When she regained consciousness, were you there? Did she say anything to you? Did she remember being out of her body? Did she remember seeing and speaking or communicating with you?
I never spoke with her after she regained consciousness. I regret that I didn't follow up more closely with some of these patients. But in the emergency department, you assuscitate them, you try to stabilize them, you transfer them up to the ICU, and often you never see or hear from them again. I never would have seen Jeff Oltson again after that profound experience I had with him and his
wife in the trauma room. Had that nurse a month later not insisted that we go and talk with you about our experience, and she kind of drugged me kicking and screaming up to his hospital room to tell him what we had experienced. Otherwise I would have never seen him again.
Right, So Jeff Olsen again, He's in a car accident. His wife, Tamara, is killed in the car accident. He loses his son in the accident. He's left severely injured, maimed. I believe he did. He lose a limb, I think in that accident.
Yeah, he lost a leg.
And you saw the soul of his wife, Tamara. She came to you in the emergency room. She thanked you for caring for her, for her, for her husband. And then the nurse that was in attendance also saw this. Did she immediately the nurse that is, did she immediately go to you and say? Did you know you saw that? Didn't you? You saw what I saw?
Well, she kind of didn't have to. She was the only other person in the emergency department that knew I had these experiences because she had pried them out of me on a previous occasion when she shared some of her own experiences, and so she and I kind of had this confidence between us. And I wasn't going to actually go into the trauma room that night because there was the whole trauma team and the other emergency physician to take care of Jeff when he arrived, and I
wasn't planning on even going in the room. And this nurse came and grabbed me by the arm and tugged me down to the trauma room and said you have to come. And I said why and she said she's there. I said who's there? And she said, his wife, she's there. And when she said that, it dawned on me what
she was saying. And I accompanied her to the trauma room and we had the experience together, and I think we talked about it after that, and then, like I say, he went off, had several surgeries, had his leg amputated. He was in the ICU for a prolonged period of time. It was about a month later that he was conscious in speaking, and we went to his hospital room and shared with him what had.
Happened and what was his reaction when you told him that his late wife had appeared.
In the er. Initially he became quite emotionally. He became tearful and felt reassured and validated enough that he opened up and told us about his experience at the scene of the accident. Before his body was even expricated from the car, he left his body and he rose up above the scene of the accident in this brilliant, inexplicable light, where he encountered his wife, and she said, you have to go back and raise our other son, because their
seven year old son had survived the accident. And he felt like after we shared our experience, he felt like he could share his. And we've been good friends ever since. It's been nearly three decades now.
Why you and that nurse and not anyone else in the hospital where you were working, or at least as far as you know, there was no one else. What is it about you? And this nurse that allows you to have these shared death experiences.
The short answer is, I don't have a clue. I don't know. I have learned that sometimes we can be more receptive, more open, we can be more believing, we can invite that experience into our life. But other than that,
I don't know. I have one friend who was a nurse in Pennsylvania in the er and the patient was brought in who was unconscious and receiving chest compressions during a cardiac arrest, and during the recuscitation, she looked up and saw him standing on the far side of the room observing his own recuscitation, and they successfully resuscitated him
and sent him up to the ICU. She went up and visited him a few days later, and he had a profound experience outside of his body and believed that he had an encounter with the divine being that they had a conversation before he was sent back.
Had you asked other doctors and nurses whether they they had witnessed anything like this, do you think they would have answered truthfully? Or I mean, do you suspect in other words, that that maybe this is more common, but people because of a stigma are afraid to admit. Yes, I saw you know, I saw the patient's soul leaving their body.
Yes, it's much more common than we generally appreciate. And yes, I've spoken to physicians. When I speak, it's not uncommon for me to have a physician or two that'll come and talk with me afterwards or send me an email and share their own experience. I belong to a Facebook
page that has nearly eighty thousand physicians. It's only physicians on the page, and I'd just ask a simple question once, Have any of you resuscipated somebody from a cardiac arrest and they told you that they had a conscious experience during that period. And there were a few people that were vocally skeptical about it, but most people were receptive
to it. And several people started their comment with something along the lines of I've never shared this with anyone before, but and I actually had a few zoom calls with a group of physicians to talk about those experiences more they are happening, and physicians are reluctant to speak about it.
And you didn't speak about it publicly until after you retired, Is that correct, right?
I didn't speak about it for twenty five years, and about six months after I stopped seeing patients. One day, I just had this feeling click in my heart and I understood it was okay to talk about it now, and that's when I started to share.
Did you only see or experience these share death incidents or seeing souls leaving bodies and so forth while you were in a hospital setting in the er, or did you also have shared life experiences in other areas, maybe while you were at home.
I did have some very profound experiences outside the emergency department, but most of my experiences happened in the emergency department, and I think that was just a matter of proximity chronologically and physically, being in the proximity of people who
were passing away. Most physicians are not in the presence of their patients when their patients die, but as an emergency physician, frequently when you have a patient that passes away, you're at the bedside, You're right there, and I think that immediate proximity makes a difference in the experiences one has.
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