Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
And we're back with Alan Pierce, journalist, broadcaster, former BBC correspondent and co author of Coma and Near Death Experience,
The Beautiful, disturbing and Dangerous World of the Unconscious. Before the break, Alan, we were talking about, you know, well, I was asking you why I've never heard about these stories, why this phenomenon of uh, you know, drug induced coma survivors has not been you know, widely made known, and whether it was being deliberately suppressed by the medical community. So we were sort of in the midst of that conversation when we we had to break. Is there anything else you wanted to add to that?
Well, yeah, The funny thing is, and we couldn't get our heads around this rage, is that no one has actually researched the subject comperly before. No one's examined white people being pasted into goma, and no one's examined the events within coma and also what happens to people posted
coma because they're never the same again. Part of the reason is that critical care today has become a conveyor belt of care where ione's so busy, they don't get the chance to look over their shoulder the product coming off the other end. They simply do not see the damage. If you've been on a mechanical ventilator, for example, within a coma, you've got terrible damage to your vocal cords.
I mentioned that with Nick earlier. And when you come to let's say within your coma, from your coma, you're not in the position to discuss anything you've experienced with anybody. You're moved down the line, invariably to some care facility. Everything that happens next comes with such a shock, the inability to hold a spoon, You can't stand up, You keep getting these appording flashbacks. You don't recognize anybody, You've forgot language. One person told me she didn't recognize humans.
So you've got this scenario. And when a doctor or a nurse is ever confronted with a patient, which is extremely rare, who presents these symptoms or talks of all term at life, that there's two quick who dismiss these things has effectively a form of mental illness. As I mentioned earlier, Why no one's investigated this in terms of
is it a conspiracy? A large part of This is that when people come out of the coma and they've got these massive holes in their memory, they've got a shocking muscle wastage, joints of calcified nerves are disconnected, and they just i know, entirely on their own, and when they try to talk to somebody about it, the doctors and nurses will just simply sell these are temporary blips
your memory. Don't worry about it. It will come back as you move further down the line and you get to speak to other doctors and you mentioned in your memory problems. They then start thinking you've got early onset Alzheimer's, and possibly you're unaware that other people have been through the same experiences as yourself, and you just think, yes, it's the luck of the draw. I've now got onset early onset to MENSI. People don't seem to realize the
vast damage that is being caused. And again a lot of this, as I say, is because these the hospital quiet conditions, and the people that need to know most i e. The staff in intensive gear appear to be the last people being informed of just even making an effort to find out what happens to their patients in.
The book Comma and Your Death Experience, there is one particularly disturbing story. It's a woman who experience experiences what seems to be an ongoing nightmare that and I don't know how long she was in a drug induced coma, perhaps weeks or months, but she when she comes to, she recalls this living nightmare while in the coma that seemed to go on for years. Can you share that story with us?
Yeah, I mean that there's several within the burg. Let me give you the example of Isabelle. Isabelle is a medical professional in she works in one of the finest hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa, and she contracted COVID very early on in the pandemic and this started turning to sepsis. So her colleagues said, I think the best thing we can do is to put you into a medically induced coma. And she was completely up for it. She was thinking, yeah, okay, fine, I don't remember any
of this. Put me down. Well, Isabelle wakes up within her coma, and this is a common thing that people say they woke up within their coma coma as in, we fell asleep on the sofa, We just woke up and here we are in this level of reality. Isabelle wakes up within her coma and finds herself in an organ harvesting facility. She says she was kept there for four years. They learned how to grow her organs, harvest them, kill her, regenerate her, grow her organs over and over again.
For example, she said she had a uterus removed seven times. This is just one set of things that happened to her. She then listed a whole bunch of lives, one after another after another, all of which ended in murder or rape, her murder, or just some appalling event, and just one after another after another. She also said that she spends ten thousand years on the bottom and top levels of existence.
Down on the bottom of it was all mild and funny creatures, and at the top it was all ones and zeros, and that she could flip between the two. She was utterly exhausted within her coma with all these events that she just wished she would die. And she found herself dying, And she found herself in a beautiful field of tall green grass, and the breeze is blowing. There's a horse nearby, and it's the most perfect summer's day.
This is very clearly a near death experience. And she walks for a while and she finds some stairs going up into the sky, wooden, gnarred stairs. As she climbs these stairs, and she says she was four steps from the top when she heard her name being called, Isabel, Isabel, you have to come back, she said, Oh, I was
so pissed off. I just stomped back down those stairs. Eventually, when she's out of her coma and she's on the road to recovery, she goes back to ICU and she speaks to her colleagues and she tries to tell them about the events she experienced within coma and they're like, oh, yeah, really, that's weird and not taking it remotely seriously. And these are the doctors not taking seriously. A colleague has had these experiences who desperately came to tell them what's happened
to her, and they won't listen. And if they won't listen to a medical colleague and not get to listen to.
A patient, do the experiences of drug induced coma survivors differ greatly from people who are in a coma as a result of some kind of a trauma or accident, brain injury, et cetera. Do they have any experiences that are similar to drug induced comma survivors.
Yeah, a good question that they do appear similar. Within the book, I think two or three of the coma survivors were in a situation where one case, Alvey guy called Rory, he was in a home invasion and he got battered about the head with a hammer, and he was in a spontaneous coma, as it were, and within that he was having events. He did actually come to within the hospital, but he was what they call agitated.
He was fighting desperate to pull all the tubes and things out of them that they just put him back down again. Somebody else was in a motorcycle accident and she went into a spontaneous coma and she had events within that, and again she came to within a hospital, was agitated, was then placed into a medically induced coma, and they'd have a whole range of experiences pretty much
like being in Alice in Wonderland in many respects. In other respects, she was entirely in the dark, completely conscious, unaware of her body or anything around her, but in the dark, and she was there for what thought like an eternity when this happened to her. She's only just turned fifteen, and she's in her mind calling out, mommy, mommy, please come and wake me up. I've been sleeping too long.
Something is wrong and this is just not understood. Doctors think it's that some people are analyzed, they'd locked in syndrome, and yet they're completely conscious of events around them. And when that happens, oftentimes events within the hospital award get transferred into some other kind of event, such as and
Isabel mentioned this. She said, the nurses with no doubt cleaning her teeth, but to her mind, she was being held by a kidnapper who's melted a toothbrush and inserted razor blades and was slicing into the teeth and guns. That's how she perceived just having her teeth cleaned. When people have a bedbarth within conor, oftentimes that's perceived as
a form of sexual assault or rape. And another thing that happens is doctors will talk over the patient the coma patients not aware that a patient in some cases can hear them, so they're saying things like, I don't think she's going to survive the night, we'll try this one last drug. But I don't think her chances are good. No one wants to hear that is she kind of discussed these things do it outside. These things now to
me are so relatently obvious. I'm staggered that they're not obvious to the medical profession.
And again, these people are showing no our little brain activity while they're in a drug induced comma.
Okay, so it's extremely rare, as you've had a brain brain injury of some kind, that they monitor your brain within a medically induced coment exceptionally ran one of the doctors that's been helping us with the book, Dr Wezi Lee. He's professor of medicine at Vanderbilt. Some time back, he
was becoming concerned that his patients were dying too. Many of them were dying within comer and when he got to see them afterwards, he was really worried about what have happened to them and the things that do happen. For example, he had a thirty five year old woman who's with his patient. She was a mathematical whiz, absolute genius. After her coma, when she went to see Eli, she couldn't even add up her checking account now she had an impressive IQ of one hundred and forty prior to
the COMA. Doctor Eely has another test taken and her IQ came up at one hundred, just shockingly low. They then put her into an MRI scanner and instead of the brain of a thirty five year old woman, she had the brain of an elderly woman with dementia. Parts of her brain had absolutely shriveled. And this is what's happening to people within COMA. Part of the reason is lack of sleep, which seems ironic because coma effectively comes
from an ancient Greek word meaning deep sleep. So from the get go everyone's thinking of sleep, but you're not sleeping. When you switched the brain off. When you switched the brain off, absolutely nothing happens within the brain. It's a bit like having a desktop computer and unplugging it from the mains and then expecting it to work. The brain will not go through its circadian rhythms. As a result,
he will not experience rem sleep. When Dr Wes Eedy put his patients on an EG brain scanner, he was horrified to see that they were flatlining. As close to death as you did get he had no idea people were being sent down to those depths.
So the brain is unconscious, if you will, or completely offline, but the mind, wherever that resides, is incredibly.
Active, incredibly so because the medical world seems to think that the mind and the brain are the same thing, or somehow that the brain produces the mind. Although these are any theories that never been proven, we are clearly showing here that somebody who would be flatlining on an
EG brain scanner is having a rich inner experience. It might be a lovely one, or it might be something ghastly like like you said, those experiences, but these things are happening and moment one understands it, and no one has investigated it until we came along. One of the reason is no one takes it seriously. Because I'm a journalist and be as a PI. We came to the subject with completely open eyes. Whereas modern science, materialistic science
as it's called, actually limits itself. The only things that they can weigh, measure, slice up, and put under a microscope. Consciousness, which they can't do any of those things too, is best ignored. So when people have events within coma they can't explain, They just ask them over. They fog them off, which is the best way of describing them.
Did anyone in the book have a predominantly let's say, beautiful experience while in a drug and induce coma. Were they in a you know, in paradise?
Yeah? Many, many, many are. And I think the longer you're in one, and perhaps the closer you get to death, the lovelier it will become. One of the nicest stories in the book. A hospital chaplain from Birmingham, Alabama, Corey Agricola, fantastic guy. He was working at the UAB Hospital in Birmingham and it's vast place and he thinks that over the years he's been there, he's ministered to something like fifteen thousand people. And that's the reed Familist people are
approaching death and all the rest of them. And he was burning out. He completely had it crank and he got some mystery infection. They didn't know what it was. They put him in a coma. He went to heaven. Okay is Christian, but he went to heaven. He didn't see God, he didn't see Jesus, didn't see anything like that. He just sort a mountain of light. He could hear praise music, beautiful music that he'd never heard before or since,
and he just had the most exquisite time. And he said that God was showing far more grace as you approach death than you could ever possibly imagine. That this is easing once passing. It's the most beautiful experience. When he came back and recovered, and he actually recovered very well. He's now able to minister the people within hospital families who've got a patient within coma, he can talk to them about that, talk to them about you know what you can do in the room. In many cases you
can talk to them and hold their hand. They will know. Other cases they won't have the first clue. But he's now able to tell people, particularly those who are approaching death, what he's seen. He can give them an eyewitness account.
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