Anish Vij
A woman who suffered a terrifying near-death experience (NDE) in hospital has explained what she thinks the 'afterlife' is like as she admitted to no longer being scared of dying.
Barbara Bartolome, who is now the founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), previously spoke to TODAY about her NDE in 2016.
Her experience, she claims, was a 'life-changing' gift. Watch below:
The mum-of-two was 31 when she went to the hospital for a myelogram, which is a type of diagnostic imaging procedure.
It basically involves injecting iodine dye into the base of a patient’s neck, but for Barbara, the dye accidentally went in her brain.
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“I literally went from inside my body, and when I shut my eyes… the next second I was up on the ceiling looking down at the entire room,” she explained.
“There was this feeling of a presence that was next to me. It felt like it was God.
“It felt so loving and so accepting, and so eternal.
“I literally looked down and said, ‘Huh, if I'm up here, and my body's down there, then I think I must have just died.’”
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Rather than confronted with darkness, Barbara said she began speaking to the 'presence'.
She told it she wasn't ready to leave behind her baby daughter and eight-year-old son.
While she was still pleading with 'God', she suddenly woke up and experienced a sudden loss of fear of death.
“I shut my eyes up on the ceiling, and reopened them, and I was looking right into the orthopaedic surgeon's face,” Barbara said.
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On her new purpose, which is to speak openly about NDEs, she added: “I realised that talking about my near-death experience is what I'm supposed to be doing. It's the peace that I'm supposed to give, it's the gift.
“Doing your best to be a good person, I think, through your life here is all that you're really being asked to do.”
Dr Laurin Bellg, a critical care physician who experienced 50 NDEs, said it doesn't matter what the doctors tell you, what matters is what the patient experiences.
“We know that they're clinically dead and then whenever they are revived, they will actually explain to us what they saw in sometimes exquisite detail about the process of resuscitation,” Bellg said.
“They may have encounters with loved ones that have gone before them or spiritual beings that actually fit their belief system and an extreme reluctance to come back to their physical facility after experiencing a sense of intense love and peace.”