Dying to Be Me (16 page)
Authors: Anita Moorjani
As I began to read the information on the website that my brother had sent me, I felt myself getting goose bumps as I discovered stories that shared some similarities with mine. None of them had the element of illness that I had, but some of what they experienced in the other realm was very similar. Several spoke of expansion, clarity, and a feeling of oneness—that we’re all connected. They expressed feeling no judgment, only overwhelming, unconditional love. They talked of meeting departed loved ones or other beings who cared about them, and they had a sense of universal understanding and knowledge. I couldn’t get over the fact that others had experienced that feeling of acceptance and unity, the knowledge that we’re all universally cherished. Many of them shared that after their NDE, they felt a sense of purpose, and that was exactly how I felt!
After reading a few accounts, I noticed a banner on the site that said, “Have you had a near-death experience you would like to share? Click here!” So I did. A lengthy, highly detailed form popped up, and I started filling it out. I hadn’t written down my experience before, only tried to talk about it with close friends and family members, so this was the first time I’d analyzed it in such detail.
Since this was the first time I was putting it all down for someone unfamiliar with my situation, I wanted to make sure I articulated what I wanted to say very clearly. The questions also made me think about parts of my experience in ways I never had before. I filled out all the details about having cancer, everything I experienced when I crossed over and then came back, and finally the cancer disappearing very rapidly. After completing the fields on the form and adding all the extra details in the spaces provided, I hit “submit.” A message popped up, saying, “Thank you for sending us your testimony. We will contact you within the next three weeks to inform you whether your experience will be posted on our site.”
By that time, it was late at night for me, so I went to bed thinking that I probably wouldn’t hear from them for a while. However, to my pleasant surprise, there was already a message in my inbox from a Dr. Jeffrey Long when I awoke the following morning.
Dr. Long explained that he was an oncologist as well as the owner of the NDERF site where I’d submitted my experience, and he found my experience to be one of the most exceptional he’d read. He wanted to ask me some follow-up questions, particularly regarding my medical condition, because he was extremely intrigued by my rapid healing. He said that I articulated my experience particularly well, and he wanted to know more about my cancer, such as when was I diagnosed, the duration of my illness, and how long it took for the cancer to heal after my NDE.
I answered all his questions as best I could, and he responded again almost immediately. There was a genuine buoyancy to his response. He said he was very excited about my answers, and he thanked me for allowing him to post my experience. He said that it would be inspiring for tens of thousands of people across the world. He then posted my account with a direct link on the NDERF home page, including all the answers to his follow-up questions, which are still in the site archives today in the original format.
I subsequently found out that Dr. Long had printed out my submission as soon as he received it in order to read and reread it because he thought it was so remarkable, which he hadn’t done with any other submission.
At the same time, my friend Peter Lloyd, who runs a publication called
Holistic Hong Kong
, was so amazed by what had happened to me that he asked permission to print my story. So I sent him an exact copy of what I’d submitted to the NDERF site, and he included it in his next issue.
Several weeks later, during the summer of 2006, I was contacted by another oncologist in the United States. His name was Dr. Peter Ko, and he said that he had a personal interest in studying spontaneous remissions. Within the space of three weeks, two different people had sent him the links to my experience, the one posted on the NDERF website and the other in
Holistic Hong Kong
. When he first received the NDERF link, Dr. Ko pretty much dismissed it as my submission was quite lengthy, and he receives many e-mails from people suggesting articles for him to read. But when he received the second e-mail, this time with a link to my story on
Holistic Hong Kong
with a note requesting that he read the article and telling him that he’d surely be interested, he decided to see what it was about.
After reading my story, he was so intrigued that he contacted Peter Lloyd and asked if there was some way of reaching me, since the website didn’t give out my full name—it only identified my story as “Anita M’s NDE.” So Peter connected Dr. Ko and me via e-mail, and Dr. Ko immediately asked if he could call me because he had a lot of questions.
We spoke on the phone for several hours, and I gave him details of my experience and of my medical condition in particular. I then faxed him some of the pertinent pages of my medical history, including the doctor’s report of February 2, the day I entered the hospital, describing my condition and prognosis, with the diagnosis “lymphoma, stage 4B.”
After reading some of those pages, his first words were: “Lady, whichever way I look at it, you should be dead!”
D
R.
K
O WAS SO INTRIGUED BY MY CASE
that he arranged a business trip to Hong Kong so that he could go to the hospital where my experience took place and study my medical records.
It was mid-October when I met him in the hospital where I had my near-death experience. We sat in the lobby and spoke for a while, getting acquainted. He asked me questions about my experience and my illness, wanting to know everything from my perspective. Then we went to the administration office and asked for my records. They brought out this huge file, about three inches thick, and dropped it on the counter in front of us. We took it to the canteen, and Dr. Ko started to go through all the details page by page, pulling out pertinent documents to be copied.
I felt extremely excited and privileged to have two oncologists—first Dr. Long and now Dr. Ko—so interested in my experience. It validated my feelings that I’d come back for some greater purpose that was going to help others. I was grateful and delighted that my going through everything I did could perhaps assist someone else.
Dr. Ko asked me whether I would be open to speaking in public about what happened to me. He is, by his own admission, a skeptic by nature; but he was very excited by what he’d read in my hospital records and wanted to put his research on my case to good use immediately. He planned to organize a conference locally while he was still in Hong Kong in order to share his most recent findings with the medical community, and he wanted me to speak also. He told me that he’d already mentioned my case to several people in the local medical community, and had given a little bit of background about my story and my reluctance to accept conventional treatment.
Dr. Ko felt that it was important for the medical community to hear my story from my perspective. He said that he’d never come across a case of a full remission from such an advanced stage of cancer, let alone at such a rapid rate. He believed it was important for people to know about it. I was extremely excited to be asked and eager to share what had happened, so I agreed to speak at the conference.
I also put Dr. Ko in touch with our family general practitioner, Dr. Brian Walker, who confirmed that he’d been astounded by my recovery. Dr. Walker reiterated that he’d never seen such a rapid remission from such an advanced stage of cancer either. Dr. Ko spoke with Dr. Walker for some time about his observations of the progression of my cancer over the years, and Dr. Walker validated and endorsed many of the American physician’s findings. Dr. Ko then contacted the press and made sure there was a reporter present at the conference to report my story in our local newspaper.
The following is an excerpt from the summary that Dr. Ko wrote up after his research through all my hospital records. He sent out this report, which I’m reproducing with his permission, as an e-mail to the press and medical community in connection with the conference. It recounts the details of my story from an oncologist’s perspective, confirming my personal experience.
I hope you find Anita’s story compelling as I do…this encounter is turning out to be quite an eye-opener for me! When I came to HKG [Hong Kong] last month, my intention was to scrutinize her clinical history, and to either validate or invalidate her claims. Having satisfied myself with the factual details, I actually find myself becoming more and more intrigued with her fantastic experience…especially the message she brought back! While clinical details can be a bit tedious for the general reader, I do want to provide them to you as reference, so that you can really appreciate how ill she was, and how dramatic a recovery she made. I hope that, plus a couple of personal observations, can put Anita’s story on a more solid foundation:
1. A chronologic account of Anita’s illness…In the Spring of 2002, she noticed a firm swelling just above her left collar bone. This was obviously an alarming sign to her physician. It was biopsied in April that year, and determined to be Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. She was “staged” as 2½ (early to mid/asymptomatic). You knew all about her reluctance to undergo conventional therapy, seeking a variety of alternative approaches. Her disease slowly progressed over the next 2 years. By 2005, it began to interfere with her well-being. The cancer involved more and more of her lymph nodes, and became more and more enlarged. She also developed what we call “B symptoms”…night sweats, fever, skin itching, etc., all pointing to disease progression. She also developed pleural effusion (accumulation of fluid) on both sides of her chest, and throughout 2005, required several attempts to “tap the fluid” since it began to interfere with her breathing. By Xmas 2005, her course accelerated, and she began a downward spiral…the disease in her neck and chest wall was infiltrating the skin, resulting in large infected ulcers that would not heal. Unable to eat or absorb nourishment, weight loss, marked fatigue, muscle wasting…and her kidney functions started to be compromised.
The morning of February 2 found her unable to get out of bed; her entire face, neck, and left arm were swollen like a balloon. Her eyes were swollen shut…all due to compromised venous drainage from her head and neck, by massively enlarged and matted lymph nodes. She was gasping for breath as a result of massive pleural effusion bilaterally, despite using supplemental home oxygen. Feeling utterly helpless, her husband and mother called her family doctor for help, who urged them to get her to the hospital right away. There, an oncologist was alerted, and was shocked by the shape Anita was in. Another oncologist was summoned due to the difficult decisions she presented. Several other consultants were called in to address different failing organ-systems. The consensus was that she would not survive without intervention. While chemotherapy might be highly toxic in view of her multiple organ failure, it would be her only chance. During that night, she underwent multiple examinations with MRI and CT, had 2 liters of fluid tapped from her chest, started on 3 of 7 chemotherapy drugs*, and [was] placed in the ICU. This was when Anita drifted off into what she described as her NDE.
*The chemotherapy regimen called for 8 cycles of 7 drugs, each cycle taking three weeks.
2. Anita’s dramatic recovery after she emerged from her NDE…The evening of Feb 3, Anita awoke, sat up, and declared to her family she would be okay. She conversed with the oncologist, who was baffled by her ability to even recognize him.
On Feb 4, Anita demanded to have her nasogastric tube removed, and promised her doctors she would eat what they brought her in order to gain some weight. She asked for her iPod to be brought from home.
On Feb 5, she greeted her doctors by asking them if they wanted to “join the party”; they eventually agreed to release her from the ICU on Feb 6.
By that time, much of her neck and facial swelling had resolved; the massively enlarged lymph nodes began to soften, and she was able to turn her head for the first time. The drugs for her first cycle were completed in mid-February. A plastic surgeon was asked to:
a. biopsy a lymph node on her neck, and
b. skin graft the large open sores on her neck and axilla. He could not find any lymph node on examination, and scheduled her for an ultrasound examination prior to the biopsy; he would also do the skin graft at the same time.
Three ultrasound exams failed to reveal any obviously pathologic lymph nodes. On Feb 27, he eventually biopsied one from her neck…and there was no evidence of cancer. The skin ulcers healed on their own without skin grafting.
The oncologists eventually agreed to let her go home on March 9, after her second cycle. She celebrated her birthday on March 16 at Jimmy’s Kitchen, and went to a wedding, dancing and drinking champagne on March 26…then began her third cycle. They all came to a compromise by doing a CT-PET scan after 6 cycles (July 24)…she was given a clean bill of health, and they stopped 2 cycles short.
Her recovery was certainly “remarkable.” Based on my own experience and opinions of several colleagues, I am unable to attribute her dramatic recovery to her chemotherapy. Based on what we have learned about cancer cell behaviors, I speculate that something (non-physical…“information”?) either switched off the mutated genes from expressing, or signaled them to a programmed cell death. The exact mechanism is unknown to us, but not likely to be the result of cytotoxic drugs.
I think my encounter with Anita’s experience shall set the stage for me to learn more about this phenomenon, and about the true nature of our selves!