My Mother's Near Death Experience as She Ventured into the River Styx

[Bill Walker]

Back in the mid sixties my mother had an experimental heart valve operation. She was one of the very first to receive a heart valve from a pig to replace her failing heart valve.

     The surgery went very smoothly, perhaps to smoothly, in fact. For whatever reason, that even she couldn’t recall later, she began pulling out all of the tubes and Inter venous lines and monitoring patches that connected her to life support. This almost immediately caused her to code as her heart failed without these backup systems.

     As she tells it she found herself standing on the edge of a river. My mother was pretty religious so I assume this was the river Styx for her. She felt an over powering urge to walk into the water and cross to the other side. When she got to the point where she was about waist deep she realized that if she crossed all the way over there would be no returning. At this point she thought about her two young sons, myself being one of them obviously, and found herself awakening to the doctors and nurses frantically trying to save her life.

     Surprisingly enough when she relayed this story days later to her doctors they believed her. At that time NDE’s were just starting to be realized in the medical field but not widely believed by many people in the health care industry. It was fortunate that she was a patient in a large well respected University Hospital. Georgetown University was so interested in her story that they had two psychiatrists come and evaluate what her experience was like. They made it clear that they believed her and were not questioning her mental status.

     Thirty years ago I tried to get the psychiatric notes that the two psychiatrists had written. Unfortunately, I was informed that, either these notes were buried in a mountain of old archived files or more likely had already been destroyed. I still regret not being able to read the entire case file and my mother had long since passed by then!

By

Bill Walker

[Bill Walker]

One more thing to add to my post here. When my mom was in the river she said that there were flames she could see glowing from the far side. She never explained what she felt the meaning was. My feelings are that she was being sent a message that it wasn't her time to cross yet!