Aftereffects of My Near-Death Experience                            by Haneefa Mateen I had a near-death experience on January 4, 1982 after a misdiagnosed ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Four days I laid in a hospital bed before "emergency surgery" was done. I don't remember much of the details of the NDE other then looking down from the ceiling at my body in the hospital bed. Later, I woke up with the question "What have I been doing with my life?" repeating again and again in my head. The following is an account of the aftereffects of my near-death experience. First Seven Years: Immediately after the near-death experience and for the following year, I grieved for the loss of my baby. Yet I also felt almost blissful. Perhaps I brought back some of the peace I had experienced on the other side. I became more outgoing and less shy. The question "What have I been doing with my life?" remained in my head. I began changing my life accordingly. I returned to college where I made several friends and acquaintances which gave me a social life that I did not have before. In nursing school, I discovered that I really didn't need to study. After a while I was falling asleep whenever I opened a textbook, but I still excelled on tests. It was like I "inhaled" the lectures even though this included subjects with a lot of material such as pharmacology, microbiology, anatomy and physiology and of course, nursing as it related to each disease from infancy to old age. My husband could not deal with the changes in my life or my blossoming personality--mostly because he was no longer the center of my attention as I had new other interests. I still cared for him and our home but I now had a life too. Basically he was wasting his life out in the streets and not home much anyway. After the near-death experience, I chose not to enable him anymore. I used to make sure he was awake to go to work after he had been out all night. We had three alarm clocks in the bedroom set at different times and he still would not get up unless I poked and yelled at him. My clinical rotations were on different shifts the next semester, so I was not there anyway. I stopped covering up for him and things went from bad to worse. We divorced soon after I graduated. In the seventh year I started to have psychic experiences. My mother's spirit visited me for three nights in a row. She had disappeared almost 12 years earlier. I couldn't stand crowds, even 5-7 people, because I felt other people's physical as well as emotional pain. One day, I experienced both day and night at the same time. In other words, it was daytime but as I walked along outside, what I saw, felt and experienced was nighttime for a short while. While writing, my pen and hand often took off by themselves. I saw several of my past lives. Physically, I would get terrible stomach aches that would last two days whenever I would eat meat. I developed allergies to gluten, dairy, cats, mold and medications that didn't bother me before. Lights, music and violent media became intolerable. For years I didn't have a television in my home and rarely turned on the radio. Watches with batteries stopped soon after being on my wrist. Initially I actually blamed my mother-in-law for giving me cheap gifts. However, when I purchased my own watches, the same thing happened. Eventually, I tired of replacing batteries and stopped wearing watches. Seven to Fourteenth Years: During the eighth year, the psychic experiences escalated to unbearable. I knew about the Gulf War before it was announced in the media, having seen and felt the terror of the women and children running down the street from the orange flames for several nights prior. Four months after the war ended the US admitted it bombed civilians. I knew when the phone and doorbell would ring who would be there. But I also knew what people were thinking and believe me you don't want to know when your friends are not telling the truth. It was horrible! So I prayed for God to remove this ability from me. It lasted three weeks and then begin to decrease to a more tolerable level. Over the years it has become barely perceptible. I am aware that it still exists but I can choose when to respond. I continued to know about events happening on the other side of the world and the Oklahoma bombing, mostly in the form of extreme anxiety instead of visually, hour prior to the news broadcast. Other unsettling incidences were visual images involving young children, just minutes before potentially dangerous accidents happened. I was dozing on a stalled chartered bus parked on the side of the highway, waiting for repairs. I kept seeing a little boy running out onto the highway. I got up out of my seat, looking around I saw a real little boy playing on the grass several feet from the bus. I told another woman sitting across the aisle. She said the father was watching him so I sat down and closed my eyes. Again, I saw the little boy running out onto the highway. I looked out the window and he was running out onto the highway. I leaped off the bus and onto the highway, grabbing him without any thought for my life. A similar thing happened soon after this when I was at my sister's home and I saw an image of my toddling nephew falling down the stairs. His mother and my sister were both standing close to him so I assumed they were watching him. I was on the other side of the room. He fell partially down the carpeted stairs and was okay, but I wasn't. I was shook up that the responsibility was on me to save the children because I saw it and the parents didn't and to keep my mouth shut so as not to embarrass them (or myself). Some premonitions and events have actually been humorous. I dreamed about a friend's pregnancy in another city before she even knew she was pregnant. Funny thing--in the dream she was craving chicken so a mutual friend and I were driving around in the middle of the night trying to find an open chicken restaurant and we were all vegetarian! I told her and she denied she was pregnant. Her daughter is four years old now. Have you ever forgotten to turn off the stove and come home hours later to find the food and the pot safe as if time has been put on hold? If I'd been at home it would have been hopelessly burnt for sure! Just curious if this is common. This has happened to me several times. There have also been several deja vu experiences such as having a dream or a flash of an image and then several years later being in the place seen previously even though I'd never been there or even heard of it. Some occurred way across the USA or the world! Often the dreams were forgotten about as insignificant and then later I recognized the exact words spoken and the previously unknown people. It's embarrassing to be staring in awe as the recognition sinks in with tears streaming down your cheeks in a room full of people. And you can't explain that you now know you have made the right decision to take the risk to get there. One consolation has been an image of a field of flowers, mostly red, which instantly fills me with an incredible feeling of peace and relaxation. It is the only memory of the near-death experience itself, other than looking down on my body. Since the NDE I've been on what seems like a never-ending search for that incredible peace and unconditional love on earth. The closest I have come to it was learning meditation when I see very vividly colored fields of flowers and feel the peace again. Fourteenth to Twentieth Years: These recent years have been quieter in terms of psychic and physical changes, perhaps because I have integrated them into my life as more normal. My allergies and sensitivities to light and noise is less. The most significant development has been my ability to relate to people instead of withdrawing from them because I didn't know how to handle the vivid visual or dream information I would get about them. However some life changes since 1994 have been unsettling and challenging. Some of this time has been wonderful and I have felt whole and fulfilled better than I ever can remember. But the years leading up to this and since then have been rough. I questioned my life purpose and direction. Was I going backwards or forwards? At PMH Atwater's workshop in September, 2000, she gave us a handout with the Brain Shift Phases of Integration Most Experiencers Go Through. I read Phase Four and gasped. But the above details from her book Children of the New Millennium really explains much more and hits home. I cried when I read it because it explains so much of what I have been through. I attempted suicide last year for the first time. Prior to this I had always rationalized myself out of it. To most people it would not have looked like suicide. It just would have looked like heatstroke because I chose not to open a window or turn a fan on. I don't know if it was possible for me to even die that way. But it is interesting that I had an abnormal cardiac stress test earlier that month before the suicide attempt. I had already given my body a "die message." 1999 was hell! It started January 1999 and ended December 31st. I lost my health, had no income, became homeless, lost all my friends, moved to a foreign side of town. Then doctors, public aid and other social agencies refused to help. I had made major sacrifices with following my intuition/greater plan and then it seems that I had lost everything! In September 1999 I almost died from a simple unidentified infection. What a way to have to let go of all the false roles and identities I had. Talk about major transition! It was either sink or swim. Reading Children of the New Millennium has been a blessing for me. Why is it that I usually get explanations after I have already been through the worst of it? Imagine how I felt when I read the following: "Somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth years and, maybe up to the twentieth, there is another marker--a second birthday--and it catches most experiencers unaware.  It is a second drop --a second shift. The second drop is like a second death, in that it heralds a time of life reversals and the need to ask some tough questions:  Were the sacrifices I have made since my experience worth it?  Are my aftereffects fading?  If the experience can successfully negotiate the challenges of this second drop, a second shift is possible--a major advancement toward "the peace that passes all understanding.".... Of those who attempted suicide after their episode, all of them (children) did so during Phase Four.  Also, most of those who had another near-death experience in adulthood had it in Phase Four.... The second drop that occurs is not always as perilous as it was for the young man just mentioned, but, unlike the 'first birthday', this is a time of reckoning and reassessment when experiencers make major decisions that require new commitment.  The first shift can be linked to the original near-death state.  The second shift is more dependent on choice, on the experiencer's willingness to surrender to a greater plan.  Regardless of how integrated and spiritual an experience may appear to be after the seventh year, all pales by the power unleashed if the second shift occurs."  (Children of the New Millennium, pp 123 -124)

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