A Near-Death Experience Gave Me My Life’s Best Education
ONE COULD MEASURE the distance between life and my death in millimeters. Two millimeters, if you really must know. My surgeon’s razor-sharp blade slices silently and achingly slowly towards the pulsating carotid artery in my brain. And still closer. There is no coming back from nicking that blood vessel, no tying it off with sutures or cauterizing it.
The operating room air seems oppressive, and several medical personnel in blue-gray scrubs animate the room. The tall, self-assured anesthesiologist bets me that I cannot count to ten before falling asleep. I believe I will win the wager. My last memory before entering the abyss. I lay supine on a frigid steel table, anesthetized, skull about to be pierced.
The surgeon confidently perches next to a side table containing the tools he will insert to remove the golf ball-sized tumor that lives in the brain behind my nose. The lights above me blaze, illuminating the entire operating theater with pure white light.
Imagine that the technician has the GPS coordinates reversed. The scalpel, which had entered the crescent-shaped burr hole in my right frontal skull, stops just millimeters short, and I survive.
“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak?” Harry interrupted again.
“So he can sneak up on people,” said Ron. “Sometimes he gets…
