[1]<\/a>\u00a0 She was assigned to Maria, a Hispanic migrant worker who had suffered a massive heart attack and was being cared for at Harborview when, suddenly, she \u201cflatlined\u201d or went into cardiac arrest.\u00a0 Fortunately, the medical staff were able to resuscitate her\u2014Sharp being in the room, watching\u2014and everything seemed routine.<\/span><\/p>\nHowever, when Sharp was just about to leave the hospital for the evening, she received word that Maria was very agitated and wanted to see her.\u00a0 It took Sharp some time to calm Maria down.\u00a0 Then came the interesting part:<\/span><\/p>\nMaria pointed to a corner of the ceiling and said she had been up there watching people work over her body.\u00a0 She told me precisely, and correctly, who had been in the room, where they stood, what they did, and what they said.\u00a0 She described the placement of machinery and all the paper that had been kicked around on the floor during the resuscitation, paper that the electrocardiogram machine had been continuous feeding out.\u00a0 Next, with a snap of her fingers to show me how fast she had moved, Maria told me she suddenly found herself outside the hospital room, looking down at the emergency room entrance.\u00a0 She described the curvature of the driveway, the vehicles all going in one direction and the doors opening automatically.\u00a0 Everything was absolutely accurate.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nSharp didn\u2019t believe her.\u00a0 It was simply too much.\u00a0 The rational, trained social worker began to think of far-fetched ways in which the migrant worker Maria might have gathered all of the detailed information that she clearly possessed.\u00a0 However, Maria wasn\u2019t finished with her story.<\/span><\/p>\nShe said she had been distracted by something in a different part of the hospital, a and she next remembered staring closely at an object on a window ledge about three stories above the ground.\u00a0 It was a man\u2019s dark blue tennis shoe, well-worn, scuffed on the left side where the little toe would go.\u00a0 The shoelace was caught under the heel.\u00a0 Maria was upset, she explained, because she desperately wanted someone to go get the shoe.\u00a0 Not to prove to herself that it was there; Maria knew she was an honest woman and she was telling the truth.\u00a0 No, she needed to prove it to others\u2014that she really had been out of her body, floating free, outside the hospital walls.\u00a0 That she wasn\u2019t crazy.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n[1]<\/a> The story can be read in Sharp, After the Light<\/em>, 7-15.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Canmore, Alberta, Canada<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 From one of my incomplete manuscripts: \u00a0 One of the most famous of all near-death accounts was related by Kimberly Clark Sharp, who was working at the time the story unfolded as a social worker at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.[1]\u00a0 She was assigned to Maria, a Hispanic migrant worker who had suffered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>