When Bettina Peyton was a child, her father told her there was nothing after death, “and I became an atheist on the spot.”
This worldview was only affirmed through her course of life, where Peyton pursued medical sciences.
Yet for numerous patients coming into the hospital needing resuscitation, it was a battle their medical teams would not win. Average rates of success for resuscitation attempts are lower than many might think: between 5 to 10 percent on average, and up to 20 percent in hospitals. And in the 1980s, this was even lower, Peyton said. Almost all those patients did not leave the hospital alive.
She would look at these bodies, and feel sad, wondering if they were conscious at all or aware of what they were being subjected to, a “complicated death ritual before they would slip away into oblivion.”
Bleeding Out
Peyton’s second pregnancy was a complicated one, where she and her doctor knew she would be at great risk of blood loss and would need a precise C-section that also cut through her placenta. Peyton began donating her own blood in preparation for the blood loss that would occur closer to the delivery.Sure enough, at seven months, Peyton started to bleed and was rushed to the same hospital where she had finished her training two years prior. She remembered joking with her anesthesiologist before going under, and then she was unconscious.
To her surprise, the first words she heard when she returned to consciousness were, “her blood pressure is too low!”
Peyton hadn’t come out of her anesthetized state, but she was “alert, more aware than ever” and it wasn’t a frightening, but a “wondrous state.”
Then she heard her surgeon say the baby was gone, and the anesthesiologist say her blood pressure had dropped to nothing, and then her heartbeat was gone.
By now, Peyton was watching the room scene from above, from outside of her body. She watched as resuscitation techniques were performed on her own pale body.
“Amazingly, instead of being terrified, I’m watching the space with extraordinary equanimity, even as I realize I’m dying,” Peyton said.
She assumed she would fade into nothingness next, but not before the resuscitation team performed a futile, painful attempt to revive her. Instead, she felt a current of energy pulling her back into a dark, vast space in which she could not see.
Then “Kaboom!” she said. “It felt like I exploded through some great barrier. I am free.”
Peyton was in endless darkness, but it was a “radiant” sort of darkness and “mesmerizing.”
“Astounding beauty, boundless, sparkling light. Everywhere I turn this light is looking back at me. It knows me. This light is conscious,” she said. “All-knowing, all-powerful, humming with possibility.”
Peyton felt a perfect sort of peace, and then a voice that told her, three times, “you must live.”
She noticed a pinprick of light that became multifaceted and multicolored, and in it she saw all the scenes of her life play out simultaneously. Then she was given knowledge of how to return, and seemingly in an instant she was back in that hospital room, watching doctors she had helped train rush in to assist with the resuscitation.
She could feel them think, “she’s already gone.” She would have thought the same herself: her body was limp and drained of blood. But when she returned, the light came with her, and it was in that room leading the team, she said. In that all-seeing perspective, Peyton was able to see, from inside her body, the senior surgeon reach into her middle and find her aorta, and light exploding through her body.
“Lying on the operating table, all I can feel is love, and all I can see is light radiating from my body,” she said.
A Different Way to Help Dying Patients
Peyton left the hospital with her baby five days later, “and I was not the same,” she said.She felt extraordinarily sensitive and perceptive, and still felt connected with everyone she came across as she did in her out-of-body state.
“I had entered the hospital a close-minded skeptic that was often cynical, and I came out wonderstruck, awakened to the sacred foundation of all existence,” she said.
She couldn’t wait to tell her husband the good news: “You’re not your body! Dying is nothing to be afraid of!”
Her husband, an atheist, looked at her like she was crazy. He felt the consciousness and light and love she described was too much like the religion he had rejected, and only a fantasy. Peyton believed what she experienced to be real, and in her research discovered she had had a near-death experience, and many others had had them too.
A while later, the word “meditation” jumped out at Peyton as she was reading a brochure, and she ended up taking a class, because she wanted a teacher to lead her.
It was there that Peyton felt she touched upon that “sense of expanded consciousness” she had in her near-death experience.
“The same radiant darkness, the same expanded sense of freedom all around,” she said. Peyton said the front of her shirt was wet from her tears of joy, and over the course of the workshop, she was able to go in and out of that blissful state she could only call “home.”
“My near-death experience brought many changes to my life. For one thing, it launched me on the path of meditation. It also gave me the courage to take an extended leave from medical practice and go home and raise my children. The near-death experience encouraged me to change the path of my career as a physician,” she said.
“I decided to devote my medical practice exclusively to end-of-life care. I joined the first wave of physicians in creating the new hospice and palliative medicine, and helped to establish and directed one of the first state-of-the-art inpatient hospice facilities in New England. My near-death experience was perfect training for caring for patients at the end of life,” she said.
No longer did she pity the bodies that would suffer a futile “death ritual” before meeting oblivion. Now Peyton was able to offer comfort, peace, and hope to patients as they neared the end of their lives.
It took time for Peyton to come to grips with her near-death experience, but afterward, her life and worldview were much improved, she added. She said friends and family have told her she’s much more fun to be around, and more relaxed and natural.
“When people remarked on how calm I was, I would smile and know it was all thanks to my near-death experience,” she said.
