The closest I have come to death was on a street in Paris where I suffered a Cardiac Arrest. Paramedics used a defibrillator 5 times to bring me back. Was I dead? ~ They say not because there was no brain death (although there are those who would disagree about my brain).
I remember feeling faint and then an intense pain in my shin as I fell onto a traditional Parisienne boot scraper in someone's doorway. After that a soft and very pleasant sleep until I came round (About ten or firteen minutes had passed) and I thought that I was being smothered. I fought to push off the oxygen mask and the paramedic holding it.
There were no choirs of angels, no bright lights at the end of a tunnel, nothing except an all enveloping blackness.
According to the French Doctors at the hospital I ended up in the administration of oxygen within three minutes had saved my brain but to all intents and purposes I had died.
The paramedics tried heart massage first and broke two ribs in the process.
This all happened, as I am sure I have told you before, a few weeks after an bypass op so the heart massage also split the wound down my chest that was still healing causing some bleeding and the Defib shocks boiled the spilled blood causing some painful scarring as well.
My hope is that death, when it comes, will be as painless as the last time ~ it was being saved that hurt.
Now, of course, I have an implanted defib and that has "saved" me three times in ten years when my heart has stopped. Not everyone can have one of these but the more defibs there are around and the more people who know how to use them the less people would die from Cardiac Arrest. Treatment in those first few minutes are vital. Without the French Firebrigade Paramedics I would not be here to bore you all with my tale.
The ribs and the shin took longer to mend than the heart.
Don't know if this adds to the debate or not but that is my experience of "near death"
