NEW AGE JOURNAL
EXCERPT FROM
NEW AGE JOURNAL
Letter from the Editor
September/October 1994
I HAVE A PASSION FOR STORIES OF EXTRAORDINARY healings. They bring me solace and inspiration in times of crisis. Twelve years ago, for example, when a close friend, Australian musician Hans Poulsen, was diagnosed with an advanced, and supposedly terminal case of cancer, the many remarkable cancer healing stories I had read helped me keep a hopeful attitude, I don’t know whether the positive support of his friends was the key element in his eventual recovery, but I do know that Hans appreciated it.
I had no such healing stories to draw on two years ago, however, when Hans once again became critically ill, He had suffered a massive brainstem hemorrhage and was in a deep coma, with only a 1 percent chance of survival. Neither I nor any of the other friends gathered at his bedside knew anything about the healing of this condition, and Hans's doctors did, nothing to encourage hope.
Maybe because we were in denial, or maybe because our intuition told us that more was possible, we refused to accept the prognosis and began doing the only thing we could do, surround Hans with love. We made sure someone was always with him. We prayed at his bedside. We played music and sang to him, and we repeatedly told him that we wanted him to live but also that it was OK if he chose to die.
About ten days into this bedside vigil, a healer who had heard of Hans's case offered to fly in from Colorado to see if he could help. As it turned out, Roger La Borde has a remarkable ability to communicate with coma patients and was crucial to Hans's recovery. Now, two years later, Hans still requires a wheelchair, but he continues to improve, beating the odds for a second time.
We've since discovered that Hans's healing was not a complete anomaly. With the help of healers and family members, many other patients have also recovered from coma even after doctors had given up hope. And yet the phenomenon has received little notice. When writer Brad Lemley investigated the subject for the story that appears on page 8o, he found numerous intriguing cases. We hope they'll be helpful as well. I wish this kind of article had been available two years ago, when I first sat at Hans's bedside wondering what consciousness was left in that seeming shell of a body.
Back from Coma
REPORTS
FROM SURVIVORS-AND HEALERSWHO WORK WITH THEM-ARE CHALLENGING
OLD ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THIS ENIGMATIC
STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
By Brad Lemley
T0 ALL WHO WITNESSED it, Peter Peelgrane's return from the brink of death was nothing short of Miraculous. A helicopter pilot internationally renowned for his flying skill, Peelgrane was working for a Denver Colorado, Television station on February12 , 1992, when his chopper’s engine suddenly lost all power. Slowing the fall with his free-spinning rotor, he was able to land the craft safely on an ice floe in the middle of a local reservoir. But then the ice gave way and Peelgrane and two friends, both freelance photographers, were cast into the thirty-four-degree water. As Peelgrane looked on, first one then the other friend slipped beneath the surface. When the rescuers finally fished Peelgrane from the frigid lake forty minutes later, the pilot’s heart had stopped and his core temperature had dropped to seventy-two degrees-- as low as has been recorded among hypothermia survivors. Working on his stiff utterly lifeless form seemed futile, but paramedics began resuscitation anyway. In such cold water cases they have a saying. They’re not dead until they are warm and dead. By boat and then aircraft, he was transported to a Fort Collins hospital, where doctors opened his chest, revived his heart, and connected him to a ventilator so he could breathe. Clinically dead for forty-five minutes, Peelgrane was once again alive, but in a profound coma.
Peelgrane's rescue and resuscitation, however, is not what friends and relatives remember as the miraculous part of his story. Even more incredible is what came next, as Peelgrane lay captive within the supposedly insensible sleep of coma. Indeed, his case would soon challenge some very basic assumptions about the nature and significance of this enigmatic state of consciousness--and, in turn, how the ethically difficult question of removing life support should be decided.
As the days passed, Peelgrane's prognosis worsened. "The doctors kept telling me that after seven days in the coma, his chance of recovery was less than 2 percent," recalls Peelgrane's wife, Karen Quinn. "They suggested that I pull the life support, that I was not being fair to Peter."
Quinn was spared making that awful decision by the arrival of Roger La Borde, a forty-eight-year-old healer who claims an unusual facility for communicating with the comatose. La Borde, of Crestone, Colorado, says that one night in 1977, in the midst of an excruciating divorce, he "gave up control" of his life, an "emptying" process that he says opened him to a new reality. In the following year, the former executive recruiter for Exxon says he had a series of powerful psychokinetic and clairvoyant experiences and developed a healing ability under the tutelage of Gerald Red Elk, a Sioux shaman. A brain wave test on La Borde in 1989 revealed extremely high delta waves—exactly the EEG profile of people in coma. In his report on the Test procedure, EEG researcher Edgar S. Wilson, M.D. called La Borde’s results ‘profoundly unusual" and said that he had "no explanation" for it. At the suggestion of a friend who had filmed La Borde for a BBC documentary Quinn brought the healer into Peelgrane's room on that seventh night. "I told the nurses that Roger was another long lost cousin, because they had this stupid rule about relatives only," she says. "When Roger walked into the room, he put his hands on Peter's arm and I put my hands on Peter's other arm, and I got this, like, electric jolt in my stomach.'" From ten o'clock that evening until two the next morning, La Borde says he simply sat in a corner of the room and tried to "connect" with Peelgrane. "It's a space I can move into, and I know when I have connected with the other person," he says.
After four hours, he says, he succeeded. Then, in a low voice, he told Peelgrane that the time had come to decide whether to live or move on. "I told him that if he were going to stay, I needed a physical sign." La Borde told Peelgrane to imagine that he was walking in a field of flowers. He described the colors and the smells, and then said, "You know, Peter, when you are walking through a field of flowers, you have to move your feet." Peelgrane immediately started moving his feet under the sheets-the First sign of deliberate movement since the accident. La Borde managed to get Peelgrane to repeat the performance for his nurse and physical therapist, and he improved steadily, if slowly, from there.
La Borde continued working with Peelgrane, sometimes stunning the staff of the Poudre Valley Hospital, in Fort Collins, Colorado. "I've been a nurse for twenty years, and I'd never seen anything like it," Joan Grant, a primary-care nurse, told the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper at the time. She said when Peelgrane had spells of agitation, La Borde would come and stand next to him. "He didn’t physically touch him, but you could see the change in the monitors blood pressure, pulse, respiration. It happened at least three times that I saw. I was amazed by it."
As would be most medical professionals. John J. Caronna, M.D., professor of clinical neurology at New York Hospital's Cornell Medical Center, reflects the view of many in mainstream medicine when he dismisses as "rubbish" such reports of communication ,psychic or otherwise with anyone in a true coma. "By definition," he says, "you cannot communicate with a person in a coma. That person is unconscious." Still, interviews with doctors, nurses, nontraditional healers, and, especially, the formerly comatose themselves suggest that this unique state may be far more complex than current medical thinking allows. Unusual, spiritual, meaningful things happen in coma, they say. And unusual, spiritual, and meaningful measures are required to reach into these states and help people return to consciousness or, if the patient wishes, to carry out a decision to die I truly believe that a very significant percentage of people in comas could be brought out, if you approach it with the attitude,
Keys to Awakening
Advice from healers on communicating with the comatose.
WHEN DAN CONNER WAS IN A COMA AFTER brain surgery, doctors trying to rouse him dug a sharp instrument into the exquisitely sensitive skin just below his fingernails to see if he would respond to pain. Due to his paralyzed condition he could not respond to or stop the torment, but could feel that it "hurt really bad." Indeed most of the formerly comatose people and their family members who were interviewed for this story complained that the techniques used by doctors and nurses to establish communication were crude, and even painful. What's more, techniques such as shouting "Wake up or "Open your eyes!" never worked, they say.
Consider the case of Dan Conner of Lafayette. Colorado, who in March of 1993, at age thirty-three, underwent an eighteen hour operation to remove a massive tumor from the base of his brain. He was lucid for ten hours after the surgery, but then lapsed into a coma The doctors eventually told his wife it was up to her to decide when they should turn off the life support. She turned to La Borde instead, and with his help Dan has made a startling recovery Yet when asked For his memories of the state, he laughs and says in a halting "I'm not too good at remembering anymore" He is also plagued by poor balance, and it remains to be seen whether he can return to his old avocation of renovating classic BMW’s. And yet even those who have lost a great deal from their comas can retrieve something valuable from the experience. "I was close enough to death, and I know what it is," Conner says. -'It's not horrible like people think. Death is placid." Though he lacks the specific memory of a near death experience the whoosh through a tunnel, the welcoming dead relatives, the loving light-he somehow earned the serenity that commonly trails in the wake of that experience. Where once he had been frightened of his mortality, he now has "no Fear of death at all."
Hans Poulsen, a talented singer and songwriter, also paid a price for his brain injury coma. A sudden brain-stem hemorrhage (of the kind that, doctors told him, give a victim only a 1 percent chance of surviving) has left him confined to a hospital, unable to sing or play instruments. Yet, even more than Conner, Poulsen feels that his disabled condition is a small roll for the necessary knowledge he gained.
"I was in space, and I came to a net of love," says Poulsen, forty-nine, who like Peelgrane and Conner was treated by Roger La Borde. "I was captured by it. The net was the prayers and good wishes of all of the friends who knew that I was in a coma. That net definitely helped to bring me back to consciousness.
"B
efore the coma, it seems to me that my life was a dream. Since the coma, I have been forced to wake up."As part of his recuperation process Poulsen has taken up Siddha Yoga, which he says puts him into a peaceful state similar to what he recalls from his coma. "Like the coma, it forces you into consciousness. It takes you away from the game." The game, he explains, is the everyday world of consensus reality with its pressing but ultimately trivial demands.
"When people go through these experiences," notes La Borde, "many of them definitely remember something unusual, something they would describe as very spiritual." But he adds that "it comes in its own, distinct package." No two experiences are alike.
……Similarly, Peter Peelgrane has persistently stated that he recalls nothing about his coma. His wife says she "had a sense that he was with his two friends, that they were all together someplace, and that he was trying to decide whether to go with them or come back." But, about five months after the accident she adds, her husband seems to have visited another mysterious realm. "He started yelling and grabbing his chest and saying, "I’m shot! I’m shot!" she says. " A close friend there with him asked him what he meant, and he said he was in a B-52 . He was a tail gunner and he was going down, and he was shot in the chest. The friend asked Peter if he was OK and he said, 'No, I died.' It's Interesting, because Peter was born in 1945."
A month later, he was scheduled for a magnetic resonance imaging procedure. Because it involves powerful magnetic forces, technicians routinely ask patients if they have any metal objects in their bodies, such as shrapnel. Peelgrane, who at that point had recovered most of his mental faculties, said he did, in his chest. Asked if it had been taken out, he replied, "No, it killed me."
If, as Hans Poulsen and others have indicated, the deep peace of meditation can be similar to the deep peace of a coma, there remains an important difference: The trick is getting into the former state, and out of the latter one. In this regard, say the survivor, interviewed for this story, modern medical science aside from addressing the physical problem that sent them spiraling into coma in the first place had little to offer them. Many shared uncannily similar tales of mainstream medicine's wrong headed approach to coma of family members who were barred from their bedsides in intensive care units, and of doctors and nurses whose only attempt at establishing communication was to shout, "Open your eyes!" In at least three of the cases reported here Conner’s, Poulsen’s, and Peelgrane's family members and friends say doctors urged them to withdraw life supporting machinery, although their instincts told them there was still hope.
……..Though their techniques differ, La Borde and Mindell agree completely on two points: No one is so deeply comatose that he or she cannot be reached, and the agonizing decision of whether to live or die should be made by the comatose person alone.
"Everyone in a coma can communicate, but you have to be there all the time," says La Borde. "You must talk to the person, hold their hand, and watch them constantly, because the first movement can be just a subtle squeeze of the hand or a movement of the eye." Because this can 'be such a long vigil, busy doctors and nurses can't do it. Only love can sustain it which is why families and friends are often the difference between life and death for a comatose person.
La Borde and Mindell believe that some comatose people will choose to die, and must be supported in that decision. But they also feel that many comatose people will decide to live, if someone is willing to exert him or herself to listen. Poulsen, for example, recalls how La Borde "came to me while I was in coma and told me that medical technology was doing its best." As a result, he says, "Roger was crucial in bringing me back."
Adds Mindell: "The family means well, as it wrestles with this decision of whether or not to pull the plug, but my message is, It's not their decision. All of the energy that is expended in making this wrenching choice should be devoted to learning how to communicate with the individual, so that he or she can decide."
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