Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander

Author:Eben Alexander [Alexander, Eben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781451695199
Amazon: 1451695195
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-10-23T07:00:00+00:00

19.

Nowhere to Hide

By Friday, my body had been on triple intravenous antibiotics for four full days but still wasn’t responding. Family and friends had come from all over, and those who hadn’t come had initiated prayer groups at their churches. My sister-in-law Peggy and Holley’s close friend Sylvia arrived that afternoon. Holley greeted them with as cheerful a face as she could muster. Betsy and Phyllis continued to champion the he’s-going-to-be-fine view: to remain positive at all costs. But each day it got harder to believe. Even Betsy herself began to wonder if her no negativity in the room order really meant something more like no reality in the room.

“Do you think Eben would do this for us, if the roles were reversed?” Phyllis asked Betsy that morning, after another largely sleepless night.

“What do you mean?” asked Betsy.

“I mean do you think he’d be spending every minute with us, camping out in the ICU?”

Betsy had the most beautiful, simple answer, delivered as a question: “Is there anywhere else in the world where you can imagine being?”

Both agreed that though I’d have been there in a second if needed, it was very, very hard to imagine me just sitting in one place for hours on end. “It never felt like a chore or something that had to be done—it was where we belonged,” Phyllis told me later.

What was upsetting Sylvia the most were my hands and feet, which were beginning to curl up, like leaves on a plant without water. This is normal with victims of stroke and coma, as the dominant muscles in the extremities start to contract. But it’s never easy for family and loved ones to see. Looking at me, Sylvia kept telling herself to stay with her original gut feeling. But even for her, it was getting very, very hard.

Holley had taken to blaming herself more and more (if only she had walked up the stairs sooner, if only this, if only that . . .) and everyone worked especially hard to keep her away from the subject.

By now, everyone knew that even if I did make a recovery, recovery wasn’t much of a word for what it would amount to. I’d need at least three months of intensive rehabilitation, would have chronic speech problems (if I had enough brain capacity to be able to speak at all), and I’d require chronic nursing care for the rest of my life. This was the best-case scenario, and as low and grim as that sounds, it was essentially in the realm of fantasy anyhow. The odds that I’d even be in that good of a shape were shrinking to nonexistent.

Bond had been kept from hearing the full details of my condition. But on Friday, at the hospital after school, he overheard one of my doctors outlining to Holley what she already knew.

It was time to face the facts. There was little room for hope.

That evening, when it was time for him to go home, Bond refused to leave my room.

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