Submitted by chris_downie t3_zvmksk in LifeProTips
TL:DR You never know what can happen each day. I was walking down the street thinking everything was fine with my health and suddenly I had a brain seizure caused by a golf ball-sized brain tumor (photo – a bit jarring: https://imgpile.com/i/byxIJ1). I have wondered if visualizing a life/death experience could help people replicate some of what I went through and lead to positives like appreciating life more -- without the "actual life or death" fear :). This could be part of writing in a gratitude journal that helps you focus on what's important to you in life. The second LPT out of this experience is to keep your body prepared to better handle life or death situations. My neurosurgeon told me if I wasn’t otherwise healthy and fit I might not have survived this experience.
Note: if you aren't familiar with this, visualization is proven to be very powerful. I mentioned to someone in the comments that I'm sure it's not possible to fully-replicate a near-death experience. But people have done amazing things with visualization like in this blog post by Psychology Today talking about using visualization for chess, sports, and more making me wonder if it's possible to partially-replicate some of the positives of wanting to live more than anything else and then after you do survive focus on the most important things in life (whatever those are to you): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/flourish/200912/seeing-is-believing-the-power-visualization
Here is the longer story if you are interested:
In 2018, I was walking down the street in San Francisco. A co-worker asked me a question. I couldn’t access the answer and thought, “this will make me look stupid.” That was the last thing I remember because I had a brain seizure and full 9-1-1 experience. I woke up in an ambulance. After getting a CT scan in the ER, they told me I had a large mass in my brain and needed another ambulance ride to the neurosurgery hospital for an MRI to figure out what was going on.
The paramedic in the back of the second ambulance told me he wanted to become a firefighter, but kept failing the fitness test. So here I am in an ambulance not knowing whether I would live or die, and I’m motivating someone on his fitness program (I am a goal-setting and fitness expert/enthusiast). I took this as a sign that my time here wasn’t finished.
After the MRI, the neurosurgeon said he needed to cut a hole through my skull and remove the tumor. He undersold the challenge of the surgery to not scare me because the tumor was mixed in with the brain tissue that controls my speech.
About 1.5 days later, he did surgery for 5.5 hours – longer than expected because of the complexity once he got in there. When I woke up, he basically said if I could speak, he did a good job. Fortunately, I could speak!
It took about a year to fully-recover and my dog was an incredible help walking me around our neighborhood.
Since then I’ve done my best to help other people learn lessons from this experience that can help them. This includes helping people be grateful for life and prepare their body and mind for life threatening issues because you never know when you might have to fight for your life in an emergency like a car accident, unexpected illness, etc. My neurosurgeon told me if I hadn’t been otherwise fit and healthy, there was a fair chance I wouldn’t have survived this experience.
It was also fun to be a win for him because he said many of his patients didn’t survive their brain tumors. There were so many helpful and caring people throughout this experience. Here is a before/after photo (warning this is a bit jarring to see the question mark in the side of my head):https://imgpile.com/i/byxIJ1
I remember the first time I saw fireworks after my surgery and I literally stopped and just fully-experienced them like a kid. This happened with many things in life.
I have wondered if visualizing going through a life/death experience could partly help replicate what I went through and lead to positives. This can be part of writing in a gratitude journal.
I wish you the best in appreciating your days and being prepared in case you ever have to face a life/death situation!
Thanks for all of the positive comments and especially to the people sharing their incredible survival stories too!