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I've been following the story of the teenage boy in Alabama who was pronounced brain dead. His parents had just signed the paperwork for organ donation when all of a sudden he began to respond. He has now said that while he was unconscious (my confusion is that he was supposedly brain dead) he walked along a field and he believes he was in heaven. Then later his mom says the color of his eyes has changed and that is a sure sign he was reborn. I am shaking my head in confusion and wonderment. Was he really not brain dead and the doctors called it incorrectly? Can a brain dead person return to a state of near normalcy after 15 minutes of being in that state? I know he wasn't in "heaven" but if he was dreaming would that not indicate he could not have been brain dead? What do you think of this news story?

AmelieMatisse 8 May 7
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29 comments

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8

Well ... I remember a few times when I thought I was in heaven. Sometimes the other person involved even confirmed it by uttering OMG.

show off! hahaha

@VLove couldn't resist.

7

I smell male cow somewhere

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I've seen one patient who was pronounced brain dead have a recovery. I view psuedo brain death as the brains equivalent to "take the battery out for a few minutes and put it back in". The weird fact is we as humans have only unlocked a small portion of the brain and what it can do. There is still a ton of mystery in it. I don't buy for one second that God brought this kid back, but I do think there are a lot of things that can cause a psuedo brain death. It's fascinating that people can recover from things like that, but I don't think it has anything to do with some magic man in the sky. If that were so, how many people of faith should have been spared? Bah. All I know is that we don't know much.

4

[wral.com]
This is one, but there is a whole page full of the story. You know this kind of “miracle” gets the theists all close to orgasm!

4

I saw that story too. I find it a little sketchy.

3

Eyes can change colour, they may change back quickly.
The brain dead thing concerns me, but only a little.
The dreams may not have occurred until the instant he was coming out of it, there is no time in the brain.
Though I do worry about how final brain death is now.

3

First of all, most of that story from the boy's point of view was largely fabricated. I think medical technology arrived to a point where we can reasonably determine that after physical death and organs shut down there is/could still be some activity going on in the brain hours after being pronounced dead. This would explain the visions the boy had (just a dream by the way) as there certainly was still some activity going on in his brain. This would also explain so-called near death experiences. I think stories like this suck (I am glad that a young boy survived though) because the religious fanatics will pounce on it at the first opportunity and say "see we told you god and the afterlife are real". I can only hope that story fades away quickly and people forget about it.

I agree. This family will now become stars on Christian radio and tv and the stories will get bigger and bigger. More fuel for their fire

I can never understand why when one person survives in some unusual manner it was god saving them and a miracle. But when someone dies, suddenly, with no obvious cause, no one calls that a miracle of god. And how for some reason god chose this one kid, while killing a million others in cruel or vile ways.

3

it came from Fox news there for suspicious

@squiggy_70 FOX just picked it up from about 5 other places that announced it first. It is all over. A real push in the fake news world

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@LadyAlyxandrea's comment re. "pseudo brain death" is interesting. I suspect that in this case the patient was not in fact brain dead, but in a state so close to it that the doctors treating him were unable to distinguish between it and actual brain death. Being in such a state is likely to do some very dramatic things to the brain's chemistry; therefore, one possibility is that he did not in fact dream, but has false memories of doing so.

Another possibility, of course, is that he and his mother made the story up, either because they want to convince others that heaven exists or because they wanted to get in the news - I imagine the likes of the National Enquirer would pay a tasty sum for an exclusive interview, after all.

Jnei Level 8 May 7, 2018

Well after the last kid lied about heaven they could get movie deals and books

3

So a teenage boy refuses to get out out of bed until threatened with a fate worse than death?
Happened five days out of seven when my kids were at school.

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Ok, this is not the same, but I'd like to relate one of my experiences in the hospital. This was quite a few years ago, but I had gone in to the emergency room for chest pain and palpitations, so my doctor spoke with the ER by phone and wanted me admitted because he felt I was too young to be a candidate for a standard heart attack and wanted to find out what was going on.

A little while later, a resident came over and hooked me up to a different EKG/heart monitor and turned it on. The reading looked fine for a while, then just trailed off.... So I called the doc in and asked him what had happened. He looked at the machine and then looked at me and started to get visibly nervous and told me I had just had a myocardial infarction, although I was sitting up breathing and speaking to him. It turns out, it was just a broken heart machine - not the one in my chest, either - I just have a mitral valve prolapse.

I guess my point is that weird stuff happens in hospitals!

3

I would like to see the EEG and the medical records

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Brain plasticity, the 'ability' of the brain to repair trauma, is a known thing. There have been cases like this before, others that result in a person waking from a coma speaking a foreign language fluently, changes in their accent, and anecdotally; my grandmother having a stroke and basically 180-degree turning her personality. The eyes changing colour is a normal thing as well, even in non-trauma people eye colour can change as we age. Heck even mine changed from a deep, dark, brown to light hazel. Another good o'l "god of the gaps" story basically.

Yes I get that but after you have been brain dead for over 15 minutes. That s the part that I'm not getting. And if he was brain dead how was he dreaming he was in heaven?

@AmelieMatisse Well he obviously wasn't brain dead, did anyone check to see if the monitor was plugged in?

@LenHazell53 An article I've read seems to put things into a different order. The child was dead for 15 minutes, the doctors figured an oxygen starved brain of that amount of time would leave the kid in a vegetative state AKA: brain dead.

The kid was brain dead over 'several days' which is vague so lets call it a week and a half.
In the course of these several days the child, with children having much better instances of brain plasticity than adults, had his dream.

The kids dream sequence could have been the last few minutes prior to him waking up. Dreams aren't as long as most think, and I chalk that up to basically a 'boot sequence' akin to a computer.

[abc13.com]

They don't go into detail as to how the kid ended up being dead for 15 minutes, blunt force trauma, drowning, who knows? What I feel this article should really be focusing on is the amazing ability of the body. This could be a great examination for psychology books, though I am not surprised in the least that folks from Alabama would be way too busy with 'god is gud" to care to mention that.

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Obviously the dr. was wrong..........

Or the health tech who affixes electrodes for brain monitoring who may not be the cardiac tech, surgical nurses, attending physician and who knows who else bumped a brain electrode or more loose. ...people "believe" medical people like clergy with little or no demand for proof/evidence. ...especially in life&death situations: military, cops, judges, lawyers but NOT POLITICIANS & USED CAR SALES AGENTS who control taxes and the black boxes of engineering

3

The mind is an amazing thing. It has the ability to in a sense rewire itself to fix damaged area. But since this was only 15 minutes I doubt any real damage could be sufficiently repaired in such a short amount of time. (It takes quite awhile for this to happen and then it's only minimal repair that's done from my understanding). The dream where he says he believes he was in heaven, well it could have been anything the brain subconsciously remembered that he attributes that to. As for the eye thing I can't answer that but don't see any real divine intervention here. More likely minimal but active brain activity was missed by medical staff. It happens.

2

The BBC have also picked up the story: [bbc.co.uk]

Note "At one point, Ms Reindl said, Trenton died on the table for 15 minutes". Not the doctors, but the boy's mother.

Jnei Level 8 May 8, 2018

Interesting...so she is adding to the story

@AmelieMatisse otherwise there might not even be a story.

2

There is a very long history of this kind of thing. I have no pretense to being an expert, but there are such out there. An article from Sam Harris (who may be one):
[samharris.org]

2

Dont now what to say... hallucinations can be more vivid than a dream.

2

Sounds like they used his eyes rolling back into his head as an excuse to delay him getting Schiavoed.

2

Very strange story - of course the heaven experiences are nothing more than"dreams"

gater Level 7 May 7, 2018
1

I don't know much about Alabama ... Is this not traditional KKK territory?

Perhaps I should love to Alabama ... I am a self confessed KKK => ? KuhKackeKuenstler ? (German for BullShitArtist)

yes and many other bad stuff. has nothing to do with this kid

Yeah Alabama is fairly awful

@AmelieMatisse I imagine it to be like the deep north of Australia

@PontifexMarximus never been to Australia but I'm thinking Alabama is worse.

@AmelieMatisse If I were standing next to you, I would start my next sentence with When I was in jial in Far North Queensland ... I really was ... ok I could leave after finishing my job ..
To give you an idea 77% of the inmates were Aborigines, indigenous people. Yet they represent, in that part of the world they represent less than 8% of the total population, about 3% in Australia. I had one class with 10/11 indigenous men and one guy who was the first ever to be convicted of slavery.
I was even arrested for having the audacity to talk to some harmless fellas, colloquial term for the aborigines.
Ok I have never been to Alabama, but remember some horrific documentary.

@PontifexMarximus our prisons hold a higher percentage of non-whites and we have the issue of police brutality. And if a white guy guns down 10 people he has mental problems but a non white is immediately tagged as a terrorist.

@AmelieMatisse same here ... Often I only find vulgarisms to describe the situation especially for poor aborigines.

1

Machines are fallible and the human body can do odd things. One of the reasons most states require a three day waiting period before a body is cremated. In this case, he suffered a major head trauma. His brain may have gone into a hibernation mode, just as some trauma requires induced coma. If he was seeing fields, he was having dreams, relaxing dreams. And thank goodness they waited a bit to start harvesting organs. I’m not sure they don’t rush that sometimes.

1

"He walked along a field" ... So there is no better transport in heaven???

You'd have thought they'd have Uber by now, wouldn't you?

@Jnei was more thinking along the lines of a MagLev

1

Hmmm... I need more details to answer.

1

We are still learning about the biological state of death. First of all, "brain-dead" just means that no electrical activity was measured and we do have good, but not perfect, instruments to measure this. Secondly, it is not certain that the lack of electrical activity, at least for a time, means the brain is thoroughly dead, but rather is dormant. Subtle chemical processes may still be occurring. Thirdly, many medical scientists now believe that even in brain death, the rest of the spinal cord may still be alive, and it is quite possible for the spinal cord to "reboot" the brain with electrical pulses.
Finally, any change in eye color has nothing to do with being "reborn". (Where in the Bible does it say that? Sounds more like a Hollywood movie someone saw.) Eye color is caused by pigment or the lack thereof. People's eye color often changes somewhat as they age. Hardly anyone keeps their "baby blues" their entire life. So are all the billions of people whose eye color changes "reborn", or is it just a natural chemical process?

Seems these doctors were in a big hurry to harvest this kid's organs and make even more $$$$

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