Medically Impossible Overheard Conversation

From: The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope- Allan J. Hamilton MD

From a technical point of view, everything required for this daring surgical undertaking went well. Without a hitch. The patient’s body cooled, the heart stopped as expected, and the brain waves disappeared. She was dead by every clinical criterion used in modern medicine. During her brief interval of seventeen minutes “as a corpse,” while a titanium aneurysm clip was carefully put into its final position, forever sealing the aneurysm off, the surgeon and the OR team worked and exchanged few pleasantries. Most of the conversation centered on the operative and technical concerns at hand. Surgeon and assistant would mutter quietly as they gazed through the microscope, working on the delicate blood vessel. The anesthesiologist watched his instruments but had time to chat with the nurses while everyone waited for the aneurysm clip to be positioned and then closed, finally, quelling the danger of the aneurysm forever.

As the operation began to wind down, several trivial conversations were picked up. One part related to a conversation between Tom Reed and the perfusionist, the technician who oversees the heart-lung bypass pump. 

“We’re going to need to start the pump back up in a minute or two. Everything ready to go?” Tom asked.  

“Yeah, we’ll be ready. We’ve got to blow first,” the perfusionist answered. To “blow” is vernacular for firing up the pump and letting it circulate for a few seconds to ensure any bubbles in the system are cleared before reestablishing blood flow in the patient. 

There was also a second important conversation picked up by the microphone. One of the nurses in the operating room, a certain Rita Hightower, announced she had just gotten engaged. A couple of the other nurses shrieked in excitement. Because Rita was scrubbed in, wearing surgical gloves, she wore no engagement ring.

 But she said, “Oh, wait till you see it. It’s a one-and-a-half-carat square-cut yellow diamond. And he proposed to me right there at Morton’s. John got down on his knees and proposed. In fact, one of the waiters didn’t see him and tripped and fell into the wine case. Nothing broken, but it was funny.” A couple of oohs and ahhs. Someone in the background asked where the ring was from. “Johnston Fellows.” This was one of the most exclusive shops in the Phoenix area. “John had it custom-made for me.”

The pump was cleared. “Thar she blows, captain,” came the answer. 

“Okay, then. Let’s pump this baby up, shall we?” 

The bypass machine churned and red blood began to flow again through the patient’s tissue. The patient’s body was gently re-warmed.  Her heart started beating again. A few minutes later a normal, healthy brain wave pattern reappeared on the EEG. The operation by Dr. Reed went flawlessly.

As the patient awoke in the intensive care unit, she emerged gradually from the grogginess left by all the anesthetic agents. After several hours, her head cleared. She sat up to greet Dr. Reed and his team of residents when they stopped in to see her in the evening. 

“How did everything go today?” the patient asked. 

“Textbook-perfect,” Tom said with a smile. He quickly examined her. All of it was recorded on the video camera in her room.

 “Well, I thought I remembered hearing something ‘blow’ during the case,” she said. “Did the aneurysm blow?” 

“No.” Tom must have gone sheet-white. I could not see, as his back was toward the stationary camera in the corner. 

“I thought someone said, ‘Thar she blows.’ Like in Moby Dick.” 

“Yes, well that… what you might have heard… was the tech telling me all the air bubbles were blown clear out of the lines. That’s all.”

“Oh. I’m glad. I was just remembering what a disaster you said it would be the aneurysm leaked or ruptured.”

“No. Everything went fine with the aneurysm.” Tom leaned in closer to the young patient. “Is there anything else you recall?”  

“Yes, a ring. A one-and-a-half-carat yellow diamond from Johnston Fellows. Oh... and Morton’s restaurant where someone fell into a wine case.”  

Tom just kept staring at her. “You remember all that?” 

“Yes. Why? What does it all mean?”

 “Well, those were just conversations we had in the operating room. Nothing special.”

What shook everyone up who watched the video between Tom and his young patient was we all knew that this woman’s brain had been dead—without discernible electrical activity whatsoever. This meant that no brain cells were active, working, firing, or emitting electrical signals. Yet somehow the patient managed to recall the conversation in the operating room while her EEG was flat. In other words, while she was, for all intents and purposes, clinically dead—with no ability for her brain to function—she somehow managed to make or “encode” specific memories of that conversation in the OR. And this was no hazy recollection. The patient was reproducing practically word for word what had been said. Right down to the jewelry store and the waiter stumbling. No, she clearly recalled what had been said. There was no doubt about that.

From everything we currently know about how the brain works, it would be utterly impossible, from a biochemical, metabolic, and physiologic point of view, for this woman’s brain to create a memory. To do so would require neurons to be activated and then be capable of encoding incoming electrical signals. This electrical activity would cause them to convert the voltage signals across the cell’s surface membrane into specific changes in the transcription of messenger RNA—or mRNA— in each neuron. These changes in mRNA produce precise molecular changes, altering amino acid and peptide production within thousands of cells to make a lasting memory the brain can recall. In order to create a “Kodak moment of recollection,” the brain must be very much alive and bristling with electrical activation, and intracellular metabolism must be “revved up” to the maximum of each cell’s capacity. 

Yet we also had here unequivocal, scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical electrical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created? Where had these memories gone? And where could such a place exist? Certainly, wherever it was, it would have to be beyond the confines of her own brain and mind as we currently understand them. But wherever these memories existed while her brain ceased to function, how could they be accessed later from such a location? And how could such memories survive intact “out in the ether,” a place accessible to her brain for later storage only after it revived and awoke? One thing was clear: Explanation or not, she had stored and recalled accurate memories of what had happened.