Lifestyle

Man who died 17 times in 13 minutes says he saw heaven — but his dad sent him back

David Benjamin
In November 2004, John Williams was 39 years old. One frosty winter weekend, he headed to Whitby with his then-partner to celebrate her 40th birthday. While having dinner at a local pub, he began to feel hot and sweaty, and immediately knew something was wrong. He left his seat mid-meal and staggered outdoors, convinced he was going to collapse. The next thing he knew, he was being blue-lighted to hospital in an ambulance in the throes of a major heart attack. Then, he blacked out (Picture: Supplied)
Hours later, John woke up in the hospital, hooked to machines, still hazy from the previous event. He tells Metro that he remembers a consultant coming to his bedside, looking sternly at him, and saying: ‘You’ve been lucky.’ He then drew an imaginary line with his finger and ticked the right-hand side of a non-existent piece of paper. ‘With heart attacks, you either live or you die,’ the doctor said to John. ‘There’s no in between. But, you’re not out of the woods yet’ (Picture: Getty Images)
The consultant then told John that he had suffered a myocardial infarction, a medical emergency where blood flow to a part of the heart muscle is blocked, and he required surgery. ‘I was told I needed a triple bypass,’ John recalls. For context, this is a treatment for multiple blockages in the coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart muscle, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The operation involves using a heart-lung machine, which allows surgeons to temporarily stop the heart to precisely reroute blood flow around the blocked coronary artery by attaching healthy blood vessel grafts from the leg (in John’s case), to create new pathways to the heart muscle (Picture: Supplied)
Technical stuff aside, it was almost a year later that John would receive his operation — and when his near-death experience took place. For those new to ‘NDEs,’ they’re described as profound and vivid experiences, reported by people who have been close to death, such as during cardiac arrest or trauma (Picture: Getty Images)
The night before the surgery, John was in his room at a private hospital in Leeds. ‘It felt like a hotel,’ he recalls: big windows, a private bathroom, and a fancy menu that resembled more of a Michelin restaurant than it did a hospital. Even his ‘final meal’ arrived beneath a silver cloche. ‘At first, I thought the environment was why I felt so calm,’ he says, remembering the shock of waking up at Scarborough Hospital on a busy cardiac ward a year before, surrounded by beeping machines and older patients — a scary sight to be greeted with at just 39 (Picture: Getty Images)
At around 7pm, the nurse entered John’s room with a razor. She asked him to shave his chest and his left leg ahead of surgery the next day. ‘As I went into the bathroom, I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, “This is the last time my body will ever look like this. From tomorrow, I’ll have to live the rest of my life with a huge scar on my chest, a constant reminder of what happened”‘ (Picture: Getty Images)
However, at the same time, John — who had been raised Catholic — felt a wave of tranquillity take over him. He said: ‘You’d have thought I would have been anxious, considering doctors were about to slice me open, break my ribs, and stop my heart, but this calmness just washed over me like something I’d never felt before.’ This is when John pictured his father and grandfather for the first time, who had both passed decades before. ‘I knew they weren’t physically there, but I could sense them with me. It was almost as if they had come to wish me luck’ (Picture: Getty Images)
After shaving, John left the bathroom to let the nurse know he was finished. She told him to get some rest, and that she would come in to wake him in the morning to take him to theatre. But she never did, or so John thought. Instead, he had a premonition that something was going to go wrong. ‘I saw my dad and grandad again, this time up in heaven. We were in the same room together, and I remember saying to them, “I’ll see you soon, I can’t wait to see you both, it’s been such a long time”‘ (Picture: Getty Images)
While John says his grandad’s response was: ‘You’ve grown up since I last saw you. We’ll see you very soon,’ his father was a lot sterner. Although excited to see his son again after dying 10 years earlier, John says he was adamant that he wasn’t entering heaven just yet. ‘You’ve got two young daughters at home,’ he said, ‘not just yet.’ Still, ‘it was like we all knew something was going to happen, and I might not make it. I was in this in-between area, waiting to float up there to be with them. At that moment, it was where I wanted to be’ (Picture: Getty Images)
While this was happening, John believed he was in his hospital room, waiting for the nurse to wake him the following morning. ‘I don’t remember any nurses, porters or doctors coming to collect me,’ he says. But soon after being with his deceased relatives, where he felt his dad was ‘pushing him back,’ John started to ‘wake up,’ and felt the ‘calmness and serenity’ slipping away. Adjusting to the surroundings — and still thinking it was the morning of the operation — he could hear a nurse saying: ‘Don’t try to speak, you’ve got a tube down your throat.’ What was actually taking place was that they were waking him up from an induced coma, days after the op. ‘It’s all over John, you’re in intensive care’ (Picture: Supplied)
Unbeknownst to John, he had died 17 times in 13 minutes during surgery. The operation had been a success, but his heart had gone into arrhythmia shortly after — an abnormal heart rhythm where the heart’s electrical signals are disrupted — which required being defibrillated. Looking down at his chest, freshly bandaged from the operation, he could see two rectangular burn marks: proof that doctors had worked tirelessly to save him. ‘I still can’t fully explain what happened or when it happened,’ John says, recalling the time he spent with his father and grandfather. ‘All I know is that it felt so real, but at the same time, otherworldly. I have never felt such calmness since’ (Picture: Getty Images)

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