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This is an accurate account of my near death experience and what I believe to be a visitation by an unknown and uninvited visitor shortly after my heart stopped on the operating table in October of 1972.

Just before the dawn I come before the machine again. So many times as a child at rest, standing before it, dominated as it drones deep into my very organs, I am summoned to offer myself. No begging for consciousness does it recognize except to increase the paralysis. The tips of my ears and toes are cold to painful screams yet numb my every sense to silence. It awakens me helpless, not to surrender; yet I lay there. I remain shackled and filled with its presence moving through me, like warm soup through a sieve. It controls my every effort and reveals my thoughts to escape it. Let me stand and hurry away to the sounds of light. When the music starts, again I feel my toes on the edge. I look over, down and before me, there, is the emptiness. I feel the train rumbling closer as it has so many times before. It appears as a toy, red, pulling cars with wheels that rattle as it disappears before the machine. I must run before I fall. I cannot, so I drift with the pain in my legs. I can't run, it's so slow. Behind the blinds, slightly open I view the meaning of the visitor. When I reach out, I list to the floor, face down. People are passing without notice of each other or myself. The visitor is marking each of them with the doubt he wears as a standard.The train passes again, larger than before, shaking the tracks and jarring my bones. I can taste the smoke; my lips are dry, and the pain in my legs sinks to the quick. The visitor stands within me now as I tremble. Its entity strips away my skin and probes at my soul as a young boy would salt the path before a snail. It observes my life fleeing, I'm sure with no consequence due to its presence. My belly aches for sunrise, if I can only get there. The machine begins its drone once again and I return to my stance on the edge, violated. I smell the popcorn and hear the voices of my friends in school. I look over the shoulder of the attending physician and struggle to see the entries on my chart. There, I lay, still in the hospital bed.

From above the ceiling of the room, I feel my father holding my hand. " Don't worry Ed, he wont leave us here alone." It's my mother's voice; I feel my breath now. The next day I recite the entries of my chart to the attending physician, as he compares my recall to the record. As he leaves the room, he orders a change in my pain medication because of the "hallucinations". The nurse enters the room to ask how I could read the chart while restrained. "I'm sorry we had to bind your arms and legs, but you were in so much pain and you kept trying to pull the "IV's" out." Dr. Burke returns later in the evening, while I lay in intensive care, with a gift. As he tunes a small transistor radio to the local Christian station and places it slightly out of my reach, he asks "Were you looking over my shoulder the entire time?" My jaws were wired closed from the surgery, so I could not respond. "You're back with us now, I'll pray for you" he whispered softly. The thought of death never entered my mind. I am convinced that I remain uninvited by the visitor. Head on collision 1972

Regards, Bob