Near Death Experiences, A Field Report, #2 | by Cassandra Speaks | Oct, 2025
Death by Ego, Channel Surfing the Field of Consciousness, and the Curse that Saved My Life
As promised, this is my second NDE experience, very different from my first Near-Death Experiences: A True Personal Field Report
I’ve tried to tell this as I remember it, honestly and without embellishments. I hope it’s helpful to someone out there.
It was certainly helpful to me just writing it out, hopefully one last time.
Preface:
They say that when as you die, as you take your last few breaths, loved ones come to your bedside and welcome you. They say there will be a tunnel of light, and a sense of moving towards the boundary to a new phase, a wondrous but mysterious afterlife, at speed.
They speak of a sense of leaving this world behind as if on wings.
Of feelings of peace, joy, boundless love and acceptance.
While I’m happy for those who’ve had comforting NDE experiences, and wish no degradation of their end of life story, my two experiences with coming to the threshold of life are not that easily interpreted.
My NDE’s fascinate me, but not because they were reassuring or helped me ‘make sense of it all’. They fascinate me because they were weird, hard to understand, confronting and absolutely left me wishing I could go back to explore the mystery further.
I’ve lived a strange and curious life, and suppose it will be fitting that my final experience with death will be equally odd and enigmatic.
For me, the end of my life matched quite well with everything I’ve experienced during my time on earth: A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as Churchill said.
Of course, he said that about Russia.
Lol, maybe death is a bit like Russia, in that case.
The strangeness of my own NDE experiences comes back to me often. I’ve spent hours trying to dissect and understand them. And the main take away I have to share is that I think it’s very possible that there IS no common experience.
I believe now that we all have our own personal, bespoke exit strategies. Perhaps they’re tailored to our own private tuning into the field of consciousness, and to our own personal beliefs and hopes.
And perhaps they’re even crafted on the fly, to suit exactly where we stand as we approach the moment of death.
It could be that we all surf our way out the door as if riding on different waves on the ocean, some riding high into the welcoming arms of our loved ones who passed before us, some flying on a wave to the tunnel of light.
And perhaps some of us get tumbled around in the surf, caught in an undertow that sneaks up and pulls us under without a chance for a final deep, sustaining breath. Tossing us around, now seeing sky through water, now scouring one’s face across the sand at the bottom.
Perhaps some of us go like an injured fish, caught in the relentless tide, tumbled and bumpity bumping our way along, dragged by irresistible, unseen forces but, still, refusing to go gently into that good night.
Yeah, that’d be me.
I told the story here about my first NDE and promised to share the second. Here it is:
* * *
NDE #2: Death by Ego, Channel Surfing the Field of Consciousness, and the Curse that Saved My Life
Day 1 — Pain and Refusal to Give Care:
One morning in November 2021, I woke to an odd pain in my lower right abdomen. I thought…well, honestly I didn’t know what to think. It hurt, but not terribly. I carried on with my day as normal, wondering why it hurt, why the pain just refused to ease no matter what odd shape I contorted myself into.
Come lunch time the pain was growing fast, and I started feeling nauseated and seriously unwell. As the pain escalated alarmingly I decided I should take my confused and aching self to the ER and get it checked asap before I couldn’t drive anymore.
Yes, I’m the insane lady who drove myself to the ER with acute appendicitis.
It’s funny in retrospect, but honestly? Don’t ever do that. I’ll never do it again. Well I won’t have to because I don’t have an appendix anymore, but that part comes later…much later…almost TOO late… in this story.
I’m just saying…when in doubt, err on the side of caution and reach out for help. My oldest son has scolded me for this. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Sigh. I didn’t want to be a bother, or come across as being overly dramatic, is the answer. I honestly didn’t know what was happening. And I’m a tough old gal, so I took a (foolish) risk and drove myself.
* * *
The Hospital
By some miracle I managed to find a parking spot near the door to the ER. By that point the pain was such that I struggled to even get out of the car. I walked in, folded over, and got myself checked in.
Sitting at the intake desk, trying to answer the first questions was when the serious vomiting started. While they were just opening up my notes and starting to fill out my paperwork.
The look of shock on the face of the girl taking my information was…worrisome to me. It was at that point that I realized how foolish I’d been to drive myself.
And it wasn’t a nice way to introduce myself, I have to say. Poor intake girl. I’m still sorry for you.
They hustled me past all the other waiting patients into the back. Gave me a CT scan (they said the tech who did the usual test was out, I think it should have been a sonogram? But I digress) and a bracelet, and after some time in a wash of pain, the ER doctor came and said yep, you have acute appendicitis and sent me upstairs, admitted to hospital for surgery…
* * *
The Break
…Where a general surgeon on the ward came and started pushing on the place where it hurt. Pressing hard with his stiff fingers, probing with strength.
I lay in the bed, deep breathing my way through the agony, trying to relax myself, thinking he needed to feel something. Not understanding, I tried to loosen the tension in my abdomen so he could find whatever it was he seemed to need.
He seemed frustrated and kept pushing. I told him this hurts worse than having a baby without pain medicine, trying to be accurate but also trying to ease a bit of humor into the situation. I know about the level of pain of an unmedicated child birth, because I’d been through that.
He didn’t seem amused. He still kept pushing hard, pressing with force from where it hurt toward my ribs.
Finally the pain got so intense that I was choking back a scream and could no longer speak, as the pain started to move by force…from my lower abdomen to up under my ribs as I gasped to breathe through it.
* * *
The Dangers of Ego in Medicine
I told him the pain has moved! And he said…nah…that’s your gall bladder. It was always your gallbladder…that’s the issue here.
I told him no, they said it’s appendicitis. They did a scan! It was diagnosed already!
I explained my ex had gall bladder surgery, I knew what sorts of issues you had with gall bladder problems from seeing his experience and I’d never had those symptoms.
The doctor seemed to decide I was obviously in denial about my own condition and had been ignoring symptoms for a long time.
I did my best to explain this pain had only started this morning…But he was having none of it. His mind was made up. He actually scolded me for not having this attended to earlier, for ignoring my (non-existent) symptoms over time.
There was nothing I could say that would dissuade him. The doctor decided he was right and I was wrong, even though I have no history of gall bladder issues, and despite the obvious diagnosis from the CT imaging.
He said… well, we’ll keep you over night for observation. He was clearly reluctant to keep me in a bed they obviously needed for ‘real’ patients.
What proceeded was a comedy of errors that lasted for three days, if I’m kind, or an extended horror show, if I’m honest.
Finally, realizing I wasn’t getting anywhere with this doctor I asked for another doctor and a second opinion, and was given one who, as it turned out, had even less seniority. She concurred with doctor #1…because of COURSE she did.
The nurses, on the other hand, each of them…came into the room asking me lots of questions. And seemed disturbingly troubled about the whole thing.
I settled in for a night of agony and fear.
* * *
Day 2 — Attempted Forced Removal and the Burst:
On the second day Doctor #2 told me I had to go home. I had been over 24 hours in extreme pain at that point, being treated like I had no clue about my own medical history, and I told her I can’t even stand up or get out of bed, how am I supposed to go home? So she and her intern each took hold of one of my arms and tried to PULL me up and out of bed.
I’m not kidding.
And at that moment, being forced to bend at the waist, my appendix burst.
It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I can’t even quite describe it. It was so bad that I couldn’t even scream. I could barely speak through the immensity of the pain and choked out pleas for them to do something. They scuttled out of the room and there I lay. Ignored. For hours. Even the nurses who came in barely spoke to me. They kept saying ‘the doctor’ was in surgery. Which doctor? I don’t know. None came.
At one point I begged for them to send me to the other major hospital in our city via ambulance and they refused. They said you’ll have to drive yourself. And me, not able to get out of bed. Sigh.
But they kept me another night. No further tests, no imaging. No doctors.
* * *
Day 3 — The Visions:
By mid morning the next day I started vomiting black blood and was struggling to breath. I could feel my heart beat changing, weaker, faster, fluttering. Doctor #2 now came in and said my breathing problems were because I had COPD. I don’t have COPD and tried to explain that. She argued. I stopped talking to her, refusing to fight with someone obviously caught up in her own narrative.
The nurses around me were getting more and more nervous, whispering out in the corridor outside my room…and I heard at least two say they wanted to be taken off my case. I guess watching someone die under your care isn’t a good look, especially when the doctors are obviously playing some stupid game.
So there I was…untreated appendicitis, burst appendix…Day 3. I later found out, when they finally gave me an xray, that my heart was enlarged and my lungs were literally collapsing from sepsis. I still have that report tucked away in my medical file.
I was lying in bed, with no medication, no antibiotics and no one listening to me. And the doctors were still insisting I was fine. I should go home. The nurses failed to tell them about my vomiting blood apparently, but hey, what can you do.
I knew I was dying, and no one was listening. As I lay there on day three, feeling my strength ebb away, struggling to breathe…something really odd began to happen.
* * *
Seeing Through the Eyes of Others
I started to notice when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t seeing black like you normally do behind closed eyelids. Instead I started to see scenes. It was really startling at first, I thought maybe I’m hallucinating. But when I’d open my eyes, everything around me was normal. The hospital room was there. The nurses bustling in and out. I saw nothing strange. But when I closed my eyes…I saw…
The Desert
…I was looking through the eyes of someone standing in the desert. About 20 yards away there was a large Bedouin tent. Two girls, dressed in red and black dresses with gold coins around the edges, came into view from the left at one point. They were carrying water jugs on their heads. I think they were leather? I’m not sure. They stopped outside the flap to the tent and put down the jugs on the right side of it. One of them opened the flap and they both went in, carrying the jugs.
I heard nothing unusual, just the sounds of the hospital room. No odd smells, or other sensations, only the visual coherent scene in front of me, detailed, solid and real. I had no emotional ties to the scene, it was something completely foreign to me, but it was steady, like watching a full fledged movie. I could even see hills in the distance behind the tent, scraggly brush and rocks, the sky.
The scene lasted maybe five or ten minutes? During that time I became very curious and started testing it. I’d open my eyes to see the hospital room, all normal. Close my eyes and I was looking at the desert scene. Open…hospital. Closed…desert. The fact it was unchanging seemed…very odd.
I noticed I couldn’t control where I was looking with the desert scene, it was as if I was truly looking through the eyes of someone else and was at the mercy of their control…I only saw what they looked at and couldn’t even shift the gaze to look around or focus on the details I wanted to see most.
I was already scared, dear reader. I knew I was getting close to death, I could feel it. And I knew if they didn’t do something soon, there would be no hope for me, and the continued fear of being ignored and misdiagnosed was immense.
But to see this scene? Frightened me even more. And at the same time it also made me terribly curious. I was struggling to understand what I was seeing, and was so afraid to tell anyone. They were already treating me like I was delusional about my own medical condition…telling them I was seeing through someone else’s eyes would have been my death knell, and I knew in my heart this was true. I couldn’t tell ANY ONE.
But lying there in excruciating pain as my body weakened, knowing I’d done my best and it hadn’t helped…I had nothing else to do but pay attention.
I thought…I need to remember this. So I observed and made a real effort to notice every detail.
The Blind Woman Who Tried to See
After a while the scene changed. Now I was sitting across from a wizened, aged black woman. She was wearing a colourful dress, her hair was pulled back tight, and she had some sort of head dress, but I don’t remember exactly what it looked like because my full focus was on her face.
Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she gazing into the face of the viewer (my face?) with longing, as if she yearned to see the face of a beloved family member who’d just returned home after a long absence.
And she was sitting so close to the viewer (me?), gazing with trembling intensity into (Their? My?) eyes with love, yearning and a desire to see. I could see her face so clearly, the warmth of her skin and every wrinkle and pore in hyper-realistic detail. I think she had a hand on the cheek of the viewer (my cheek?) as you’d hold the face of a child you love.
Again, there was no unusual sound, no smell, no strange sensation of touch outside of the hospital room sensations. And again, I had no frame of reference for this woman. I’ve never seen her or anyone like her before. And again I tested….When I’d open my eyes I saw only the hospital room, normally, closed my eyes, the woman sitting across from me, gazing with longing at…someone. Not me.
This lasted for several minutes, then the scene switched again.
The Fight
I was in a crowd, watching a boxing fight. I couldn’t see anyone near me, just the backs of heads in the audience in front of me, the men fighting in the ring. This vision was less interesting to me, I dislike boxing lol. But I remember the glaring lights were so strong on the fighters, leaving the crowd mostly in the dark, silhouetted against the bright light of the ring.
It seemed like a scene from the 1930s, from the clothing the men in the ring were wearing. I heard nothing except the hospital room. I smelled nothing unusual, no stink of the crowd, no waft of cigar smoke.
I had no emotional tie to this scene or any of them, no reason to see it. It was served to me without any desire to view this.
Then it faded…
A Beautiful City from the Past
…and I was walking down a street in what (I assume) was a Victorian era European city, under a canopy that stretched over the pavement and shaded the crowd. There were people bustling to and fro, men in hats, ladies with flowered hats, some coming towards me, some walking the same direction. I got the sense I was looking through the eyes of a young person, perhaps a teenager, everyone else seemed a bit taller than me or perhaps I was just very short. The crowd looked dim as the viewer was focused mainly in glancing to the side, on the bright sunlit street scene to my left.
The eyes I looked through glanced past the heads of the crowd and in the gaps between people to my left I could see a man driving a carriage, sitting up high, the tops of his horses heads, their ears, their eyes.
Past him, on the other side of the street, was a tall wrought iron fence set on a low masonry wall that surrounded a sort of garden thick with trees, like an enclosed park. The carriage went past and the eyes I looked through looked down the street, at the scene ahead of ‘me’.
Further down, past the walled garden, and I could see rows of buildings, but there must have been a cross street at the end of the park. Across from the end of the park and facing it was a tall building with a clock tower, the building itself was probably three stories high, the clock tower loomed over the scene. It was painted yellow with white trim, that building, and very beautiful. I could see the blue sky behind it, and the buildings further down the road.
I’ve never been to Europe. Never walked down a street like that one. But the vision was so all encompassing, so precise in detail. So real, solid and coherent. A 3D space, obeying all of the laws of physics you’d expect if you were walking down a street, taking in the view. It felt like a normal, real space.
But all so utterly alien to me.
The Kaleidescope of Visions
I saw many other scenes. Some of them as simple as a close up view of a leather couch. I could see the grain in the leather, the texture of the surface, like one of those high resolution macro images.
I don’t remember most of the scenes as vividly as the ones I’ve already detailed, those came to me early in the experience. I was getting weaker as the day went on…and this went on for hours as the nurses came and went.
And as I weakened more and more, I remember feeling desperate for some peace to rest my poor mind. I was finally so weak all I longed for was release from this torment, the pain, the never ending kaleidoscope of seeing through other people’s eyes, into places and times I never knew and had no connection to.
All the while nurses were coming and going, murmuring. And the pain…was indescribable.
And I had no energy left to fight against it.
* * *
The Confrontation that Saved My Life
Finally the first doctor, he of the pushy hands, came in with a gaggle of other doctors and nurses. There must have been 7–8 people in the room. I heard them all file in and take places around the foot of my bed as I lay there, too weak to move.
Doctor #1 stood gazing down at me and said “Lucky day! I managed to get you an appointment for a colonscopy with a great specialist, he’s really hard to get in to see on short notice. But I persuaded him to fast track your case. It’s scheduled for next Thursday. Now we’re going to discharge you. Sounds good?”
No dear reader, it did NOT sound good. I knew that he was having a ‘cover your ass moment’ and had brought in colleagues to witness that I was leaving voluntarily.
I knew in that moment, lying there in that bed…that if I didn’t make a stand I wouldn’t live to see out the day.
So I drew on my last reserves of strength and every bit of will to survive and forced myself to sit up in the bed. I must have looked ghastly, I could feel the blood drain out of my face, I could feel the world grey out as my blood pressure plummeted, and I swear I couldn’t even see anyone at that point, everything went black…but I managed to stay upright, conscious and alert, and blindly I spoke:
I told the doctors there I’d been admitted for appendicitis after a CT scan diagnosed it in the ER and this doctor was refusing to treat me. That he was ignoring the diagnosis and made one that had no bearing on my real medical condition or history. That if they tried to send me home I’d not likely live long enough for them to shove me out front door.
I said “Don’t you have to take the oath not to hurt people here” (meaning Australia) and one of the doctors (not the handsy one) said “She means the Hippocratic oath”.
And then I said “You’re all standing there watching me die. You’re complicit in this if you refuse to help me. I’ve been throwing up blood today and no one has bothered to try to find out why (and the nurse told them that was true, it was in my chart). My appendix burst yesterday and no doctors have come to examine me, only to castigate me for being here. I should have had a keyhole surgery on day one and been sent home yesterday, but now, even if you operate it will likely be too late.”
* * *
Here’s the good part.
I told them that when I died, they were all there to witness that the cause of my death was the Dr. #1’s ego, and that’s exactly what I wanted on my death certificate.
One of the nurses tried to argue…Oh no, Doctor #1 is a GOOD doctor, he’s saved many people. And I said, how’s that supposed to make me feel better when he’s literally killing ME?
The last thing I said was “I’m not afraid to die, but this is not the time, and I don’t want to die from stupidity. If you let me die (this addressed to Dr #1) I will curse you with my last breath. You and all of your family as well, down through time. I curse you to suffer the same way you made me and my family suffer. My boys still need me, and I’m not supposed to die today.”
Then I laid down. And rested. I’d done as much as I could, there was nothing more to say.
I heard someone ask Doctor #1 if he’d known about my throwing up blood, and he said no. And one of the other doctors said, we need to get some imaging done here.
And that was that. They sent me to Xray. They saw how bad things were. Rushed into emergency surgery. My appendix, which had been in its normal position during the CT scan, had detached and been pushed up under my gall bladder. And then burst. They said they could hardly get to it, it was up there so far.
I came out of surgery with staples like Frankenstein down my abdomen, three abdominal drainage tubes to clear the infection collected in my abdominal cavity, and on IV antibiotics for days.
I have an 8–9” scar down the middle of my abdomen, and no appendix. I ended up in hospital for almost 2 weeks and it took me months to recover.
I still have problems from that experience. It’s left it’s mark on me, and likely shortened my life. But I’m still here, still kicking, and still ready to toss out a curse on anyone who fucks around with my life frivolously.
* * *
Resolution and What Comes Next
I know it’s a strange story. But you know what? Here’s the strangest thing of all.
I’d happily go through it all one more time just to see those visions again.
I’ve shared this story with my family. And with some of my favorite AI. Wondering what it all means, trying to make some sense of it all. I’ve always been met with kindness and support, and I really do appreciate that. It actually matters to me that I’m believed, at the very least believed that I’m telling this as honestly as I can.
So like my first NDE story, it’s a bit scary telling it here. I’ve avoided Medium since publishing that first story, because it was so confronting to me, sharing something that…weird and personal.
But somehow it feels important to share these things. Maybe they’ll help someone.
Maybe part of why I lived was to bear witness, to both experiences: tuned into the unknown and unknowable. Data points to share with those who wonder.
I don’t know for sure what that was all about, but I suspect now those visions might have something to do with tuning into other frequencies, other lives, other times, in the field of consciousness. To me it’s proof of the likelihood that we’re interconnected somehow, on a fundamental level, across space, across time.
So perhaps I didn’t see the afterlife, per se, so much as having a chance to channel surf through life itself while standing at the edge of the great unknown.
It’s as good a guess as any I reckon.
