From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
We are happy to have with us on roundtrip death today, Peter Fanel.
Good morning, Peter.
Good morning, how are you doing, Eric?
I'm great, how are you?
Doing well, doing very well.
Remind me, where do you live?
I'm right outside of Tampa, Florida.
OK, well, that's a beautiful part of the world.
Hey, before we get started in your near death experience, which is what we're here for,
our audience wants to get to know Peter just a little bit.
Who are you?
What are you about?
I am your average Joe.
I worked construction.
I did a short tour in the military years ago.
I drank, I partied, I did competition barbecue.
I've had failed marriages.
I've just an average guy.
You were talking past tense on some of these things.
Is that because you've put that life behind you and you're a different person now?
Since my near death experience, that that person seems to be the one who died in the hospital.
And this new person who's come out, I'm still kind of discovering.
Well, let's get back there.
How long ago was this that you were in the hospital and what was it for?
It was all of July and most of August of 2021.
It was seven and a half weeks.
I went in for what was supposed to be a routine colon resection.
They found a polyp that couldn't be removed in the colonoscopy and they suggested surgery.
So I went for it and it failed.
It almost killed me.
So what happened?
I mean, did the doctor just forget?
Did he nick something?
Did he or she forget to close it upright or what happened?
Well, the reconnection, once they do the colon resection, the reconnection is called anasmosis.
That portion failed.
The reconnection failed.
For three days, I was in the hospital doing normal recovery and he failed to recognize
it even though the nurses did.
And he discharged me on the third day with a leaking colon.
And how were you feeling?
Did you know you weren't getting better?
I didn't, but I kind of, you know, I just thought it was surgical stuff, but my friends,
families and the nurses all recognized something was going wrong.
You know, the first day I was begging for food.
I was ready to eat again.
And the second day about midday, that fell off.
I didn't want anything to do with food.
And by the third day, I was delusional.
I was seeing Hollywood movie stars walking through the hallways and I'm not, I'm not
a starhound.
I'm not one of those people.
Never was.
That sounds crazy that they would send you home at that point.
That's one of the failures of the medical system.
Dr. Fortuni did not want to admit any type of incompetence, failures, whatever you want
to call it.
His ego would not allow that to happen.
So even though nurses told him I needed a belly scan before I left, they didn't do it.
And I'm guessing that speaking of medical system, that on this kind of routine surgery,
the insurance company says, Oh, three days in the hospital, time to go home.
Pretty much.
And some, there's some kind of a payment system in there that the doctors, I don't know what
it is.
I don't know.
I don't want to know what it is because it's grotesque.
It almost killed me.
But it forces the doctors in the hospitals to get you out or there's some type of a,
I don't know if it's like a ding against their record or they don't get paid beyond
that or whatever it is.
All right.
Well, let's move ahead.
So you get home.
Do you start getting better?
Do you get worse?
I was getting worse every day.
I came home.
I don't remember the majority of my four days at home.
The leaking colon just kept leaking and my girlfriend called the doctor's office every
day and every day they told her it was, I was being lazy.
I was being a baby.
I wasn't getting up and moving around enough.
It was trapped air.
It was every excuse they could possibly give and it was all over the phone.
There was no examination.
It was all advice over the medical advice over the phone.
And by the fourth day, I mean, I was crawling.
I couldn't walk.
I was crawling and I went in to use the bathroom and I vomited feces.
I was on the toilet and I leaned over into the bathtub and my system turned into a reverse
and I vomited feces.
At that point, I got my girlfriend out of bed and I said, it's time to go to the hospital.
I'm dying.
Yeah, you are really sick at that point.
Okay.
So you get back to the hospital and then what happens?
We go into the emergency room.
Dr. Fratini was doing surgeries again that day and he took me in and completely opened
my belly.
And when he opened my belly, he cut my duodenum.
So it created internal bleeding inside of all this sepsis.
I heard the colon resected more of my small intestine, my large intestine.
So I'm pretty much without an ascending colon at this point.
Then he closed me back up and I put me back in the room.
And again, on the third day, he was trying to discharge me.
One of the nurses came into the room and said that he was going to kill me, that my girlfriend
needed to go get help.
She went and got an administrator and within 15 minutes of him trying to discharge me,
I'm being wheeled into the intensive care unit where they're installing a drain on my
side and they had drained me of six and a half liters of septic fluid.
VCs, when they cut me open, it sprayed all over the floor.
So I'm sure I had more inside of me than the six and a half they caught.
And this man was just trying to discharge me 15 minutes earlier.
Wow.
That's unbelievable.
But we're not here to slam on the medical system.
Let's talk about your near death experience.
Does this happen while you're in the ICU?
Yes, it did.
Most of my time in the ICU, the first several days, I don't have a recollection of.
It was during the height of COVID and it was another spike that happened in the summer
of 2021.
So the ICU started filling up again.
And I went from what I guess was a regular room where they could isolate me to a curtain
room right outside the nurses station.
They were isolating all the COVID patients in the regular rooms because they could close
the doors, seal them up.
While I'm sitting outside of the nurses station in this, what I thought was a hallway, it
was a curtain room, is when my near death experience happened.
All right.
I want every detail of it.
What happened first?
I was laying there in the bed and I was hallucinating, whether it was the sepsis, the fever, the
medication, I'm not certain, but I mean, I was, I was laying there and the ICU turned
into what I call a steampunk construction site.
For those that don't know the term steampunk, describe that a little bit more.
It was heavy copper and brass tubing.
It was ornate.
It was gothic.
It was strange.
It was very, very strange.
And I got to the point where I mistook one of the nurses for a welder.
And I told another nurse, hey, your boyfriend can get a better job.
He's a great welder, you know, it's, there was, the hallucinations were intense.
But beyond that, when the nurses station was in this state of steampunk construction, everything
got really, really dark.
There was a doorway behind the nurses station and it was black.
And I felt myself leave my body and I got into this doorway and I could feel that I
could sense the hospital behind me, the lights, the commotion, the people.
And I just stepped through this doorway into the darkness.
And I was standing on top of a stone wall, like a castle wall.
And I proceeded out and there was a being there.
I don't know who it was or what it was, whether it was my mother, my father, you know, a guardian
angel, I have no concept of that.
We were staring over this dark monotone sepia type of area.
The only thing I can imagine it was was purgatory.
It wasn't hell.
It wasn't life.
It was the absence of life.
Now, let me, let me just interject here.
You were having hallucinations.
How do you know this wasn't just one of those?
I don't.
That's why this, this is a near death experience.
I know that my fevers were 105, 106.
I was diagnosed with E. Coli sepsis and acute septic shock.
Nobody expected me to survive this.
Nobody not even, not even the physicians expected me to survive this.
And when I did, they got scared.
So this is, this is truly a near death experience.
I don't say I crossed over into something and I got downloaded with information that
I shouldn't have.
Okay.
All right.
So you're back in this, what you describe as a purgatory kind of place.
What's going on there?
What do you see?
What's happening?
I feel everybody's pain.
There's a lot of souls there that are racing about some are, some are having fun, being
malicious.
Some are in pain.
They're crying out.
They're suffering.
The sense that I got from that was suicides, some drug addictions, people that are addicted
to this existence, whether it be sex, whether it be drugs, whether it be alcohol or just
being a malicious person.
If they're addicted to that, they're held in this area until they can get recycled.
It's like a big recycling process center for souls.
It was, it was intense.
It was intense.
Beyond that, beyond this area, I could see a light, you know, and I wouldn't call it
heaven and harp and angels and all of that, but I got a glimpse into it.
And what I saw was a functioning, clean, happy existence, a society that didn't have the
pain and anguish that we have here.
So were you able to go to that light and see more or did you just have the perception
of what was happening there?
The perception of what was happening.
I wasn't, I wasn't allowed to go there.
I took this being, all right, my father, I'm a survivor of suicide.
My father chose to end his life when I was 11 years old.
And at that time, you know, it kind of instilled in me an exit option.
You know, my father could do this.
I could do this.
If life got too tough, I could opt out.
You know, it made it an option.
And I took my time in purgatory as a warning because, you know, with that option, I've
attempted it a couple of times in my life when things got rough and I'm still here.
And had I not had the warning of purgatory and the information download that I did receive,
I might have not, I might not be here now.
Because the last two years of my life have been excruciating.
So was there anything else that you saw there?
Did the beam communicate anything to you?
What that information download to all right, well, like, but the guy I was before was a
drinker and a smoker.
I mean, I was a heavy drinker.
I drank 12 pack a day, five, six days a week, you know, I'd smoke three packs of cigarettes.
I had an onion allergy.
You know, I did the barbecue circuit.
I, I was basically what most people would call a redneck.
That was all taken away from me.
That was removed from my system.
And the warning was put into my mind of this is where you're going to end up if it doesn't
change.
And it's not even an addiction that was removed from me.
It was just the whole system, the social interactions that I had with that some of the friends that
I had during that time, that person died in the hospital and this person emerged.
Do you remember coming back into your body?
I do.
I believe us at the time I was tearing, I think I was tearing out my IVs.
I was doing a grand wall seizure freaking out.
One of the nurses was the one who tied me down when she did tie me down.
She was praying over me, but she wasn't praying over me for me to gain peace or be healthy.
She was praying that she had the strength not to deal to deal with me to, you know, it
was a malicious prayer.
And I sensed that I witnessed that coming back in.
And when I came back to consciousness, I was screaming.
I told this woman, I will cut your ugly effing head off, put it on a stake and post it outside
of my house so everybody can see what it be you are.
I attacked her.
I attacked her religion because the way she was using it.
I mean, when I time in the ICU after that, I had other nurses that prayed over me and
that brought me peace.
But this woman, I could sense her malice.
What is a malicious prayer?
It was a prayer of vengeance.
It wasn't a prayer of peace.
It wasn't a prayer of healing.
It was, Lord, calm this guy down before I have to do so.
It was that type of a thing.
It was anger.
Yeah.
And selfishness, it sounds like.
Yes.
More worried about herself.
So you've been through a lot of dark things and it makes me wonder if, um, if maybe that's
why your experience on the other side was sort of a dark one, that's something you can
relate to in your life.
And it knew, you know, it was for a good thing, right?
It helped you make some good changes in your life.
Absolutely.
But it had to be a dark place to do it.
Yeah.
I accept the warning for what it is.
I know who I was and I still figured out who I'm going to be.
So was there anything else in that warning that you can remember?
Uh, not, not so much.
I think that, I mean, that pretty much altered my life 180 degrees.
The drinking, I haven't had a beer in two years.
I haven't had a cigarette in two years.
I have no desire to be a part of that life anymore.
I still have friends from that life and those are true friends, but the acquaintances and
the associates and the fights and the drama, I'm good not having anymore.
My onion allergy was removed from me.
And that's, I take that as like the final sign, like, okay, this is real.
This isn't just the medical condition and fear dictating, but I broke out into hives
when I ate onions, like from head to toe for hours and it was excruciating.
I can eat all the onion I want now.
And it's the strangest thing being back on this side with all of that being removed from
my world.
So we've heard about some of the physical changes that you went through.
Well, much more than physical when we're talking, quitting smoking, quitting drinking, but
that had effects on your physical body.
Was that really difficult to deal with?
I'm going to call it withdrawal symptoms or was it because you were in the hospital and
dealing with all these other things anyway?
It was just sort of a fresh rebirth when you got home.
It was more of a fresh rebirth.
I mean, even when I was drinking and smoking like that, I could go two or three days without
beer.
I mean, and I would intentionally do that.
I'd say, no, I'm taking, I'm taking two days off, you know, just, just to give my system
a break.
And I never had DTs, I never had the vomiting or, you know, the physical symptoms of withdrawal.
I would get anxiety.
Like if I knew I was going out drinking and I wasn't going to the bar by five o'clock,
I would get anxious, you know, that was, okay, we're going drinking, let's go do this.
But if I wasn't, I could handle it.
So I never had the detox stuff.
It was just a rebirth.
Like you said, a rebirth and trying to figure, trying to walk, learn how to walk again, you
know?
Yeah.
How did you interpret all of this?
Did it take some time to go, oh, wow, my experience means XYZ.
And I'm going to change my life purposely because of these things.
Or was it much more of a natural, hey, that happened.
Now this is happening.
No, it was hard.
When I came out of the hospital at the end of August, I had to learn how to eat again.
I couldn't process whole meats.
Being a barbecue guy, that was traumatic.
You know, I've been dealing with PTSD.
For a year and a half, I sat in my office every morning and cried for absolutely no reason.
The tears and the pain, the anxiety of it all, I would just cry.
At some point during that year and a half, I was investigating therapies, different types
of therapies.
And a lot of people suggested to me ketamine therapy.
Okay, I understand that.
But with my situation, any type of a clinical environment just enraged me.
I mean, I couldn't talk to my insurance company on the phone when they call to solicit a new
plan.
I'd cuss those people out and then apologize and say, look, it's not you.
You're just an employee of this corporation who destroyed my life.
You know, I want your bosses to hear this.
I want the doctors to know this.
You know, and the people on the phone were generally kind about it.
And I tried to make it as nice as possible.
But PTSD is real, even if it's medically induced.
So these things were triggers that set off that trauma.
Oh, big time.
Big time.
So how did you get through that?
What did you do?
I finally landed on a therapy for ayahuasca.
And I went and I was called.
I found this place.
It was Solterra in Terrapoto, Peru.
And as soon as I saw it, I knew this is where I had it.
I had to go.
This was my calling.
And at the time, it was the beginning of 2023, January.
There was a lot of civil unrest in Peru.
So I decided against that location and I opted for another one in Costa Rica, Playa Blanca.
And it was the calling is real.
You know, I felt it.
I'm not saying this is what's going to work for everybody else.
I'm not saying that this is the cure all magic button to fix it because it's not.
It's a tool in an arsenal that you can utilize to rebuild your life.
And it worked for me.
And I did the Playa Blanca location and I got the head start on it that I needed.
That was in May of 2023.
And in the beginning of June of 2023, I got a notice that Terrapoto had openings.
And I finally answered the calling to that location.
I got the healing that I needed.
I got the start in Costa Rica and I got the completion for now in Peru.
So this is extremely new because we're recording this the end of June of 2023.
So you just barely went through all this and the results are really good so far.
And we're not here to take any kind of deep dive on ayahuasca or ketamine or anything else.
But I'm glad you found something that helped you.
That's what matters.
Oh, yeah.
And like I said, I mean, the PTSD is real.
It's how people experience it or where they get their trauma from is going to lead them
in a direction.
Whether it be turns that they turn to God and the church bless them.
That's what works for them.
If they turn to psychotherapy, God bless them.
That's what works for them.
But my calling was to this medication in the ancient ways and it worked for me.
Hey, tell us about the new Peter.
You mentioned things you gave up.
What have you adopted?
What's the new you?
Healthy eating habits.
I haven't had pork in probably a year.
You know, whole red meat.
I just had a little bit the other day and it's okay.
But for the most part, I'm basically a pescatarian.
I, I just started eating poultry again.
But for the last, I don't know, eight months, 10 months, it's been all fish, vegetables,
fruit, smoothies, a garden.
I had, I have 50 orchids that I take care of.
I meditate.
You know, the red neck ism is gone.
And we're not slamming on red necks.
No, not at all.
We're not saying that's a bad life lifestyle.
We love our red neck listeners out there.
But for you, you needed to take a different step, a different direction.
Right.
Okay.
And we're not slamming on barbecue either.
Cause I mean, I still know how to barbecue.
I still know how to build things.
I still know how to survive off the land.
If I have to, I was, I was in the military.
You know, I, that's always going to be part of who I am because how I was brought up,
but the negative portions of it, the toxic masculinity, the, the fighting, the rage, the
alcoholism, the misogyny, all that's been removed from me.
I have found in doing these interviews that quite a few people that have NDEs, their relationships
change a lot.
They get divorced or the girlfriend or boyfriend that they had in their life.
That changes a lot of people even change jobs.
Have you had some of those kinds of things happen?
Um, I've lost some friendships.
Um, my girlfriend is still with me.
She's been very, very tolerant.
Thank you, Heather.
She sounds like an angel, by the way, saving your life many times.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I, during my PTSD, I, I would fly off the handle for absolutely no reason.
And even during those episodes, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't control it.
And she, she got me through it.
She's still here with me.
So did you have a belief in God prior to, and how has that changed?
I'm more of a spiritualist.
I've had my bouts with religion and the people who portray themselves as leaders in
religion.
So my life pulled me out of that.
I, you know, I was brought up Christian.
I still have those core beliefs in my life, but I've been more of a agnostic for the last
many years of my life.
It's, and I'm still that way.
Very spiritual, very ground, very grounded now, but not so ceremonial about it.
I love to ask people.
How much fear of death did you have prior to this and how much fear of death do you
have now?
The fear of death before.
Yeah.
I mean, everybody has that.
It's the unknown.
It's the, the great beyond.
And it's human nature.
It's okay.
Right.
Now, not so much.
I have a good sense of what, what's going to happen to me.
I want to live for the first time in two years.
I want to live, you know, I'm, I want to leave a mark on this world that's positive instead
of what I was before.
How are you going to do that?
I'm doing these podcasts, sharing my stories, keeping people away from Dr. Fortuni.
Unfortunately, that man has a higher body count than most U S soldiers.
It's true, but it is what it is.
And I know that I've saved people's lives already with some of the stories that I've
told the reviews that I've left.
I've taken people out of his office and put them into a better situation.
I know that for a fact.
They've commented on, told me this.
So that makes me feel good helping people through their ayahuasca journeys.
I've had a couple of people that I've been in contact and they contacted me because
oh, I'm going to do this.
What was your experience?
Well, my experience was my personal experience.
You're going to have to deal with this on your own, but I'm here to talk you through
it if you need it.
You know, and I've lent support to people in that manner.
It just, it changed my outlook to a more positive and I'm really enjoying it.
So before we wrap up, let's expound on that just a little bit.
Here's somebody out there listening that's having a really rotten day and you said that
you used to feel like, ah, things got really tough.
I could always take my life and that was an option.
What's your message to someone that may be experiencing something really difficult today?
Don't give up.
There's hope.
You know, you can't make a permanent solution for a temporary problem.
Whatever you're going through will pass and there is help for what you're feeling no matter
what it is.
Peter, thank you very much.
You and I are going to talk some barbecue after we're done recording here like we did
the other day.
Absolutely.
But that's for somebody else's show.
So I'm not going to bore our listeners with that.
But anyway, thanks a ton, Peter, for being on.
I appreciate you.
I appreciate you, Eric.
Thanks for helping to get the stories out and I know this helps people.
Thanks again for listening and remember to share this podcast.
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Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.