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.
Welcome, welcome to Roundtrip Death, everybody, and a warm welcome to our special guest today,
Matt Hendrick, coming to us from the Denver, Colorado area.
Hey, Matt.
Hey, Eric.
How you doing?
Good.
It is good to see you.
How are you feeling today?
I'm doing good.
Good to see you too.
I don't know if people can tell, but let's get this out of the way.
You're in a wheelchair.
What happened about 30 years ago?
Yeah, I was in a pretty bad car accident when I was 21.
I was sleeping in the passenger side and I had the seat leaned all the way back and it
was one of those cars where you had to fasten the lap belt yourself.
You would shut the door and the shoulder belt would come on automatically and got in for
a ride.
I leaned the seat back and I was sleeping and I hadn't fastened the lap belt.
We got in a car accident and we hit something going about 25 to 30 miles an hour.
I came around the shoulder belt and it saved my life, but also broke my neck at the same
time.
I became a quadriplegic, C5, C6 quadriplegic.
Wow.
I know that makes life tough, but you have such a great attitude.
You're like my hero here.
The fact that you can do artwork, beautiful paintings really says something about you and
your resiliency.
Yeah, thank you.
I do a little bit of abstract type artwork.
Let me tell you first that I can move my shoulders and my biceps, but I have very little use,
probably hardly any at all, use of my triceps.
I have a little bit of wrist function, but no hand movement, no fingers.
The definition of quadriplegic is partial or full paralysis in all four limbs.
I have the partial paralysis.
I'll do my artwork.
I've come up with a technique where I can use my hands to do an abstract, colorful background.
Then I'll do mouth painting with the brush in my mouth as well.
I can then I'll switch and I'll do a portrait or some sort of more detailed picture, whatever
the subject of the picture.
I'll do it a little bit more detailed with the mouth painting.
It's like using your hand for me.
It's actually a little bit better because I can get my eyes right near the brush.
I don't know.
It's something to try if you haven't tried it.
I haven't tried it.
By the way, people can see your artwork, your book that we'll also talk a little bit about,
and a beautiful video about your mouth painting at Hendrickmedia.com.
I wish I had filmed your video.
That's very well done.
Is that the documentary?
Yeah, it's about two minutes long.
Yeah, it's done by the Denver Post.
I don't know who produced it, but if it was Denver Post, that's a nice job of filming
for some newspaper guys.
Yeah, they did good.
They actually had me on the front page that day and had my whole story on there.
It's pretty cool.
Well, is there anything else that you can tell us about you personally just so people
can get to know you?
Well, yeah.
I'm an author as well.
I like to work out.
I'm very active in the disabled community in Colorado.
I found that this injury, there's a lot of lemons involved, but there are some good days.
I try to send a message to people of some of the little things in life that seem so
horrible that they're not really that bad.
You can get over it.
I try to encourage people to have a good attitude.
I just try to be that way myself as an inspiration or role model, maybe, to encourage people
to not give up when things are rough and stuff like that.
Great attitude.
All right, let's jump right into the near-death experience.
I need to put an S on that because you've had four.
Yes, I've had four.
Yeah.
We're going to mostly talk about your last one, your most recent one, but I do want to
touch briefly on a couple of the first ones.
I think we should go back to 1991 when you had the car accident because this was your
first experience with a near-death experience.
Would you mind telling us a little bit about that?
Just briefly what happened in the accident.
You mentioned the seat belt thing, but what happened immediately after that?
Immediately after that, I woke up and people were knocking on the window and asking if
I was okay.
I blacked out quite a bit.
I have little slideshow, like video clips of what happened for the next, probably, month.
The next thing I remember, I'm being hoisted up into the helicopter for the flight for life.
Some other little memories of the hospital people wake up and I'm telling them I need
to get to class, get back to college, and do my homework and stuff.
They're basically telling me that I'm paralyzed and I go in and out of consciousness.
Then eventually, I got back to Colorado.
We had a medical jet bring me home.
I had a surgery to stabilize my neck.
It's a halo procedure, what they call it.
They don't really do those anymore.
And it's pretty horrific.
They put screws into your head, in the front, in your forehead, and in the back.
They put this contraption on you that you can't move your neck at all for eight weeks.
You have to move your eyes around like this to see stuff.
I've seen pictures of people with those on it.
It's just like a torture chamber device.
Yeah.
I can tell you it is.
It's really weird when they take it off and they unscrew it because they don't put you
under for that.
But you're under when they put it on.
You can hear the screws coming out.
It's pretty wild.
But I think it was during that surgery when I had my first experience.
It's the tunnel of light kind of thing.
Yeah.
Go ahead and start to give us some detail on that.
I just sort of came to it and lifted up this tunnel.
There's a white light at the top.
I could see three darker silhouettes up there.
It was like human voices.
They're encouraging me to relax and give up and just give up.
They would say, this is over.
This one's over.
It was very, very comforting.
That's one thing I remember like, whoa, this is better than anything I'd experienced in
reality.
I had a bunch of friends from high school and college visiting.
Right when the medical jet landed, they were all there and they were hanging around the
hospital to support me before this surgery.
And there was lots of girls from high school and college that had showed up.
I remember it meaning a lot to me that they actually had cared about me.
Some of them I thought didn't know I existed.
I went into that surgery and I remember trying to talk to the voices at the top of the tunnel
and say, I don't want to go.
Wait, hang on.
I don't want to go.
I've never seen how many women are coming to visit me.
I love it.
And they laughed.
They laughed so hard and I went right back down into my body.
That was my first experience.
So that was the beginning and end of it.
Pretty girl saved you.
I love that.
The second one was how many years later?
It was about 15 years later, I would say.
And this was also in a hospital stay.
Were you having surgery again or what happened?
I had a collapsed lung and I had a complication in the hospital where the chest tube clipped
an artery between my ribs and I started bleeding out, bleeding to death.
They did a code blue in the hospital and they brought the troops, everybody that was available.
They came and each person tried to revive me.
That one, as my blood pressure started going down, they were announcing the blood pressure
and I can remember it got pretty low.
It got as low as I am 60 for the high number.
I can't remember the lower number but as it was going down like that, I would see the
white plasma like this milky kind of strange white light and I could see people moving
around.
There was one nurse with some blue glasses and a ponytail and she was whipping her ponytail
around and it was making trails through the white.
Very bizarre and when they would come in real close to my face and say, are you okay?
I would see their whole face.
That was a little bit strange too.
Eventually they got one of the doctors, I think it was a doctor, had come in and she
got something into my neck and down into the like a catheter down into my heart area almost
and they pumped some stuff in there and I came back immediately.
But that one, the white and it was weird.
It was very calming.
I wasn't scared, I wasn't like, oh, I'm dying or anything like that.
So that was my second experience.
Some people in that kind of situation have told me that they found themselves out of
their body like up near the ceiling in the corner of the room and sort of watching what
was going on.
Was that happening to you or were you still in your body just looking up at people as things
were happening?
I was still in the body looking and looking up.
Okay.
All right, let's move on to number four because this is one that's more of the traditional
out of the body really went someplace.
So let's talk about this one.
This was just February of last year.
So it was much more recent and I know your memory is clear on this one.
Tell me what led up to this.
Yeah, that one, I was in the hospital for a bladder infection that had crossed the blood
barrier and became sepsis.
I was pretty sick.
They had me on some antibiotics for three days in the hospital.
And for me, it's really hard to do time in the hospital because I'm not at home with
my caregivers and people that help me roll around in bed or they can focus just on me.
When you're in the hospital, you have these nurses with like 40 or 80 people that they
have to worry about.
So they kind of leave you alone and I can't move my hands like I said earlier.
And I have to try to get them to do things the way I do it at home.
And one of the nurses there, so let me tell you too that I have a catheter for urine and
when you're a quadriplegic, they will do this procedure called a super pubic procedure
where they put a hole in your stomach right below your belly button.
And so you'll have a catheter coming out of that hole.
It goes into your bladder and that's how you manage your urine and bladder system when
you're in this condition.
So the nurse told me, I'm going to put this sticker on your leg and you're supposed to
put the catheter into the sticker so it doesn't get pulled basically.
And I'm kind of an old guy, old school guy and I don't use those.
I just put it, I put the catheter kind of up in my waistband to secure it.
And when I sleep, I just have it coming off the bed.
And I told her that's how I do it.
And she was like, okay.
But she went and did it anyway and put it on and I didn't know.
I went to, I asked them to roll me onto my left side in the middle of the night and they
turned me that way.
I'm thinking in my head, I don't need to check the catheter because it's going to be
covered off like I do at home.
I had rolled right on top of it and it kinked.
For me, that's, it can be really dangerous.
It causes another medical thing called autonomic dysreflexia that it's basically a pain response
when you have a spinal cord injury and you can't really, your body's trying to tell your
brain that there's something wrong, but the connection in your spinal cord is kind of
a little bit messed up.
So your blood pressure goes up and you can have, well, ultimately you just have a stroke
and die.
So that was happening.
But I was sleeping and in my, I guess it would be a dream.
I felt like I had to go to the bathroom real bad because it was kinked and my bladder was
filling up and I could tell that my head was pounding and I'm like, okay, I need to get
somebody in here to help.
But I didn't wake up.
Usually I would wake up in that situation.
And this time I kind of went into this, it was pretty cool actually.
All of a sudden I'm looking up at the sky and it's like purplish black, like a magenta,
just real vast sky, like, you know, nothing like that would be on earth.
And I was standing with the person that I couldn't really see, but I felt like I really
knew them well.
And we were waiting for the hawks to show up, which is interesting.
Not sure why.
We kept waiting and it's just an overall feeling of, you know, this is home, this is fantastic,
just comfortable.
Like when I talk about stuff like this, I like to tell people that I was in Hawaii once.
And the water was 85 degrees and I was underwater and I was like, this is so pleasant, you know.
That's the only thing I can really compare it to.
But it was better.
You know, it just feels real like you're supposed to be there.
It's comfortable.
And I could see often the distance while we were waiting for the hawks, I could see like
a city kind of in it.
It looked like geometric, like figure outlines and they were like purple, like fluorescent
purple.
And the background was sort of black and pinks and purples and almost like crystals.
It was very interesting, very, very cool looking.
And then the hawks showed up and it was like, they were like these big black, it was sort
of, it's very hard to describe.
They were kind of like a black circle, but the wings looked like almost like a windmill
kind of thing.
And they were kind of spinning around like in a clockwise motion and they were coming,
you know, and they went over the top of us.
It was nothing like a hawk that we're used to seeing here in our lives.
And then it kind of moved into where I was walking through a field of like, it was kind
of brownish tall grass.
And you know, there's like a little path.
And once again, this super comfortable feeling just was there.
You know, like this is, this is just awesome.
I don't really want to go back to my paralyzed body for sure.
I didn't want to, but I remember looking down and seeing these little insects on the grass
blades on the top.
And they got on my hand and they would look, they were kind of looking at me and it was
kind of like a little cartoonish looking insects.
And they, they looked at me and they made these little noises and I got the knowledge
or I don't know what happened.
They didn't talk or anything, but all of a sudden I knew that they were responsible for
making crop circles.
That's what I got from that.
Okay, hold on.
These, okay, something just blew my mind for a second.
So you got, you had some kind of communication that insects let you know they're the ones
that make the crop circles that we assume are from aliens or from people trying to play
tricks with us.
That's, yes, that's what I got from that.
All right.
Interesting.
Hey, before we move on, I want to ask you a couple of questions about some of the things
you've mentioned so far.
First of all, in what way did this feel different than a regular dream that you have when you
sleep?
Okay, that's, that's a great question.
Well my dreams when I sleep are always really fragmented.
They're very like something that's always real weird and not, you know, they're not
real linear.
They're kind of just you're dropped in this situation and something weird happens and
nothing makes sense.
And they're very short and I don't usually remember my dreams.
You know, it's always like, oh, that was a dream.
That was just a little piece of that dream.
This is like, this is a lot different.
More real.
It's very, you know, there's no like this last one we're talking about.
There's no like fogginess.
There's, it's very laniier.
It's just like your day would be in life, you know, where.
Does it seem more real than a dream?
Exactly, yeah.
Like you really were there.
Yeah, even more real than what we're doing here.
Well, I'm not sure how to take that.
Okay, you mentioned somebody was with you.
Can you give any idea who that was or what kind of being that was?
No, I don't.
But they were definitely either from there or they were, they had knowledge of that place
because they were the ones telling me about waiting for the hawks.
And, you know, I felt like I was kind of new.
You've had a year to think about the hawks.
That sounds so, it's just different.
It's just kind of bizarre.
Do you have you come up with any conclusions as to why hawks, were they symbolism of something
or what's the deal with hawks?
I really, I mean, I've seen hawks and eagles in the sky around here and I'm fascinated
with those.
But I don't know why they would pop, why that would have popped up in the NDE.
Did you feel like you were still in your paralyzed kind of state or you were free from that when
you were there?
Oh, definitely free from it.
Tell me about that.
Like, were you walking or were you, what do you remember about that?
Yeah, walking.
When I put my hand down, I was moving my hand.
I could kind of show you my hand here.
I can't move my fingers.
But in that world, I put my arm down and I could, you know, I was moved, the insects
were on my fingers and I was moving my hand around.
And I definitely was walking.
Have you been able to paint what you saw there?
No, I have not.
I haven't even thought about it until right this second when you just gave me the prompt
there.
Okay, I'm your muse for your next project.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't wait to see it.
And then one last thing that we're going to keep going with your story.
I love how you were trying to describe feeling comfortable.
I believe you mentioned the word home.
Dig a little deeper.
Why at all were you feeling comfortable means a lot of different things?
Yeah, exactly.
Just, you know, in how you feel like when the temperatures just right and you're like,
this is, you know, there's no wind.
There's, I guess it was, it was those kind of things just the, I don't, I really was
key in in on temperature and just how the body feels, you know, like, it almost felt
like there was nobody involved.
You know, there's no like, oh, my ankle hurts or you know, my, you know, there's no hunger,
no thirst.
I can't come up with anything other than, you know, I just kind of felt like I was home.
I was like kind of relieved that something was done.
I'm finally, finally back.
Okay.
Let's pick it up from the Hawks.
You said the Hawks finally arrived.
Yes.
Like two Hawks or 200 Hawks?
I think it was about three or four, but definitely didn't look like a hawk that you would think,
you know, here, one of the Raptor types.
What did it look like?
It was kind of like a black center and like, geez, like kind of like the thing behind you
there that, that's interesting.
Oh, the shipwheel?
Yeah, that shipwheel is kind of like how to center like that.
It's an antique shipwheel.
Interesting.
But the blades coming off of the center were more like curved, kind of like, like, like
a, like a futuristic high tech windmill kind of thing, like a fan.
And they were kind of spinning.
I guess they were animals, but not, I mean, they don't look like an animal that I've ever
seen.
What else did you see?
What happened next?
After I saw the insects, I remember continuing through that field on a path and there was,
there was a lot of people with me and we were in a line, a single file line and it kind of
curved around and there was a cave and it just kind of had a dark entrance and I couldn't
really see.
I was pretty far away.
I was in a line to get to this cave and everybody was very happy to be in that line and it was
just, it just had a feeling, a positive, like happy vibe, you know, like, okay, you know,
we're here.
There was, I felt like there were people there that I knew, but I can't tell you who they
were.
Fair enough.
Anything else?
That's pretty much where it ended.
After that, I woke up in my hospital bed and on my head it's just boom, boom, boom, pounding,
pounding, pounding from the autonomic dysreflexia.
It had gotten pretty bad.
When I'm in the hospital, they have like a little ball that they hang down kind of by
my face and I can, I can hit it with my hand like this.
It sets off a call button for them to come in and I set it off and they were like, well,
you know, we're busy feeding patients right now and you're going to have to wait.
You know, I was, and then I had to hit it again and I was like, you guys don't understand.
I need help immediately.
Get in here now.
And after I hit it the second time, they rushed in and took my blood pressure and it was 250,
260 over, I never remember the lower number, but you know, my normal blood pressure as a
quadriplegic is 85 over like 50.
You know, 250, 260 is way up there.
The head is pounding.
I'm about ready to have a stroke.
They rolled me over and the catheter got unkinked and the bag filled up immediately.
And then it filled up again after they had emptied it.
The night urine bag and that was definitely the cause.
And I started to slowly come back to normal.
But yeah, that was, that was the fourth one.
That's the last one I've had and I'm trying my best not to have another one.
Good idea.
So what have you learned from all this that you can share with people?
Well, I mean, I've learned that each time I really, I feel like it changes you.
You almost gain some abilities.
Like I've noticed psychic type stuff.
I've noticed a lot of that.
I noticed a lot of synchronicities in my life.
And I'm not sure if I would notice that otherwise.
These like, you know, people I meet are very similar to other people I've met over the
years.
Another thing, since I need so much help, I have a lot of caregivers.
I've had a lot of caregivers over these 33 years.
I'll be, I'll be starting my 34th year of being a quad in October.
So it's quite a long time and I've, you know, I've met tons and tons of people, different
kinds of people from every different country, every kind of person, every religion and race.
And you get to know them on a really personal level.
And there's a lot of like really bizarre synchronicities I've noticed between a couple of people.
Can you give me an example of what you mean by that?
Yeah, for sure.
Let's see, I can give you, let's see, it was in probably 2013.
I, I, well, and I hire all my own caregivers and I was given an insurance, an insurance
settlement.
So I manage all my own money and pay them.
I don't use any government stuff, which is nice, you know, I don't have any control.
I, I get to hire and work with the people I want.
I want to.
So it was probably 2013.
I hired a girl that I can just give you some of the things that I learned about her that
are similar to another.
So she basically, she's a massage therapist and she was a blonde, blonde girl with blue
eyes and she's from New Jersey.
And she was driving a black Jeep after I hired her.
Her name was Rachel and, you know, we got to know each other.
We worked together for two years.
Her dad was from New Jersey and he had a, he had a house in the mountain, in a mountain
town in Colorado.
She would go up there, you know, on holidays and 4th of July and stuff like that.
Anyway, so that's her and then I probably like, let's see, that had to be like 2017
when I met another lady through the same interview process and Rachel no longer had worked for
me.
And this, this lady drives up in a black Jeep and she gets out and I kind of watched to
see who's coming to my door to make sure that it's not, you know, so I make sure it's who
is supposed to be coming before I opened my door.
And she's walking up and she's got blonde hair and went, you know, she's got blue eyes.
I noticed when we're doing the interview and she tells me that she's from New Jersey.
We started working together and I learned that her dad has a house in the same mountain
town that Rachel's did.
And she's like, and, you know, he has a party on the 4th of July.
So if I have to work that day, it would be nice.
If you could try to have that covered.
And I'm sitting there going, is this real?
You know, and that's happened like two or three times.
I have some other stories about that.
I don't know what that is.
I talked to people about that, but there's never a clear thing.
And I don't know if that's connected to the NDE's or not, but I do notice that I see
things, you know, I start to match things up and see a lot of connections like that.
Interesting.
Before we wrap up, I just want to give you a little background here.
We have listeners from all over the world and there's a lot of turmoil out there right
now.
Right?
There's, there's wars, there's terrorists, there's natural disasters.
Sorry, I'm not trying to bring everybody down, but I would love to hear a message of hope
from you.
Brighten our day.
You are a good shining example.
What do you have to say to lift everybody today?
Eric, I would have to say, if you, if you think about what it would be like to have to live
in a wheelchair and not be able to move your hands, that's bad.
I've been able to overcome that.
And when I look at the world and the hatred and the divisive, the division that people
are trying to create over like really small things that I really, they don't matter.
Those problems that people fight about and, you know, they'll go to war and for the, just
their opinion, you know, and that's not, that's not good, obviously, but those little things
really don't matter.
We have it good right now.
The way, I mean, we live inside, we have electricity and running water and that, that should be
really good enough for us, I think.
What's the headline from that?
Where are you going with that?
I guess I'm saying that like, don't sweat the little stuff.
You know, it's not, it's not worth digging in to where we have a giant war over these
small issues.
It's very petty.
I mean, if we could get over that and have humanity be together as one, I think that
would be better.
Yeah.
Amen to all that.
If anybody wants to find your artwork, your book, Hendrickmedia.com, it'll be in the show
notes.
And Matt, thanks a ton for being with me today.
Hey, Eric, thank you for having me.
I love it.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtripdeath.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.