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 Round Trip Death, everybody.
And I'd like to welcome our special guest today, Dr. Barbara Mack from the good state
of Washington.
How are you today?
Very good.
Thank you.
Good.
Well, welcome to the show.
I know you haven't shared your experience publicly before.
And I appreciate you trusting us to be able to do that here.
This is a non-judgmental place, so you can open up your heart, tell us what happened
to you and what you learned from it or all those kinds of things.
But before we do, I want our listeners to get to know you a little bit.
So tell us who's Barbara.
Okay, so I am a mother of four kids, a grandmother of two, a wife and a physician.
Used to be in the ER mostly, and then about 15 years ago or so.
I kind of transitioned over to more of a private practice where I really try to help people
find the underlying causes of their distress.
I do like bio-dentical hormones, natural things, totally outside of the insurance and
pharmaceutical, well, it's not pharmaceutical, I do prescribe drugs, but I don't take insurance
and it's just my own small practice.
Are you a DO?
No, I'm an MD.
Okay.
Medical doctor.
And I'm not sure that I understand all the differences between those things.
DO and an MD are pretty much the same.
They're just a lot more MD schools than their IDO schools.
But the default is a little bit different on the DO side.
They're more holistic perhaps, but really pretty much the same.
There's a natural path that's all the way a lot more holistic.
So I'm not a natural path.
I kind of tend that way now.
It's very refreshing to hear from a doctor that is rooted in the causes of what's going
on versus just writing your prescription to take care of the symptoms.
So thank you for that.
Trying to do, yes.
That is awesome.
Okay.
Near-death experience time.
You're ready to talk about this?
This was what, 10 years ago?
2006, so a little more than that.
You had to run in.
I'm sorry, this is not funny.
I'm wiping the laugh off my face because this is not funny.
It just sounds very unusual and that is that you had to run in with fire ants.
What was going on that day?
How did you find yourself there?
My husband was stationed in North Carolina at Fort Bragg.
He was going to play golf with his teammates.
He's in Special Forces and they were going to play golf.
And so I went basically to be their designated driver because they were drinking.
So at the end of the day, golfing and everything, it was a beautiful day.
And at the end of the day, we're all kind of rough housing a little bit and playing,
just kidding.
And I ended up falling on my back and there are a lot of fire ant hills in North Carolina
and those things are, they're really painful.
And I stay clear of those things.
You can usually see them because they're huge mounds of fire ant hills.
They're big and they're easy to recognize.
But on a golf course that's been manicured, you don't see that.
It was flat.
So I didn't know and I just ended up on my back on top of one of these hills and I suddenly
felt all this stinging all around me and especially on my neck and I got up and they were, I had
fire ants swarmed like hundreds or maybe thousands of them.
There were just so many and I just, they sting.
They really hurt when they sting.
And they just kind of rubbed them all off, wiped them off, brushed them off and got up
and I'm really itchy and it hurts but I'm otherwise fine.
So at that point we were going to drive home.
And so I started driving my husband home and to get through the base, they were playing
on the off course that is on the base in Fort Bragg and to get back to where we lived in
southern Pines, I had to drive through an area that's very remote.
It's a training area where people jumped in their parachutes off so there's really nothing
out there.
There's no convenient stores or place where you could make a phone call and no signal for
our own through the cell phones either.
Then about 18 miles of that and about halfway through that I told my husband, I don't feel
really well.
I think you better drive it.
He's already had a DUI, he did not want to drive and he started to say no but then he
looked at me and he said, oh okay.
Because I guess my face was really swollen from all the iran stains.
I was having a little trouble breathing but mostly I just didn't feel well.
Probably my blood pressure was dropping from the toxin.
So he took over the driving and I told him, you need to take me, I need something.
I knew I was not going to make it all the way home.
I knew that the venom was dropping my blood pressure and I would need something.
Epinephrine would have been the medication of choice but I knew that there was no way
of getting that in time but that we could drive off the base to a convenience store
or a gas station and I could buy some benadrym.
So I asked him to do that and he started driving that way and then we finally get to the gas
station.
My husband pulls up and he goes in and I actually don't even remember that part.
I vaguely remember pulling up but I don't remember much after that.
He's in there but the next thing I know, I'm in this place.
It's kind of like a maybe a large room and I'm sort of at the bottom of this big gray
space.
Everything was kind of like misty but it was not a cold mist.
It was like a warm mist and I was comfortable but I'm sitting there and everything was just
gray and it was nothing.
I didn't have my body.
It was sort of an amorphous something and then I noticed above me there were two and
then three kind of beings.
And they were like me, they were sort of this amorphous substance.
They were lighter than the gray background but they were sort of just these kind of blobs.
They didn't have arms or a face or hands or anything or feet but they were beings.
I knew that they were beings and I also knew that they, especially one of them, it chokes
you up to talk about it now.
It didn't keep it so long after.
One of them especially was very close to being and knew me very well, knew me intimately
and had my best interests at heart.
I didn't feel like what some people describe as love and stuff like that.
I just felt comfortable and safe.
I understood these two or three beings above, somewhere above me, to have my best interests
at heart.
And then there appeared kind of an opening, a circular opening in the top of this area.
It wasn't really an enclosure either but it was sort of an area and I kind of had my back
to something, it wasn't a wall but it was like it didn't continue past my back.
I looked up and there was this large disc circle, a circle in this enclosure and white light
was coming from it, some kind of light.
And the three beings were kind of hovering near that opening but inside where I was,
inside the place I was.
And they were discussing my fate without words, without speaking.
I came to understand that I was going to die and I said, wordlessly, I said, I'm going
to die and that's okay.
And then there was a bit of a pause and then what came back from the being that was closest
to me was, no, it's not okay.
You have to, I don't know, I can joke about this still.
But the being said, you have to go back.
And I didn't understand why I would be okay with dying because I was never, I was not
suicidal, I was enjoying life.
I had four kids, they were old enough to be okay on their own, I guess, they were in their
teens and twenties.
So I guess I could have left but I was fine with going but anyway, when they told me I
had to go, I wasn't going to die and I had to go in there.
They said you have to go in there and tell them what to do, which I knew meant I had
to go get out of the car and go to the convenience store and tell them I needed Benadryl.
And I knew that I would have to bite and chew it because it wouldn't be the injectable kind
but biting and chewing it would get enough of the chemical and could be absorbed through
the mucus membranes in your mouth that I could get enough to probably help me with the toxin,
the venom.
So that's what I did.
I got up out of the car and I walked in and I opened the door to the store and I thought
that I told them what I had to tell them but apparently what they say I did is I just
crashed forward and took down a rack of candy with me and so then I'm on the ground.
So I guess I passed out but then I, once on the ground, I guess down by pressure is at
least getting blood going, flowing to my brain when I'm on the ground, even if my pressure
is low.
So I was able to speak again and I said, I told them I need Benadryl and then this storekeeper
quickly got me a packet of Benadryl.
There were three tablets in there and I just opened it up and I chewed them all still on
the ground and then I got better and I was able to get up, walk out of there.
A little embarrassed that I'd created such a mess including I lost my control of my bladder
so I left a puddle of urine on the floor and let the poor shopkeeper to mop that up but
I got in the car and my husband drove me home and that was pretty much the end of it.
But I kept thinking about this.
What was this?
What would it happen?
For years I thought about it.
I told people about it and I really couldn't figure it out and then only recently I started
watching some of these YouTube videos of the near-death experiences and I thought that's
what it is.
I tried many other things.
Meditating which was helpful but it never got me near.
I even tried LSD or psilocybin with a, you know, I hired somebody to pay this woman $700
to babysit me to do this even trying to do it correctly.
But I didn't get anywhere like this with that experience.
It was interesting but nothing, it was not the same.
I've had people tell me that they've tried mushrooms, they've tried ketamine, other things
like that to reproduce what happened to them and it never works.
Yeah, especially those that feel the intense love on the other side.
I'm so sorry you missed that part that you didn't really get that experience but so many
people do, that's part of what just can't be recreated when people hope to be able to
recreate it some other way.
Which is also why when people say, well, gee, I want one of those cool NDEs for myself,
too.
No, you can't, you may not come back for one thing and trying to do it with drugs just
usually doesn't work.
So, well, not usually.
I've never heard of it working.
It doesn't work.
So don't try.
I definitely would not recommend anybody attempting this but I still find it reassuring.
After listening to other people's stories and I think we need to get these stories out,
we need to tell people about these things because I'm sure there's many, many others
that have not been told and I think now it's kind of safe for people to talk about them.
I think maybe even 10 or 15 years ago talking about this, Mike, had you labeled as crazy
or churches would not agree, would not go along with this because some of this might
contradict the teachings of some religious organizations who might be well-meaning but
maybe they don't want to hear this stuff.
You're right about all of that.
And luckily it's changing.
I've met with so many people that had experience, especially in maybe the 70s and 80s, okay,
long before you did.
And they told a doctor or a nurse or some other professional and they were like, don't
talk about that.
We're going to have to take you up to the psych ward.
And so they bottled it up all these years but it is safe to talk about now in most cases.
And so I'm glad that you're able to do that and you don't have to fear, gee, I'm a doctor.
Is this going to ruin my credibility to talk about this?
I'm glad we're at a place where you can just open up about it now because 20 years ago
you couldn't.
Yes, I can see that.
And probably these things have been occurring a lot more than we know and I think people
need to understand because the message is wonderful.
And I didn't get the full experience that many other people got and I don't regret that
because that might have just brought me closer to death and I'm glad to be alive.
But I no longer fear death.
And that's always one of my questions is, what level of fear of death do you have?
I used to be afraid of death.
I used to scare me a lot.
I was brought up Catholic but I'd become more or less agnostic at that point and I was mostly
concerned that there wouldn't be an afterlife and this was it.
And so it's really encouraging to me to hear that not only is there an afterlife, there
absolutely is an afterlife, not only that but it's encouraging that it's a good thing.
It's beautiful.
It was comfortable for me.
It wasn't beautiful, it wasn't fantastic.
I didn't feel all the love that I hear people talk about.
But I did feel that I did understand that the beings that were with me might have been
my guides or something.
I don't know.
But those beings did love me and they knew me.
And from my medical mind, I tried to rationalize it as maybe this part of my brain was talking
to that part of my brain and I really tried to come up with a story that would fit a medical
model for it.
I really did.
But I didn't and it wasn't until I came across a near death experience and I thought, wait
a second, I listened to several of them and then I realized that's the same thing.
And then the more I listened to, the more consistencies I heard from people's stories.
I mean, not everybody's story is consistent but there are a number of things that are
consistent in each and everyone's story or in many stories that aligned with what I had
been through.
It was really, really positive and encouraging and makes me feel happy because I know that
experience was real.
It was very real.
It's not something I imagined because even today it is so much, I don't have to think
back and try to remember it.
It's as though it happened yesterday.
I still get choked up when I think about parts of it, even as brief as mine was.
Well I appreciate that.
It's interesting that, well, a couple of things.
One is everybody's experience is different, although there are commonalities.
And some people feel like, hey, I really saw heaven.
And these are sometimes people that were clinically dead for a few minutes and other
people just have sort of a toe dipped in.
That's sort of like what yours was.
Maybe there wasn't time.
Maybe there wasn't the depth of the experience for you to be quite that immersed as some
other people are.
But it's amazing that even dipping your toe in can be so profound for you, isn't it?
It was still very profound.
It's still something I thought about constantly.
It never left my mind.
I was thinking about it, trying to learn about it and trying to figure out what was that.
It's recently that I'm finding these stories, they align with what I went through.
Well I hope that's been helpful for you to comprehend what you went through, maybe cycle
it through your brain and understand it a little bit better.
Tell me, in your medical training, was there any talk of near-death experiences or out-of-body
or anything like that at all?
No.
I mean, I had heard out-of-body experiences, but I never did we have any kind of training
on that.
Maybe they are now, I graduated in 1986 from medical school, but maybe now there are.
Well some are, but I don't know if it's regular med school training or something beyond that.
I know that IANS, I was at their annual conference not too long ago, and they had specific presentations
for medical people and they were able to get a sign off as X amount of hours of training.
Yeah, there were doctors and nurses and other people there getting some of that training
and being able to count it as, I don't know, how many hours do you need every year of training?
There's no difficulty in reaching them, but I would love to do that.
Training just for the experience, not too much for the credit.
Okay, we'll see you there next year, you can give both.
Okay?
Yeah, I'll take the credit.
I'd love to hear it, I'd love to.
So there will be another one coming up?
Every year it's usually just before Labor Day.
This most recent one was down in Phoenix before that Washington and Salt Lake City and next
year is in Chicago.
Now I don't work for IANS, I don't get paid by IANS or anything else, it's just a really
good nonprofit organization where you can spend time meeting with other people that
have had experiences like yours and that can be very helpful, very therapeutic.
Also, there are IANS chapters all over the country and in a lot of other countries too.
So if you feel like it would be helpful for you, I-A-N-D-S.
I-A-N-D-S, okay.
DS.org, it stands for International Association of Near Death Studies.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, I'd love to read some studies or find out more about it.
It can be helpful because when people come back from these experiences, we don't know
how to process them and that's normal and that's okay.
Let me ask you a couple of questions about some of the things that you went through and
you gave a good description by the way.
The three beings, you weren't able to explain what they looked like.
Could you get into that anymore?
I think you've called them like blobs, were they light, dark, colorful?
They had no shape really.
They had no features, no faces, no arms, legs, no-and neither did I.
I was just, I was one of them also.
I kind of experienced them as having more light than the background light, than the background
fog or mist.
I'm in Washington State where we have fog and mist and drizzle all the time.
It's not like that.
It was just sort of these, everything was gray, but it was warm and comfortable gray
and they were sort of, they were more, they were lighter.
They were just sort of an oval kind of blob that even kind of changed.
It wasn't, its outline wasn't the same all the time.
They got smaller or bigger.
They had really no shape, amorphous really.
So I guess that they were just a made of energy.
I wanted to be closer to them, especially the one, why do I get so choked up every time
I think of that one?
I guess maybe now I'm saying, I'm using the pronoun heat, so maybe it's a male thing,
but I don't know.
But it seemed closer to me and it seemed to, you know, it seemed to know me very well.
Just a brief interruption.
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Now back to the guest.
And it cared for me or had love for me, although I didn't experience the overwhelming love
that I've heard described.
I just knew that this, that I could trust this being.
Whenever it said I would do.
I think that is so amazing that you had an experience with beings that you can't describe
how they looked.
They didn't talk out loud and yet communication happened.
Yes.
How do you explain that?
I think about that a lot.
And this morning when I was running and I had my headphones on, I was listening to a version
of Simon and Garfunkel's Silence.
Sounds of silence.
Silence.
I've heard that song a zillion times before.
Run to it.
I've listened, you know, everyone's heard that song since the seventies, I guess, when
it first came out.
And I was listening to a different rendition of it.
And then the words, um, yeah, hello, darkness, my old friend, that, even the very beginning,
it's like I was in this dark gray place, but it was like, it was, you know, the old friend.
Go ahead and read the first verse.
Okay.
Hello, darkness, my old friend.
I've come to talk with you again.
Because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping.
And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.
So yeah, that reminds me of this experience and, and it still remains the vision, whatever
that vision was, even though it was really nothing I could, not much I could see.
I was just more of aware than using my eyes.
And then they talked further about, um, people talking without speaking, people hearing without
listening, people writing songs that voices never share.
There was talking and listening, but no speaking.
And I wasn't using my ears.
It was just an under, I understood, like I understood from their talk that from what
they were telling me, what they were saying that I was going to die.
And then, then they told me differently without words.
We need to get Paul Simon on this show and see if he had an NDE and maybe that, maybe
that was his inspiration.
Yeah.
And, and I wonder how much else out there is also, is also related to this and maybe
people, artists who made these songs, had these experiences, couldn't talk about them
in another way, but they could write songs about them.
I think there's a lot.
And I think people have been afraid to talk about it.
If you think about, for example, Charles Dickens, what was his inspiration for the Christmas
story?
Yes.
The Christmas story, yeah, the Christmas past, future, and the whole message is the same.
Be good to people.
Just all you have to do is just love people genuinely.
And it's, that's really, the message is so simple and that's all it is.
And it's beautiful.
And I've found since then, that's what I try to do.
Now I've left the emergency room and I've created my own practice where I can spend
an hour with each patient, I don't take insurance, but I could spend an hour with each patient
and really hear their story.
Because you really have to listen and you will learn much more that way.
You have to listen and allow, allow people to tell you their stories.
One other thing about these beings, you felt like they were communicating.
They were talking about you, about the fact that you needed to go back.
And you explained that any more detail?
Yeah, first they said, or I came to understand that I was going to die and I said, where
at the sleep, I'm going to die and that's okay.
Then there appeared to be some more conversation among them or they were, and I didn't hear
everything that they were saying.
I really wanted to be closer to them.
They were, they were, you know, out of my reach, not that I had arms that I couldn't
reach to, but they were, you know, they were too far from me and I wanted to get closer
to them, but they, they weren't allowing that.
And then, then when they told me I had to go back, then that was the end of my, of my
time with them.
But it seemed like they were discussing, well, no, it looks like not.
It's not going to, no, she can't, she can't go back.
She, I mean, she has to go back.
And it wasn't, they didn't use pronouns either.
They were all talking about me without using the pronoun.
Like they weren't talking about me in the third person.
It was like I was in the first person talking.
They were me.
They were part of me.
They knew me that well.
They were part of everything, but they were a part of me.
Hard to understand, isn't it?
I only understood those things and I accepted them and I was fine with all that.
So when they told me, no, you have to go back.
I was like, okay, that's what I do.
And so I got up to do what they told me to do.
And it's like the part that controlled my body came back to my body and controlled my
body to walk into the convenience store.
And then my pressure, I guess, dropped again and I couldn't, I wasn't told I landed on
the floor that my pressure came back up enough for me to, to manteed enough.
And you know, maybe I did die and if I hadn't, if I had been left in that car any longer,
I probably would have died.
You know, it was such a massive dose of venom.
I don't have an allergy to hymenoptero, which is the kind of, they're like bees.
They're related to bees.
They sting, fire ants, you know, and have an allergy to that venom as far as I know.
And I've been stung since, you know, but one or two, no big deal.
But it was just the massive amount of venom that I got from that many stings that caused
my blood pressure to drop.
And probably I would have died if I hadn't done something.
Yeah, that's a scary thing, a really scary thing.
When we spoke previously, you mentioned something about your father visiting you after he died.
Would you mind telling that story too?
Sure.
Yeah.
So right around the pandemic, the beginning of the pandemic, my dad got sick.
It wasn't COVID, but he was in his late 80s, 89, and he was on the East Coast and there
were lockdowns.
And it was really hard to get him good care.
And I was flying back and forth.
It happened to him in Florida.
He lives in New York.
I had to fly back and forth to Florida quite frequently to try and help him.
He ended up on dialysis.
There were, you know, he had heart disease.
He had to have heart surgery twice and a number of things.
And coordinating his care was just terrible.
And it was really, really a traumatic, you know, difficult thing for me because I'd been
very close to my dad.
So but he passed away.
And finally, and you know, after two years of that, he passed away.
And then as it was 2022, my brothers and my mother and I and my sister, the family went
to the Bahamas, which was his, he used to, he loved to sail.
He loved the water and his favorite place in the Bahamas.
We went there.
We went to El Boqui and we went there to spread his ashes.
And so I flew there with my husband.
And that night after I flew there, we got in our hotel, the cottage that we were renting.
And my husband went out to look at the ocean and I was alone in our little cottage and
I lay down and on the bed.
And then next thing I knew, my father was standing right next to me, standing next to
the bed.
And his, I saw him.
He looked to me as he did, back when he was young and healthy, like his 30s, late 30s,
early 40s is how I remember him.
He was healthy when he back when he was healthy and surfing and stuff like that.
That's how he came to me.
And he didn't say anything to me, but I understood he wanted to see my mother.
And then I remembered that the, the, I realized the place that we were renting was the place
that he had, then my mother had stayed in last time when we had been in the Bahamas at
El Boqui.
And so I knew where my mother was staying at in a different cottage, a little ways down.
So I got up and I started walking that way so that he, for him to follow me.
And I don't know if he followed me.
I just, I just kind of understood that that's where I, or I believe that that's what he
wanted.
And so I walked down to where my mother was staying and it was after midnight.
So I didn't wake her up or anything.
I just took my dad there or at least that's what I'm regretting.
And then one other time he came to me, it sounds kind of silly, but he kind of, he told
me to buy chickens.
We live in the city.
We have a little quarter acre in the city.
So, but we did, I told my husband and we went and bought baby chicks and started, and started
to receive chickens.
It turned out to be just a wonderful, fun blessing.
And so now we have, you know, I had chickens and in a little plot in the city here.
And they're really so much fun.
And my dad had written a story about he had chickens during the depression.
And it was really great having them during recent years when every grocery's got real
expensive and everything.
And we had AIDS and stuff like that.
But their personalities and everything was just so wonderful.
And he came to me at third time when my husband and I were laughing over the antics of the
chickens.
It's just kind of, it was just a light kind of fun.
I think message he was giving me, I don't, nothing, I don't know what to make of it.
You know, now we want to get a farm and live off career and stuff.
Come out and live by us.
That's what we're doing.
Is it up here in the mountains?
We'll talk about this later.
Just a couple more things that I'm going to let you go.
One of them is in what ways to this change your life.
And you've mentioned it a little bit, but tell me a little bit more.
Yeah.
So I've been, I had been really pretty fearful before, you know, fearful of dying, but fearful
of lots of things.
And I'm not anymore.
I'm definitely not afraid of dying.
I don't want to die and I don't want to experience pain before death.
But now I'm, I'm okay.
I'm happy about it because I know it's not going to be a bad thing.
You know, I think of my, I didn't have a life for you, but I realized that everything I've
done in my life, I will need to answer to at some point.
And I must always think about the other people that I affect with every action with my actions.
It gives me a feeling of peace.
Just knowing that, that that's all I need to do is just listen, try to understand the
people around me and do what I can to help.
We're not matter how it brings me to content.
Whether it's a patient, a family member, a stranger on the street, every interaction
is an opportunity to do the right thing.
And I no longer feel as bad about all the bad things I've done, all the mistakes I've
made in my life, which have been plenty.
So I no longer feel so bad about, about that because I know that I can ask forgiveness
and it will be okay.
And I just have to do better in the future.
The best I can do.
Can you say something to those people out there?
What are really wondering if there's an afterlife or maybe don't believe it?
Yeah, I was, you know, although race, Catholic, I had become agnostic.
I now consider myself a Christian.
I do go to church sometimes.
I am confident.
I know I don't have any hard evidence, but there is, there is some hard evidence.
Now, not in my story, but, but from listening to other people's story gives me enough that
I am absolutely convinced that, that there is an afterlife and that it's a good one.
We don't, we don't need to fear it.
Even if we've done wrong, we can ask for forgiveness and we can just try to do better in the future.
And I want people to be reassured as I am because I wasn't reassured until, until learning
about these things.
I was anxious about dying and about what's going to happen in the future.
And I no longer am.
And none of this on earth really matters.
Not quite so much.
What really matters is just how we treat people, which is, which is the teachings of Christ.
That's really, in my mind, all that he was teaching.
And so I don't really, not, not so sure about religion all the time.
Christ's teachings were just to, to do the right thing for other people, to, to love
them.
All right.
Barbara, I really appreciate it.
I know you've touched somebody today, so thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you for doing this.
Thanks again for listening.
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