Penny Sartori’s study: five years in a Welsh ICU and some hidden pictures

Step 1

Before the study · The question

A nurse wants to check what her patients see

Many people who come out of an NDE say they left their body and saw the scene from above. Those who doubt this answer that many patients know what a resuscitation looks like and can describe one without having seen it.

Penny Sartori worked as a nurse in the ICU of Morriston Hospital, in Swansea. She wanted to know whether there were NDEs in her unit and how often. She also wanted to test whether what patients said they saw from above could be checked.

To do that, she set up a test that nobody in the unit knew about.

Step 2

From summer 1997 · As the book tells it

Pictures hidden above the monitors

At each bed, the monitor was fixed to the wall, above the patient’s head. Sartori placed cards on top of each monitor. They had symbols and pictures on brightly colored paper, to catch the eye. She hid them behind the edge of the monitor, so they could only be seen from above.

Nobody else knew what was on the cards, not even the doctors or the nurses. That way, nobody could tell a patient without realizing it.

Before starting, she tested the setup during the summer of 1997.

Step 4

Counting the cases · As the book tells it

Few NDEs among all patients, and many more after a cardiac arrest

In the first year, 243 patients left the ICU. Only 2 described an NDE. That is fewer than 1 in 100.

Among those who had survived a cardiac arrest, the figure was much higher. Over the five years, 39 people survived a cardiac arrest, and 7 of them described an NDE. That is about 18 in 100.

The drawing has 100 circles. The 18 filled-in ones are, roughly, the share of cardiac arrest survivors who described an NDE.

Over the five years, Sartori collected 15 NDEs. Seven came from patients who had survived a cardiac arrest. The other 8 came from very ill patients who did not have a cardiac arrest, for example after a stroke or a road accident. The 2 NDEs from the first year are among these 15, one in each group.

In addition, in 8 of the 15 NDEs the patient said they had left their body.

She also recorded 12 cases of hallucinations and 3 visions of patients in their last days. Those visions happen to some patients shortly before they die, and they are not counted as NDEs. All three patients died between a few days and a few weeks later.

NDEs went from fewer than 1 in 100 among all patients to about 18 in 100 among those who survived a cardiac arrest. For the author, that difference shows that NDEs are more frequent the closer someone has come to death.

Step 6

Comparing with other patients · As the book tells it

Those who did not report leaving their body could not say how they were resuscitated

Sartori ran another test. She asked resuscitated patients who had not reported leaving their body to describe how they thought they had been resuscitated. Most were cardiac arrest survivors with no NDE. That way she could see whether a patient who does not report leaving their body can guess what was done to them.

• 28 people could not even guess.
• 3 people described scenes from TV hospital dramas.
• 2 people tried to guess and got the equipment wrong. For example, they said where they thought the defibrillator paddles had been placed, and in their case the paddles were not even used.

For Sartori, this shows that a resuscitated patient cannot describe their resuscitation without having seen it.

Step 7

Checking the accounts · As the book tells it

Only one account could be checked in detail: Patient 10’s

What remained was to compare that group’s mistakes with what the 8 patients who said they had left their body described. One of them gave a precise account that could be checked with the staff who were there. He is the one the study calls Patient 10.

Sartori was his nurse that day. He did not have a cardiac arrest. He lost consciousness for hours after a crisis in which he was short of oxygen. Afterward he described what the doctor, the physiotherapist and Sartori herself had done around him. His case was published separately in 2006, and we tell it in full in Patient 10’s story.

According to Sartori, the accounts of the other 7 were broadly correct, but they could not be checked. What they described could also have been seen from the bed, without leaving the body. Sartori herself found mistakes in part of two of those accounts. In a third case, she believes the patient pieced the scene together from what they heard and felt.

So the comparison with those who did not report leaving their body rests mainly on a single account.

Step 9

In the interviews · As the patients tell it

Short accounts, two of them with fear

The NDEs in this ICU were different from the ones in books. Apart from the two deepest, they were short, with no story to tell, and the patients did not give them much importance. The most common element was seeing dead relatives.

Two of the 15 NDEs had frightening parts. Those two patients described the frightening part first, because it was what worried them most.

Sartori also wanted to know whether those who had an NDE lost their fear of death more than those who did not. She was only able to speak again with 6 of the people with an NDE and 2 of those without one. The two with the deepest NDEs said they were no longer afraid of dying at all.

Step 10

2008 · As the book tells it

The author draws four conclusions

Sartori presented the study as a doctoral thesis at the University of Wales and published it as a book in 2008. These are her conclusions:

• There are NDEs in an ICU, and they can be captured in a study. They are more frequent among those who have come closest to death.
• Drugs do not cause them. She believes that, if anything, drugs block them or make them remembered in fragments.
• Those who reported leaving their body described their resuscitation better than the others. Those who did not almost never managed to.
• This strengthens the idea that consciousness might exist without the brain. It is her final conclusion, and she presents it as something the study supports, not as something proven.

The author acknowledges that the number of cases was too small for statistical calculations.

Let’s see what can and can’t be known from these data.