Woman who died for 27 minutes says she saw heaven
Will we ever really know what happens after we die? Is there really an afterlife to look forward to? If there is, what does it look like?
All incredibly deep questions that none of us have the answer to.
Well, except for those very few people who have caught a glimpse of the afterlife after a near-death experience and lived to tell the tale.
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People like Tina Hines, who was officially dead for 27 minutes and brought back to life, and has revealed what she saw on the other side.
As soon as she woke up in hospital after the traumatic incident, she had an important message for her family, urgently scribbling it down with a pen and some paper.
Tina, from Phoenix, Arizona, suffered a deadly cardiac arrest in February 2018.
One day, when she and her husband Brian were getting ready to go for a hike, Tina suddenly collapsed.
While waiting for paramedics to arrive, Brian performed CPR on Tina and managed to resuscitate her twice.
As reported by AZfamily.com, on the way to the hospital, she was revived a further six times by medics, effectively dying for 27 minutes in total.
In the end, though, Tina miraculously pulled through, and she had a vital message to share with her loved ones as soon as she awoke in hospital.
In scrawling handwriting, she frantically wrote 'it's real'. When she was asked what she was referring to, she nodded upwards.
"It was so real, the colours were so vibrant," Tina told AZfamily.com.
She remembers vividly seeing a figure that she believes was Jesus standing at bright yellow, glowing gates.
Surprisingly, near-death experiences like Tina's aren't all that rare.
According to a study conducted at the University of Michigan in 2013, a surge of activity in the brain just before death is higher than during the most waking, conscious state.
The study, which was conducted on rats, found that when the creatures were dying, a sharp increase in high-frequency brainwaves was measured in the 30 seconds after their heart stopped beating.
The leader of the study, Dr Jimo Borjigin, said: "A lot of people thought that the brain after clinical death was inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show that is definitely not the case.
"If anything, it is much more active during the dying process than even the waking state."
Topics: Health
Ali Condon