Tricia Barker's Near-Death Experience: Angels in the Operating Room

The Girl Who Ran From Her Demons

Tricia grew up in the country in East Texas, spending her childhood riding horses at dawn and swimming in lakes. She describes those years as "a very free wonderful childhood in the sense that I spent a lot of time in nature." But behind that freedom was pain. Her mother was mentally ill. There was emotional abuse, some physical abuse. Tricia retreated into books and saw college as her only escape route.

She won $20,000 in scholarship money, one essay competition after another. The checks arrived at a mailbox that was practically falling over in front of a house in shambles. "I was like God is the mailbox even going to be Dependable to get these checks," she remembers. But the checks came, and Tricia made it to the University of Texas.

By her senior year, her grades had slipped. She'd been through a bad breakup. Her drinking and drug use was "kind of off the charts," she admits. She was agnostic, convinced that consciousness ended at death. "I really did not think there was an afterlife," she says. She'd read Whitman and Emerson, but the closest she could get to spirituality was the idea that maybe she'd "blend with the grass" or continue on "in some metaphysical way." Mostly, she believed Tricia, her identity, her consciousness, would simply stop.

That belief terrified her. She'd have panic attacks thinking about mortality. "We just die and then I'm going to not be here anymore and this is all I have and what am I doing with my life," she'd think, spiraling. A therapist suggested she return to running, something she'd loved in high school. Running became her symbol: if she ran hard enough, fast enough, maybe she could outrun her demons. She trained obsessively, 9 to 10 miles a day, preparing for the Austin 10K.

The night before the race, she had nightmares. "I felt something coming for me," she says. She doesn't talk about that often, she notes, because it suggests time was already out of sync.

The Collision

The morning of the race, Tricia was exhausted and skipped coffee. She always needed coffee. She blew through the first light when it was yellow. The second light she looked up and saw was red, but she didn't understand why a car was coming so fast. "It was almost like they anticipated the light changing," she recalls. Both cars hit each other at about 60 miles per hour.

Immediately, she knew something was wrong. She was slumped over to one side and couldn't move. She couldn't reach her driver's license or insurance forms. A good Samaritan stopped, a nurse, and stayed with her, holding her hand. "I'll never forget the kindness of her," Tricia says. When the ambulance arrived and they put her on a board, the closest thing she could say to a prayer was "God help me."

"Control is taken out of your hands in a moment like that," she reflects. "We spend so much of our time trying to control life and in that moment I knew it was over." Everything depended on the surgeons now. What happened next was out of her control.

Strapped to a Board for Seven Hours

Tricia had no health insurance. She was a college student who thought she'd get a good job after graduation. Being young and healthy, she never thought insurance would be a factor. They took her to a downtown hospital. CAT scans showed her back was broken in several places. She was in shock. She didn't know if she'd walk again.

She was trying to get specifics from nurses, trying to get pain medication. They refused. They said until a neurosurgeon signed off and agreed to take her into surgery with the risk, they could not give her painkillers. She was strapped down to a board for seven hours before surgery. Family members came and went. She was screaming at people, crying, drowning in self-pity.

When a neurosurgeon finally came in, Tricia looked at her and said, "I'm going to kill myself if I can't walk so I need you to operate on me." The surgeon, Dr. Fla, said okay. But she'd been on duty for 40 hours. She had to go home, take a nap, eat something, and then she'd come right back and operate. There was such relief, because Tricia had overheard a conversation about a neurosurgeon who didn't want to come in because she didn't have health insurance. "I remember thinking oh my God I'm being thrown away," she says. "I'm trying so hard and here I'm just nothing."

All of that was the physical world. Her brain was totally in the moment of the physical. She was worried about classes, worried about walking. She really wasn't worried about death, even when they wheeled her in and a form said 17% chance of death. She didn't even stop to ask. She thought, well, that's kind of a high chance, but she'd go with it because she wanted to walk. Dr. Fla squeezed her hand. That's the last thing Tricia remembers until she popped out of her body.

Out of Body: "I Was at Peace"

The minute she popped out, she was in the corner of the room, looking down at the surgeons and her body. When you're outside of body, you don't see with normal eyes. You have this 360-degree vision. You can zoom in on something or see behind you, but it's not that important. You're mainly looking at what you're looking at.

She remembers the tops of the surgeons' heads. She remembers their hands. There was an Elvis song on the radio, the easy listening station. She knew the station. There was a lot of awareness of the room itself and of the surgeons.

Then she thought: "I'm alive. I live beyond this body." She was so excited. She wanted to tell her agnostic friends. "They will understand Consciousness definitely goes on," she thought. That moment was profound enough, just looking at her body, looking at the surgeons. "I was happy," she says. "There is no word that describes that happiness. It was relief, an absolute peace that we go on."

She was convinced in that first moment because her consciousness felt at ease. "I always feel a little bit nervous in the body and I think most people do probably to some degree. There's something, some pain somewhere or some anxiety or something is going on. In that space nothing. There was no pain. There was just peace."

Her intelligence seemed greater outside of the body. She even thought about that because these neurosurgeons had to be brilliant. Dr. Fla had her assistant beside her. Tricia remembers looking at them.

The Angels Behind the Surgeons

Then she saw light beings behind them that were about 9 feet tall. She calls them light beings. She calls them angels in her book, Angels in the OR, because that makes sense to more people. But all she knew was that they were intelligent. They could communicate telepathically. They were there to send healing through the neurosurgeons and into her body.

They assured her she'd walk, that she would run again even, and that everything would be fine. Then they almost said playfully, "watch this." When they said watch this, they shot all this energy and light through the neurosurgeons and it lit up her entire spine. She remembers thinking, "That's fantastic. The neurosurgeons have to know Angels work through them. I'm going to ask them about this later. This is amazing. They're so intelligent they have to know that there's even a higher intelligence working with them."

That moment stood out in her mind. But then the monitor flatlined. In that moment she thought, oh, I'm technically dead. She didn't really want to watch. Do they have to flip me over? What are they going to do? How are they going to revive me?

Years later she found out she had internal bleeding and was bleeding to death. They started cauterizing veins and trying to stop the bleeding and giving her blood transfusions, and that's what brought her back. But she left.

Through the Walls to the Candy Bar

When you're in spirit form you can just move through walls. She moved through the first wall and then a couple more walls and she was watching her stepdad get a candy bar out of the machine. This was her verifiable detail. To her it didn't mean anything other than she thought he was a health nut, so the candy bar was funny. "Oh he has a secret sugar addiction, I know it," she thought, and chuckled.

She moved into a space above Austin, the night sky, and floated there for a while. The freedom felt great. She wasn't afraid. She just felt free and happy. Even though she was told she'd return to the body, she thought, I'm pretty far away now, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm going to stay here. And if she stayed there, would this be okay? It was totally fine if she stayed there, because outside of body she felt as if she was supported by greater consciousness.

The brain, as Dr. Eben Alexander and others say, is a limiter of consciousness. It limits what we experience and what we see. Outside of body we see more. She just knew in those first few moments that this experience does not compare to being in the body.

"This Is Theater"

One of her other initial thoughts was, "Oh this is theater." All that we're doing is we're acting and we're learning things and we're putting on these bodies, these costumes. It didn't feel real. That felt like the reality, kind of like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. "Oh now I understand we just come here," she thought. A lot of people talk about reincarnation. That makes total sense to her now. At that time she didn't really think about it. She was just looking at the specifics of that life and realizing, you know, this life, that we go on.

She also felt the energy of everyone she'd ever known and wanted to tell everyone basically: I love you, be better, be happy, enjoy your life. "That's the message of the soul," she says. It's not anything negative. It's just, hey, go love your life.

A Pink Expanse of Stars

The Hubble telescope images, there's a couple of them that she swears are very similar to what she saw. The pink expanse of stars, light. She was floating somewhere she didn't recognize but she knew she was in the stars.

She also felt this greater intelligence coming toward her in the form of light. Almost like the telepathy from the angels' eyes, it came toward her and told her different messages. "Love is All That Matters. It's all that you take with you when you leave this place. Be like a little child. Remind them to go to Nature." All of these seem like crystallized simple messages, but there were about five or six messages like that. They were implanted deep within her and she knew she would never forget them. That was just meant to be something she took back.

The Life Review: Seeing Through Others' Eyes

Then she was shown a portion of her life. She saw some of childhood where she played in nature, moments where she had faith. These moments were good. The light seemed to say, hey, your faith was beautiful, your love for animals was beautiful, just remember the good. The good parts of life and the things that were not good melted away, almost like shadow just falls away. That's not what she was taking with her. Almost as if that message, love is all that we take with us, we don't hold on to the negative in this place of light.

She saw the life review, some places where she could be better. She was a little bit cliquish and judgmental. She was proud of herself for getting into UT and she kind of looked down on people who didn't go to college. At different jobs where she worked, she looked at people who worked full-time as wait staff and she wasn't rude to them, but she didn't give them room to get to know her.

She saw how kind they were. She saw that they went home, this one couple, and they prayed about her. She almost wants to cry when she thinks about it, because they saw that she was this depressed person and they cared, and she didn't even give them the time of day because she didn't like what they wore. "It's just so ridiculous," she says.

In that moment she thought, "I can do better. I can be a better person. I'm not leaving room for the beauty of who people are." That was the main focus of how she was going to change, as if Creator Source wanted her to look at the beauty in people and their heart.

"It's almost like our soul knows how to be but we forget in our culture," she reflects, "and we forget based on trying to feel special or trying to feel good about ourselves."

A Pickup Truck in Paradise

As she finished that life review, she ended up in this place full of greenery and beautiful grass. There was no death. Some people might call it heaven. To her it looked like a consciousness that she was participating with.

Her grandfather appeared. He wanted to recreate something from her childhood because he knew she liked riding in the back of his pickup truck. He looked different. He looked young and handsome and he glowed almost like the angels with this light. There was no death in him. She had seen him die. She was the last person he saw and he had leukemia and was in his 70s and did not look the way he looked there. He was the only person who had a connection to her who had passed.

They spent time together. Then at some point he said, "Do you want to continue on?" Even though she was in the back of this pickup truck driving very slowly through this beautiful green grass, she looked up and she knew what he meant: that there was more to this experience and that God was on the other side of this.

Flying Toward God

She just shot out of the pickup truck and she was this soul just flying towards God. "I just felt great. I felt like every bit of insecurity floated away. I just felt so loved." She felt like this is the greatest place she'd ever experienced. Why does anyone ever leave it? "I want to get closer to this God Source, this vibration, this unconditional love. I just felt safe and held in love."

Then at some point there was this energy wall that kind of stopped her and she couldn't go any farther. It vibrated through her and said, "Look down." She looked down and there was this river and there were many people who were walking on it. Some were covered in shadows, some had light. She saw that if they had light they were connected to God from that place. It just looked like fear or love, that there was only a choice between fear or love.

She thought, oh that's simple. "I just go back and tell some people not to fear things and to love more," and she was like okay I can do that. But God was like no, you're going to be a teacher and you're going to do that. She was like, well I can't do that because that's not what I want to do. "I want to make money," she says. She grew up extremely poor. She'd already taken the LSAT and prepared for law school. Given her skill set with writing, she thought, okay I can do this, I can be a lawyer.

The idea of teaching or nursing, those were like traditional careers for women and she considered herself somewhat of a feminist. "I don't want to do something traditional and low paying, no thank you, this is not for me." And so God was like no, you're really going to be a teacher. That was it. That's the last thing she heard in the presence of God.

She jokes that she wanted to argue more and there were thoughts that she was having, but it was as if God made her into this ball of energy and she was thrown back through darkness towards her body and ended up in the recovery room where they give you ice chips and ask you to tell your name.

"Her Name Is Tricia"

She still was holding on to that experience. Her first thoughts even coming out of anesthesia were, "I just had one of those things they call near-death experiences" because she'd read about it. Her energy didn't feel fully in her body. She felt like she was a part of the room. The nurse was asking her what her name was and she literally didn't feel like "me" yet. She said, "Well her name is Trisha." The nurse said no no no, your name. "Oh my name," Tricia realized.

She felt a little sad actually to come back to the specificness of being "me" because, she doesn't know how to describe it, but you're one with everything but you're also an individual in that space. To come back to the body, the body holds trauma, the body holds memory, the body will die here, but in that space you're eternal and you're free and it's so beautiful. There was already a dislike of being in the body. She felt like she'd been in this beautiful light-filled expansive place and it felt very limiting to come into the body. It felt as if she was being forced back into the body, that it wasn't a choice. If she had her way she would have stayed there. "This was definitely not my choice. I was sent back and told I had a particular mission."

She's happy for the mission now. But in that moment she was not happy.

Writing It Down Before the Morphine Erased It

She was in ICU hooked up to machines for three days. As soon as she could move her arms and talk, her grandmother brought her a journal and she wrote down everything that she remembered about the angels. She was afraid she was getting morphine in the ER and this medicine might make the NDE go away and she was like I have to remember this. She jotted down descriptions of the angels, about how they were not like paintings she'd seen, that they were light beings and they were so much larger and so much more intense, and tried to hang on to as much as she could.

She was asking nurses, grabbing their arms, "Do you believe in God?" They're like yes yes I believe in God, I go to church. She's like, "God is this big ball of light." They were like okay, we've heard enough from you today. She knows people were having these reactions that were like, all right, you can stop talking now.

Even her surgeon, she did ask her. She said, "How long did I die?" The surgeon said, "You died for about 2 and a half minutes. You got several blood transfusions, you're going to be okay." Tricia wanted to ask her more about what she saw. She could read energy, and that was not something she'd seen before. She couldn't necessarily read people's body language and imagery, but [she saw her step back and she saw her have this thought: do not keep talking about this, I do not want to have to deal with this](/video/