The most haunting thing I’ve experienced was when a patient dreamt and described something from surgery.. Short story below.


I used to work in Cardiac Surgery (10yrs) and one of our patients recovering from a TAVR (Trans-Aortic Valve Replacement) told my Charge Nurse and I that they dreamt we performed intra-op CPR on the table for about 15 minutes.  They gave details of each person in a line to perform CPR. - We actually had a plan like this to cycle each person so we don’t tire, but patients don’t know this because it’s not something we talk about.  So we were caught off guard when they mentioned it.


Explaining to the patient the surgery went fine, we assured them of no complications intra-op.  Later that evening we were called in at 3am for an emergency “bring-back” (when a post-op patient needs to be brought back into surgery.)  If you’re familiar with folklore, that’s the supernatural “witching hour” from 3-4am...  

The same TAVR patient went AFib and suffered an Aortic Dissection on the floor.  We arrived at the surgical suite, the patient was relatively stable under anesthesia ready to prep and in the midsts of prepping went into cardiac arrest at 3:33am on the dot. (Chills down the spine at this point)

Low and behold the exact same people the patient described, were in the exact same order performing CPR for exactly 15 minutes - Me, the Charge Nurse and the backup Surgical tech (5 min each).

After the Doc called it and read the time, the Charge Nurse and I turned pale white.  We’re not religious people, but we’ve never experience something like that in our years of surgery.