After life with Debbie Malone and Bianca Nogrady

After life

The question of the afterlife fascinates us all, whether shaped by science, spirituality or something in between. In this episode, we explore what happens at the end of life, and what might follow, in a conversation with psychic medium Debbie Malone and science writer and journalist Bianca Nogrady.

About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors.

Join James Valentine for the sixth season of Life’s Booming: Dying to Know, our most unflinching yet. We’ll have the conversations that are hardest to have, ask the questions that are easy to ignore, and hear stories that will make you think differently about the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience: Death.

From vivid, near-death experiences to the quiet moments before death, this episode looks at how people make sense of the unknown. You’ll hear how psychic mediums describe receiving messages from those who’ve passed, what it feels like to come back from the brink, and how the scientific community approaches questions of consciousness, the soul, and what defines the moment of death.

Debbie Malone is one of Australia’s most recognised psychic mediums, with over three decades of experience connecting people to their loved ones in spirit. As a medium, author and spiritual teacher, she works with individuals and audiences seeking comfort and closure, and has also assisted police on high-profile investigations involving missing persons and unsolved crimes.

Bianca Nogrady is a journalist, author and science communicator who has spent more than a decade writing about death, dying and what it means to be mortal. Her book The End: The Human Experience of Death explores how cultures, clinicians, and individuals confront the reality of dying, and what we can learn from it.

If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note – lifesbooming@seniors.com.au

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For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast

Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel Sonic Experience Agency

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Disclaimer: Please be advised that this episode contains discussions about death, which may be triggering or upsetting for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

If you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, please know that you are not alone and there are resources available. For additional support please contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

TRANSCRIPT:

S06EP07 After life

James: Hello and welcome to Life's Booming. I'm James Valentine and this season we're talking about death. In this episode, well, this is a debate that's been going ever since we were alive. What happens after we die? No matter your religion or spiritual beliefs, the question of the afterlife fascinates us all.

James: With the help of my guests, I'll explore everything we know, or perhaps don't quite know, about it from both a spiritual and scientific perspective. Bianca Nogrady is an award winning science journalist and the author of The End, The Human Experience of Death, and Debbie Malone is a psychic medium who felt a spiritual awakening after a series of near-death experiences.

James: Bianca, Debbie, welcome to Life's Booming. So, Debbie, this starts with you. You've had a lot of near-death experiences.

Debbie: Yes, I have. I had one at three and 13, then I had some, had another two in my early 20s. And then I had a miscarriage and then I woke up and started seeing murders and it was the backpacker murders, [that] was the first thing that I actually saw.

James: What do you mean by seeing them?

Debbie: I was becoming a victim and I was being, you know, I was being attacked and murdered, in visions and dreams. At the time the backpacker murders was a really big thing on the news and I just thought I was watching TV too much. And then I started to see things before they happened on the news.

I used to work at Fairfax community newspapers and I kept seeing all of these different visions and I spoke to one of the journalists and he said, why don't we do a story about you and just see what happens. And then it ended up, Ivan Milat's girlfriend, Chalinda Hughes contacted the newspaper and wanted to make contact.

And I ended up, consequently, working on the case with the taskforce for quite a few, quite a few years.

James: Right. I feel I'm automatically going to go a bit glib, but you mean they go, okay, so Debbie, what's happened? What can we expect this weekend?

Debbie: Yeah. And it's, and it's funny cause it's not like that.

Because it's, and me being the sceptic, all I wanted to do was to shut it down. I didn't want to do anything, have anything to do with it. I'd never had a reading. I didn't, you know, have tarot cards or anything like that. And when it started to happen, at first the police were quite sceptical and I had to speak to a few different officers and then they just said, just keep a diary.

And they said, don't think about what you see, just write it down, put a date down. And when I had enough information, I would send it through to them. I can't say that I have solved cases, it's more like I'm a profiler. So I can see, I can describe things. And the thing is with, when it comes through, it can be the past, it can be the present, or it can be the future. So it's like pieces of a puzzle. It's almost like playing charades in a way. So you're hearing things and seeing things and you try and work it out.

James: So police weren't sceptical of this.

Debbie: Oh, some were, some were. And yeah, I've had some challenging experiences with them, but I've had some incredible officers that I've worked with, you know, during the time as well.

And I just thought once I did something with the backpacker murders, it would all go away and I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore. I kind of thought that would be it.

James: And by all go away, you mean the kind of visions you were having or you, you were getting a sense of, of… Are you, in this sense, are you someone who's seeing the future or are you someone who's seeing glimpses of the afterlife or something like that?

Debbie: All of it. So the victims were coming to me, the two English girls were coming to me, and one of the visions was I could see somebody walking them into the forest, but I couldn't see who he was because I was seeing through his eyes. So they were walking away from me and they were kind of pleading with me to help them and then it would stop and then I would get a wall full of Polaroid images. And then it ended up, most of the images of the Polaroids were the other victims. But at the time, I didn't know. It was only later on when the case, you know, became solved – and some of those faces still haven't been, they haven't been linked to the case, so I think there's so many more.

James: So going back to your near-death experiences. What did you see when that happened? What was your near-death experience?

Debbie: My most vivid one, when I was 34, I had to have a major operation and I told the doctors that I was going to die and they thought I was being stupid. And I said about the anesthetic and they didn't believe me. Anyway, when I went through, I woke up after the operation and I was in a higher dependency, but they put me on a morphine drip and I didn't know I was allergic to morphine.

So they kept telling me to, you know, push the button. And when I did, I ended up having a lot of really horrible visions to start with, but then I went through to this beautiful place. It was like, it was like a rollercoaster. Like, I love the night sky, and it was like I went up, I felt like I was an astronaut without a craft and I just could see the universe and I felt very calm.

And then it was a lot of movement. The movie Contact for me is very close to my experience. And then I suddenly went into like, I would call it like a black hole. Cause I kind of feel like it was a vortex and I got sucked into it. But then, the movement was getting faster and faster, it's a bit like being on a rollercoaster.

And then I landed in this meadow and everything seemed more colorful than it is here. And the stupid part about it, there was a privet hedge, I remember that. And it was about this tall, and there's this, like this little gate and there were people in front of me and they all went ahead, and then there's people on the other side and they all seemed so happy and you know, it just seems so beautiful and just, I felt so loved and peaceful.

Then I got to my turn to go through the little gate and they said, no, you can't. And I'm a bit like, you know, I'm not the person that pushes in at the deli line. So it's like, you know, it's my turn. I want to go through. And they said, no, no, no, you can't, turn around. So I turned around and it was like, I was up in the sky, and I could see my – it makes me cry nearly every time I talk about it – I could see down that my one-year-old daughter was in my husband's arm, my three-year-old son was beside him and my seven-year-old was there, and the two boys are saying, where's mummy, where's mummy, and he said, mummy's not coming back, mummy's in heaven now.

And then suddenly I fell back down and I'm back into the hospital room and the nurse is shaking me and they're pulling the morphine drip out. And she said, what are you doing? And I said, Oh, you know, I'm going to the light. And she said, not on my shift, it's too much paperwork. [laughter]

James: Oh, the New South Wales public health system, it'll fix you up at any time.

When you did your book, Bianca, did you do, did you talk to people with near-death experience or did you cover that area?

Bianca: I did. I mean, the aim of my book was really to take, to kind of explore right up to the moment of death, but not beyond because I felt that my skills did not equip me to assess that in any kind of, in any form.

But obviously people with near-death experiences did talk to me and also people who had talked to people with near-death experiences. Because one thing that really struck me with any time I hear stories like that is the people who've had them seem to lose their fear of death. You know, I think we all carry this fear of death in us.

And I think it motivates a lot of what we do, but it, you know, I remember one woman just saying it was just so beautiful; I'm not scared, I'm just not scared of it anymore.

James: Did you hear any, did people say the kind of detail that Debbie's describing there? I've never heard that. I've heard the light or that sort of thing, or feeling.

I've never heard of such detail.

Bianca: There was actually a study that was done that looked at a whole range of near-death experiences and tried to, I guess, classify some of the common elements to them and they sort of, that idea of there's a journeying, you know, it's a tunnel, it's driving down a road, maybe a rollercoaster, that there are, there's a journeying process and then there's a decision point.

And at that decision point or junction, there is a sense that what is beyond is wonderful, that it's extraordinary and I want to be there. But then, either somebody says to them, no, it's not your time, there's something that turns them back. And I can't remember whether it's ever something that people, someone makes a conscious decision not to. From memory, people want to go forward, but someone else says, no, this is not your time. And, so, there's a pattern to those experiences, but in terms of the individual things, like I remember, one of the stories was a young soldier in world war… one of the major world wars, you know, who thought he was walking with his friends and then his friends just all kind of, he was just walking down this road and his friends just gradually disappeared.

And, and then I think there was a point where someone said, no soldier, you've got to stop, go back. And so, you know, we bring to it our own circumstance, context, to it. But those features are common in all of them.

James: But always good? Always in a sense of like going towards something good. This is going to be fine?

Bianca: Well, it's interesting because there is a very small, very small, percentage of people who have horrific experiences, terrifying, terrifying experiences. I didn't hear of any of those stories, I don't know if you've encountered those…

Debbie: Yeah, I have heard of that. Sometimes it's like they feel that, that movie What Dreams May Come, that Robin Williams was in, that kind of thing – kind of being stuck or earthbound, because a lot of the time when it's, sometimes it's someone who's tried to suicide and that they weren't, they weren't successful.

James: I wonder if the, the near-death experience is a cultural thing. Like, did you look at that at all? Is it, is that… along the ways in which we talk about it seem to me very Western and almost very English, you know, like we talk about that sort of tradition.

What do the South Americans do? What are the, what do the Germans do?

Bianca: I think it is a cross-cultural phenomenon that, I mean, there's even, I think the earliest record of a near death, or what we think is a record of a near-death experience is actually from ancient Greece, and it was a description of a warrior.

I don't know if there has been any kind of cross-cultural comparisons around near-death experiences. It would be really interesting. But I think what seems to come out is that it is very unique to that individual, what that experience is in terms of what the, what form the journey takes.

James: You said Bianca, your book was, you know, I wanted to do up to death. What did you decide death was?

Bianca: Well, that's a very good question because we don't actually, the definition of death is contested. And it is culturally specific. There are whole conferences that are held, still, on how we define death, and it's incredibly difficult. And the thing is, we don't need to define death unless we are wanting to donate organs. That's essentially the main reason we need a definition of death. We need a legal definition of death, so that if somebody is an organ donor, we know that removing their organs is not actually killing them.

But it's incredibly complex. It's around the notion of when your heart stops, are you dead? But if your heart stops, we can restart your heart. If you stop breathing, we can re-, we can ventilate you. If your brain stops, how do we measure what brain activity, what's the difference between someone, for example, who's in [an] incredibly deep coma versus someone who might be what we now term as brain dead.

And again, those definitions differ in different countries. I mean, again, if there's no time pressure, such as there would be with something like organ donation, then we do have the luxury of time to be able to wait. But there have been numerous cases where – there was one case in fact, where a surgeon was facing manslaughter charges because [of] a dispute over whether the person was in fact dead when he began to remove the organs.

And it has very specific applications. There's been legal cases around brain death where two people were involved, a husband and wife involved in a car accident, who died first because that had implications in terms of the inheritance.

And so there have been very complicated cases. And I mean, we talk about, well, brain death, well, loss of activity in the brain. But there is a state of, for lack of a better word, chronic brain death where people… The longest, I think, was somebody who literally survived for a decade and a half, a child who, I think they suffered meningitis, but they were kept on life support, breathing, they went through puberty. And then when they finally decided, we're not going to treat, or the decision was made to cease treatment for pneumonia, for example, which I guess is, you know, usually a common cause of death at that state. And when the autopsy was performed, and sorry this is a little bit brutal, but the brain was essentially calcified.

So this, this individual was by legal definitions alive, up until that point, but you know, were they there? What had departed from that person?

James: If the brain is the seed of consciousness, then they could not have been conscious, but then is the brain the seed of consciousness? You know, like all sorts of questions there.

What do you think death is, Debbie, what's death?

Debbie: Yeah, it's a hard one because I do believe there is life after, I suppose, the death is the death of the body, but I don't think it's the death of the soul. And I find that that's the thing that lives on and even you can measure it like when you make contact sometimes with spirit, they were an electromagnetic frequency. So EMF testers that you'd use to test a microwave will actually indicate when there's a spirit in the room, you know.

But, when you're talking about transplants, another thing that I was thinking, I've done readings for people, like a lady who'd had a transplant. So she ended up, she was in a coma, but she had had a transplant from a young man, and it was a lung transplant, I think.

And then she was in a coma and her mum came to see me, to see if like… because when people are in a coma, I can communicate with them even though they are still physically alive. And what was interesting, the person from the transplant came through the reading at the same time as the person who was the recipient.

So it's, and you think, well, he's passed away, but he's living on through her. That, you know, but then he gave life to her to extend her life. So…

Bianca: …I find that fascinating…

Debbie: … that's even like, I suppose that's a whole other story.

James: Well then. What's the, what's the soul? What's this soul thing that's then hanging around? Where is it hanging around? What is it?

Debbie: What does it do?

James: …Do you think there's a reincarnation?

Debbie: Yes.

James: Like what, what are you, what are you, what is, you seem to have gleaned a lot of information from the afterlife – let us know what's going on!

Debbie: Oh, look, I definitely do feel that we, that we do live on. And I'm… One of the things that I do is called psychometry. So from holding or touching something, it's like I can, I can see through my hands, kind of thing. So you can touch an inanimate object, like a piece of jewellery. You can use clothing, but we tend to wash it. But say I went to Scotland and touched the sacred stones and I could see back into the past by touching that or just being in a historical site.

And a lot of people might go to say a battle site or something, and they will feel that energy of sadness or, you know, or it might be a happy place, but you know, we tend to, we feel that. So I do feel that that energy does exist.

But from my own personal experience, I did, you know, I've had past-life experiences, and one thing I did, I've been under hypnosis quite a lot of times with the police, but I did it to contact someone for a case, but it ended up, it took me back. So I had a past life and it was, I think unless I had my own proof, I would think, you know, I need to see-it-to-believe-it kind of thing.

You know, I have seen things happen and even like children coming through and they know all about their great grandfather who they got their middle name or something so they can talk about them.

James: Bianca, you're a science writer, you know, you edit science journals. Science, you know – Debbie, you know, this is just rubbish?

Is there, is there, is there much science around this? Do scientists tend to just, you know, poo-poo this stuff?

Bianca: It's funny. I always think of that, is it that line from Hamlet, there are greater things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And even though I, you know, I come from a very, I guess, Western scientific paradigm, both of my parents were doctors, I do also, you know, I would define myself as agnostic.

I do have a sense that there is something greater than what we, you know, what exists in this mortal sphere that we find ourselves in. And in some ways, I don't know that it's the place of science to explore that. I think, I mean, certainly with the existing knowledge and technologies we have.

We have no way of necessarily studying this. I mean, what we can do, you know, when we talk about near-death experiences… and, you know, I know that there's been studies looking at using, for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a kind of imaging where you can look at blood flow in the brain; you can look at areas of brain activity.

The problem is, you know, that'd be great to study someone having a near-death experience, but how do you get those unique circumstances to happen?

James: Yes. Can you have one at 10am tomorrow!

Bianca: How do we schedule one? I mean, you know, maybe you could put someone into an induced coma, but I mean, there's obviously ethical challenges with doing that.

There are… We do understand there are parts of the brain that, when kind of stimulated, can generate these kind of ‘sense of the numinous’, a sense of a feeling of other worldliness that our, you know…

I mean, we are experiencing these things in this body, there will be things that are going on in our brain, that contribute to those emotions that contribute to those sensations.

But whether we can say this is, whether I can say, I don't know, personally, this is purely a function of electrical impulses and neurotransmitters? I can't say that. I can't say yes or no. And I don't think science has the capacity to say yes or no. I think because so much of this is belief, it is faith, which is not to say that it doesn't exist in the same way that, you know, just because someone is mentally ill, that doesn't mean that it's not real. It is real. It is real in every facet that would define realness just because we can't measure it, doesn't mean it's not real. But at the moment we can't measure it.

James: But Debbie, like you said a couple of times, you know, you can use electromagnetic something or another to measure presence and you can take photos and stuff. You would say actually there is science or there is evidence.

Debbie: Yeah, there is, I think.

James: What's that evidence?

Debbie: Yeah, well, getting the images, I think that's part of it, but I also see when some of it's the communication with the other side, and the proof of what that person in spirit will come through and say that someone like myself wouldn't know that I can relay that to someone, you know.

James: Give me an example, what happened?

Debbie: I have a client that I've seen quite a number of times now. He came to see me about his father and he had this little toy bulldog that his dad had given him when he was a little boy.

And the whole time, I didn't know about the dad, I just said, you know, I'm seeing your dad and your dad had a heart attack and he's really worried about you. And he said, Oh yeah, you're going deep sea fishing or going fishing soon, but he's telling me you can't go. And he said, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about.

I said, he's telling me there's something wrong with your heart. And I could suddenly see into his heart and I could see there was these three blockages. So there was two on the front, one in the back. And I don't propose to be a medical person at all, but I was just relaying what I saw.

And I said, have you been having any heart problems? He said, no, no, I'm all good – and his wife's a nurse. And I said, look, your dad just wants you to get checked out. And his dad had died of a heart attack. Anyway, I must've said it to him about 20 times in the reading. He says, Oh, for goodness sakes, you just stop it.

And then he rang me a week later and he said, well, I humored you. And he said, I'm not going on the fishing trip now. I'm in hospital. And they gave him three stints. And one of the blockages was the Widowmaker. And so his father had come from the other side to save his son, you know, and a few times now he sort of said, Oh, have I got any blockages? And another time I'd seen two more and he's, he had two more subsequently.

But, yeah, it's funny. If they were nice before they pass, they can be nice when they go to the other side, but other times they can be horrible. Like, you know, I had a lady who suffered really badly with fibromyalgia. And her mother came through, through in the reading, and she said, I don't want her here. I hate my mother. She's horrible, make her go away.

And I said, well, you brought her with you. I can't. And anyway, the mother just kept persisting. And I said, look, just listen to what I have to say, she wants to tell you she's sorry and acknowledges how unpleasant she was to you.

And you do what you want to do with it, but you know, I'm just going to pass the message on and then maybe she'll be quiet.

Anyway, I told her the message and I saw her about a month later, I ran into her at Cronulla, and she said, you won't believe, since I had that reading, I haven't been sick. And she said, I'm finally well. And I said, well, maybe all of that stress was, you know, affecting your health.

Bianca: It's interesting because fibromyalgia, there's much higher incidents in people who've experienced childhood abuse.

James: Oh!

Debbie: Oh well, there you go.

James: Yeah.

Bianca: Yeah.

James: It's not. All the time, as you walk down the street, as you're driving the car?

Debbie: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes, you know, those roadside memorials can be quite challenging because the person's still standing there, you know, and I think that…

Bianca: …that’s very Sixth Sense!

Debbie: … so yeah, that can make it hard or you can go into an historical location and you know, you might see someone hanging in from the ceiling and things like that.

So people think it's all rosy and fun and happy; it's always pretty busy.

Bianca: That's the thing, isn't it? We so desperately want to communicate…

Debbie: …we do…

Bianca: …with the people we've lost. Like, it's such a deep-seated need. I don't think there's anybody that wouldn't want, couldn't think of someone that they would want to just say, I miss you. I love you. You know, what should I do? It's incredible.

Debbie: Yeah. And I think, I think the thing is we always, we all want proof. We all hope there's something more. It's just, it's a hard thing because unless you have your own experience, I'm not someone who wants to change everybody's mind. I think you need to have your own experience so that you have your own understanding and then you make your own decision.

James: If there's a spectrum of sensitivity in this kind of way, then you're at one end, I am at the other. Like, I am zero for any sense of spirituality, other sideness, afterlife, nothing. Like I am just zero. Where would you sit, Bianca?

Bianca: Um, well, it's hard to know how much is wishful thinking, for me. I mean, I didn't grow up in a religious household, I don't subscribe to any religion. As I said, agnostic. I think I would like to think…

James: Have you ever had any moment? Like I have never had a single moment that says to me either, there's God, or there's anything, or there's any spirit, which doesn't mean I'm skeptical of your experience.

Like, there's lots of other things I haven't experienced either, you know what I mean? Like, I've grown old enough to understand that!

But it's like, I'm fascinated by you, to be quivering like a reed in the wind, but this sort of thing, where I'm just sort of, I'm just a buried stump.

Bianca: You're a brick!

I have never had any experience that I couldn't explain as being merely a product of my emotions and wishful thinking. You know, I had two wonderful grandmas who were both very different and who I adored and I like to think, you know, there are some moments that I've had where, you know, I've been really upset by something and I sort of, you know, I like to feel that they're there. I draw comfort from the sense of them not watching over me – because that just sounds gross – but just, you know, they are there.

And, you know, I was talking to my son about this last night and, you know, when people die, my view is when people die, they live on in us. I mean, it's so trite, it's so Hollywood, but they do, you know, I think often about my two, my Onya and my Nan, you know, I imagine what they would think of my kids who they never met, for example, or what, you know, what they would do in this situation.

So they're very much alive in some way, in my heart – God, it sounds like I'm writing a film; it's a Hallmark card – but it's, yeah, I would say there is nothing I have ever experienced that would be anything like what you experience. And again, I'm not to say that those things aren't real. It's again, not been my experience that wasn't just a function of love and grief.

James: Writing a book on death. How has that left you? How's that, how's that altered your feelings about death? What is your relationship to death now?

Bianca: It made me less afraid of dying, in the sense of it being an end of life. I mean, who knows how it will happen, but it made me less frightened of what that's going to be like. Because that was initially what prompted the book, I was with my nan about half an hour before she died and she was clearly dying, she wasn't, she was unconscious.

And you know, I was in the room with my cousins and sort of left there thinking, I wonder what that was like for her. What is she going through? Was she in pain? Could she hear us? So really the book was an attempt to answer those questions. So having done that, there were many aspects that I think, yeah, you know, it's probably not the most fun thing.

I think there was one palliative care doctor who said, look, it's probably like the worst flu and hangover you've ever experienced. Well, you know what? I've had the flu and I've had some pretty horrendous hangovers. So if that's it, I can deal with that. I think for me, the fear around death is leaving my children and my husband.

And I know that they would go on and be fine, they would cope, but it's the idea of them growing up without me and me not being there when they grow up, that scares me. But you know, they're getting older and I sort of, I'm more of the view that, okay, you know what? If I was to depart for whatever reason at this point in my life, I know they’d be okay.

And so the fear for me is lessening as I get older. And I've had a good life. So, you know, I see that with my dad, he's had a good life, he's outlived a whole lot of, you know, his historical ancestors, and he's got a great kind of collection of kids and grandkids. So, yeah, I think I am content with my life. So it holds fewer fears for me now.

James: What's your relationship to death, Debbie?

Debbie: I'm not frightened at all to pass, but I think the most important thing for me is to create memories while I'm here, because I believe that we leave our memories behind with our loved ones, and then we also take them with us when we go to the other side.

You know, and I think it's nice to have those thoughts. And you know, we do have these experiences with our loved ones around us. We have them every day and a lot of us take it for granted. We've got the six, I'm sorry, we've got eight psychic senses, but we've got the five normal senses, but they actually work and coincide with it.

And there's one called ‘clairalience’, where we smell things. So sometimes you might smell grandma's perfume or you might smell someone's smoke, and there's no one around, and you go, that's my imagination. But that's actually one of the psychic ‘clairs’. You know, we can have ‘clair’ touch, when we touch something, and we feel something from it. You might be touching grandma's watch or, you know, and we get a memory from that.

You know, the smells, the sounds – we get sounds through the music or their voices. Or you have visions, there's so many different things. And we get it in our hearts. So clairempathy and clairsentience, those gut feelings that something's wrong.

When you were talking to me before and asking me, was there anything there, there was a big whoosh of sort of cold energy that sort of appeared in the room, and then it's gone again

James: That’d be me!

Debbie: [laughter] But I think, for me, I'm not frightened of death. I'm the same as you; it's leaving your children behind and knowing they'll be all right, but also wanting them to know, we want them to know that our love lives on. I think that's the important thing and how loved they are.

James: Could you die tomorrow?

Debbie: Yeah, I could. Yeah, I had a really, the last really big near-death experience was in 2018. I was falsely diagnosed with carcinoid lymphoma and I was told I probably only had six months to live.

And I was going through all the tests, getting, you know, lung washes and, you know, gastroscopes to see where the cancer had been. And then finally they gave me a PET scan and I didn't know… I'm allergic to a lot of things.

Anyway, I had the PET, had the injection, was fine. They stuck me in a dark room. Next thing you know, I felt myself coming out of the chair, went above the earth and it was like, again, I was above the earth. So it seems to be for me, that's part of the story.

But then I felt these like angelic beings around me and they kind of calm me down cause I could feel my heart going. Because after the injection, I could feel the burning go from my arm up into my brain, I felt my brain was on fire, went to my feet and then came back, and I just thought, I'm going, and I just thought, this is it.

And then a nurse came in because they put me in a dark room, just left me. And then, I rang the buzzer, no one came. Anyway, the nurse came in and said, are you all right? And I said, no. And she said, just drink this. And she walked off and I was like, oh, okay. Then they put me in and I had the CAT scan and the guy was – cause they'd rushed me in, so I was a late Friday night one – and the guy sort of had a go at me afterwards. And he says, well, that was a waste of time. You've wasted my time. And I was like. What? And he says, there's nothing wrong with you. What are you here for? And it was like, it was just really weird. And then he sort of turned everything off and I had to find my way down three floors because I couldn't see properly because of the injection.

And I was really sick for about three weeks and couldn't see properly. And then after that, it all came back normal. So I don't know what happened, but I'm pretty grateful for that. But yeah, I figure I might only have two more goes like a cat, so I'm just going to make the most of what I've got!

Bianca: Yeah, yeah.

James: Probably wise, yeah. Try and land on your paws. What a fascinating conversation. I'm very hopeful that all of us, you know, are not going to die tomorrow, or anywhere soon, anytime soon. But yeah, fantastic to investigate all of this with you. And thank you so much for being part of Life's Booming.

Bianca and Debbie: Thanks for having us… for having us on.

James: Thanks to our guests, Bianca Nogrady and Debbie Malone.

You've been listening to season six of Life's Booming, Dying to Know, brought to you by Australian Seniors.

Please, leave a review or tell someone about it. Head to seniors.com.au/podcast for more episodes. May your life, and your afterlife, be booming.

I'm James Valentine.

ENDS

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