I've always had the impression that the dividing line between life and death was always very clear cut. If you die, it simply means you die and if you had plenty of regrets (eg. I'm still unmarried OR I've always wanted to support a good cause like anal intercourse) you would prolly come back to scare the shit out of us as a ghost. If you are alive, you can still take the time to go all out and pursue the wonders of having a two-way rectum for all I care.

I remember there used to be this movie about teenagers playing with the membrane-thin line between living and dying. FLATLINERS was the name of the teen flcik, I think. It features a group of nothing-better-to-do medical students wanting to play at this forbidden gray area. So they try to get their mates to have their heart rates go flatline before they resuscitate them again. Thus, making it seem as though as they've been wrestled out of the jaws of death. The whole idea is actually ludricious because:

1) Technically, you don't normally shock patients who are flat-lined. It's a medical thingamajig. You only shock people with Ventricular Tachycardia or Ventricular Fibrillation rhythms on the ECG readings. Some more they are medical students and they should know. Aiyoh. These movies never check their facts properly before screening.

2) But then again, who else could be so bo liao to do something like that other than young care-free teenager?

It's silly. But you won't really understand how fragile life really is until you've seen that all-too-cliched term of 'your life flashes past you'. Yes, I've got to see just that recently.

A camp mate of mine (NB: not a colleague and definitely not a friend), let's just call this crazy chap James (his real name). Now James decided to try a party trick he used seven times on his friend (NB: FRIEND not FRIENDS) at a chalet gathering. Basically it involves taking 20 deep breaths before having immense pressure forced upon the heart in an effort to stop the beating. James promised that within one minute or less, the victim would pass out and return within 10 seconds. To crown it off, he wanted to try it on me.

Of course, it was like asking 'hey, do you want me to put your life in danger so that we can be thoroughly entertained at this pathetically boring barbeque gathering?' and my first reaction was to say NO and run as far as possible. But you need to understand what James is like. He's extremely persuasive. He's extremely insistent. And he has enough dragon tattoos to form a mural on the entire Great Wall of China. It's not that he's intimidating or scary. He's just awfully irritating after a while. So you just give in to him in order to get some peace of mind. And that's just what I did.

It wasn't until I was taking deep breaths later that I started to regret what I was doing. What if I died and couldn't reap the full benefits of my insurance policy (not that one is meant to enjoy one’s own insurance policy)? What if I turned into a vegetable after my 20th deep breath because I have somehow built up an irreversible lung of oxygen intake? What about my policy on anal intercourse?

So many things crossed my mind in those tense 20 breaths. I was seriously contemplating what sort of part-time job I could take in heaven. Maybe i could be a road-sweeper or some bohemian artist painting pictures of God everyday. The thing was, I wasn't even given time to wuss out from the experiment. Before I could even look up after my 20th breath, James straightaway positioned his palms over my chest and compressed my sternum against the wall. From a nursing perspective, it was a seriously warped version of CPR, except the irony was that it was killing me rather than saving me.

In layman's terms, it was a manual attempt to stop my heart from beating and on a pain scale of 1-10, it was definitely not a single or double-digit number. Imagine having a car crash into your sternum and your sternum only. Now imagine one of those cars your see in Need For Speed: Underground with all those spray-painted dragon tattoos on it come crashing into your sternum. Oh, the humiliation!

The weird thing was this: I didn't even know I passed out.
It's as if one just transitioned into darkness without experiencing dimming. And before I know it, everything was black and I all I could see was like a mini-screen of sorts. I saw 10 random thoughts just flying past in my mind. I saw a car. And I recalled vivid scenes from my childhood. It's like watching one of those ol' skool projectors flashing photos of your entire life. It's was I was watching a really terrible B-grade movie in the old Empress cinema. Minus the ah peks that is.

And all this happened in what I estimated to be 10-15 seconds.

As sudden as the transition was into darkness, the same went for going back into the light. It's like waking up from sleep, except for first 2 seconds you wake up, you absolutely cannot move or respond. In fact, your brain feels like it was just given the power to wake up again. I found out later than I had only been unconscious for about 5 seconds only. But it seemed like eternity. I'm thinking that I actually went to heaven and I got rejected because I suck at household chores and I can't paint pictures of apples or oranges (what more God?) to save my life.

But all in all, it was a weird experience caught on a camera phone. Alas, not mine. It's weird seeing yourself lose consciousness and actually waking up again. The closest I can come to describing it is prolly your soul watching yourself die. Because when I became unconscious in the video, I just slumped to the floor and James was actually laughing like a mad bitch. It's as if his scientific experiments on transferring tattoos during cloning made a major breakthrough.

And thus, with a close shave with death ticked-off on my list of things to do in life, I'm on to my next goal. Anal intercourse anyone?

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