What happens after you die?
It might depend on whom you ask, but a North Texas man could have the answer.
By all medical accounts, 52-year-old Ricardo Javier, a neurovascular ICU nurse at Medical City Dallas, shouldn't be alive.
Javier, known to his family and friends as Jo Jo, clinically died after a heart attack while at the gym last year.
"He was dead. He was dead! If he wasn't in the environment he was in, had there not been people skilled to revive his heart in minutes, this conversation wouldn't be happening today," said his colleague and physician, Dr. Allan Shulkin.
"I was on the exercise bike and that's the last thing I remember," Javier said. "They had told my family that I wouldn't make it past the weekend."
Despite surviving the initial heart attack, he was in a medically induced coma for 34 days, during which Javier said he experienced a near-death encounter that included vivid dreams of going through a long tunnel toward a light.
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He remembers being in a white limo, driving through New York City, toward an award show, which he interpreted as the moment he would stand before God and find out if he would be able to enter Heaven.
"People talk about Heaven being this grand place, with lights and sounds, something exciting, and the golden streets and all that, so I guess in my scheme of things, New York would fit that because it's alive and vibrant," Javier said.
"Just traveling in that white limo, in that city, sort of felt like I was about to meet whoever at the end," Javier said.
However, his dream didn't end with a divine encounter.
"All of a sudden, the limo turns into a gray tunnel and I find myself walking down this gray tunnel toward this voice," he said.
The voice, he recalls, was coming from someone in need of help.
He doesn't recall what happened afterward, but as he reflects back, he believes the voice was a sign that his work on Earth wasn't done.
"I don't know yet, maybe to continue my work here as a nurse, maybe it's not over. Maybe there are some things in the family that I haven't resolved or maybe there are some things in my life that need to be resolved before I go to Heaven. I believe that God wants you to be the best version of yourself, and honestly, I don't think I'm the best version of myself all the time," Javier said.
Javier woke up from his coma with no brain damage and made a full recovery.
"We know physiology. We know biochemistry, but we don't know what's in a person's soul or heart and why does one person recover and another doesn't? There's something far beyond our capacity that makes these things happen," Shulkin said.
Call it divine intervention that's given Javier renewed purpose.
"So, right now, maybe God's giving me a chance to be the best version of myself," Javier said.
Every day in the U.S., there are 774 near-death experiences, according to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.
