A discussion of near death experiences

What happened: 4 years ago I was scuba diving in the Puget Sound between Washington state and Canada. I had a couple of good dives that day and wasnt expecting anything. It was a long day and I started getting tired, and because I was tired I started breathing hard. My regulator was somewhat stuck and not letting all the air through, so I wasn't able to get all the air my body needed. This had the result of me breathing harder to get more air, which caused the regulator to resist even more. This escalated until I started hyperventilating, which caused the regulator to 'free flow', meaning it just gets stuck on (the opposite of the problem I was having prior to this). Free flow is generally easy to handle, but is impossible when you are hyperventalating. So, I began to suffocate. I was too deep to rise to the surface, but I couldn't breath correctly where I was. The first thing that happened was I started to hallucinate, I saw things in the murky depths much like what you would read in a Lovecraft novel.

To my primate mind, the mask was keeping me from breathing. I knew that taking my mask off would lead to my death, but let me tell you something, every fiber of my being was trying to get me to do it. I kept looking up, wondering if I could make an emergency surfacing, starting to panic and not knowing what fate would be worst, rising to the surface and having any number of things bad happen, not the worst of which being my lungs bursting, or simply drowning. This is when my life started to flash before my eyes.

It may be cliche but thinking my wife as a widow was the only thing that kept me in the presence of mind to make the right decision. I had visions of cthulu, blind panic, and training all fighting to tell me to do different deadly actions, but I also had the image of my wife. The thought of her got me to do the right thing, wait. I waited, did my best to clear my mind and wait. Eventually my buddy found me, put his hand on my shoulder, and looked into my eyes. It's funny how such a primal thing got me to slow down my breathing. Eventually I got it under control, surface, and never went scuba diving again.

How it changed me: I'm terrified of dying, and it's debilitating. Before, I was a typical atheist, whenever I thought about death I just hoped I'de make a mark on the world before I went. Now that I know what's involved its not so simple. Absolute terror is what is involved, and whether it's a car crash, heart attack, or cancer, I know that terror will be back. There is no escaping it.