Callie Elwayns suffered a fatal lung collapse but then endured an out-of-body experience before being plucked back into life — but not before she lost an important piece of her
A woman who ‘died’ for three minutes has told how she lost something huge but gained something even bigger.
Callie Elwayns suffered a tension pneumothorax, a life-threatening condition where air builds up in the space between the lung and chest wall, causing it to press on the heart and major blood vessels. She collapsed and her heart stopped beating for three minutes.
During that time, she says she had an out-of-body experience, adding that she understands exactly why she had to go through it, explaining the profound impact it’s had on her.
Speaking to The Other Side YouTube channel, Callie, from Alberta, Canada, described the near-death experience. She said: “I knew I was having a lung collapse because of the pain and the inability to breathe, but something else was going on, which terrified me, so I called 911.” Moments later, she collapsed after suffering the tension pneumothorax.
Paramedics arrived and spent three minutes trying to resuscitate Callie, whose heart stopped beating. She was eventually brought back to life in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
She says she saw something she could only describe as “love” as she experienced a “vast awareness” and felt like she was becoming a spirit. “In other words, I lost a sense of my person, my identity as Callie,” she recalled.
“But it was an awareness knowing itself – it was like I became a part of everything.
“And I felt an immediate dissolving away of anything physical but also any identity. I found myself in a timeless space. It was like I was in a universe full of tiny lights.”
Callie believes she lost her sense of self because she needed to, having endured a traumatic childhood with a mother whose chaotic behaviour was “episodic”.
By the age of 13, she no longer felt safe in her own home and began sleeping rough. Three years later, she suffered a collapsed lung and was rushed to hospital. In the subsequent months and years, she suffered a collapsed lung several more times. She believes they were a manifestation of “fear and shame” attacking her.
Callie’s health eventually improved and she was able to lead a normal life, welcoming two children.
However, her perspective changed after her near-death experience, which she says has cleansed her body of her childhood trauma.
“I felt whole,” she said. “When I came back and entered my body again — which had been depleted and was having lung collapses and had been having fear and shame for so long — I realised I had that love inside of me this whole time.”
