U.S. Marines patrol with Afghan soldiers in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

This week we will be talking a lot about Afghanistan and the impact of the President’s speech. Having spent a fair amount of time there, including a trip just a couple of months ago, I am always reminded of the human impact of any conflict. I am reminded there are consequences to all those booms and explosions we see on television. I am reminded of the horrific injuries I saw due to IED explosions where young men and women are robbed of their legs, and their lives. I am also reminded of the remarkable sacrifice the doctors, nurses, medics and all the medical personnel make every single day out there. They truly risk their lives to save the lives of others.

Medicine and the military are embraced in an awkward dance and no where is that more true than in Afghanistan. Because of the terrain, most of the med evac missions are carried out by chopper. They typically have 20 minutes to fly to the patients, 20 minutes to stabilize and treat, and 20 minutes to get the patients to more medical care. It is one golden hour. Right now, even as I write this, these medics are sleeping in forward operating bases just behind the front line troops – with their boots on, and eyes half open in dusty desert tents waiting to get the call. Waiting for a chance to save their fellow soldiers who got the call before them.

Truth of the matter, nearly three-fourths of the time, the call they get is to take care of an Afghan local or soldier. In fact, if you look at the breakdown of operations performed at the coalition force run Kandahar Role III, the largest trauma hospital in the country, most are performed on Afghan patients. The local medical system in Afghanistan lacks the infrastructure to take care of most of these sorts of injuries. There is only one vascular surgeon in the country, two neurosurgeons and really no ability to perform cardiac surgery. It made me wonder what will happen to patients with trauma a year from now or in five or ten years.

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN

Dr. Sanjay Gupta | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

From the office to the operating room, Dr. Sanjay Gupta tweets.

"two hours till #1023. about to turn 40. I hit my goals for physical fitness. now, feeling contemplative. good time to reflect and meditate."
7:07 PM Oct 22nd from TwitterBerry

Follow Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Twitter: @sanjayguptacnn

Laura Geraghty was shocked 21 times before she came back from cardiac arrest with tales of the afterlife.

Caleb Hellerman
CNN Medical Senior Producer

Our special this weekend, “Another Day: Cheating Death,” includes the story of Laura Geraghty, a school bus driver in Massachusetts who survived a cardiac arrest that left her without a heartbeat for 57 minutes. While the medical aspect is astounding, just as interesting is the story Geraghty told when she was revived.

She’d floated out of her body, and found herself in a world of incredibly bright light – heaven, she says. While there she saw her son, daughter, granddaughter and even her ex-husband – who wouldn’t take her hand when she reached out to him. Eventually she came back to the real world.

Many cultures and religions describe a vivid world on the border of life and death, but the classic modern near-death experience, or NDE, was described by Dr. Raymond Moody in his 1966 book, “Life After Life.” While not every NDE includes the same features, among the most common – according to Moody – are bright lights, a tunnel, a sense of being out of the body and an intense feeling of peace and calm.

Most people who return from the verge of death with memories like this say it’s a life-changing experience. Many view it as direct proof of an afterlife – that the place they “visit” is the world we all will see after we die. But increasingly, near-death experience (a term coined by Moody) is being studied from the perspective of science.

Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, believes an NDE is caused by REM activity, the same type of brain activity that’s linked to dreaming. REM activity, says Nelson, can be triggered by intense stress or even lack of oxygen. In fact, he says many people experience an out-of-body experience during fainting episodes, or if they momentarily lose blood flow to the brain – as in a massive head rush.

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Sanjay Gupta says the latest CPR techniques can save the lives of vicitims of cardiac arrest.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Program Note: Tune in tonight to watch Dr. Sanjay Gupta report on a near-death experience. AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Editor's Note: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, is author of the new book "Cheating Death," which will be published next month. This article originally appeared in the September 20, 2009, issue of Parade and Parade.com.

I am going to let you in on a secret: When a person's heart stops beating, it's not the end. Contrary to what you may think, death is not a single event. Instead, it's a process that can be interrupted.

Mike Mertz knows this firsthand. On January 23, 2008, the 59-year-old Arizona man was driving home from work. The last thing he remembers is pulling into his complex's driveway. Then his heart stopped. Corey Ash, a passing UPS driver, noticed a silver Saturn wedged between a palm tree and a wall, with the engine running and a person slumped at the wheel. Ash stopped to investigate. He switched off the car's engine, pulled Mertz out, and laid him on the ground. Ash called 911 and started pumping the older man's chest. The next few minutes would be absolutely critical for Mertz.

If you had been there, standing over Mertz's lifeless body, would you have known what to do?

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Rescuers worked frantically to save Anna Bagenholm from a hole in the ice of a mountain stream.

David S. Martin
CNN Medical Senior Producer

North of the Arctic Circle, the weather is unforgiving, the population is scattered and the distances are immense. At the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsø, the northernmost teaching hospital in the world, doctors routinely use a helicopter ambulance and fixed-wing plane to transport the most serious cases for care – or to bring emergency care to the patient. It’s all about buying time.

During a visit Tromsø, we shadowed Dr. Mads Gilbert, who heads the Department of Emergency Medical Services at the hospital, a small city surrounded by water and mountains. He describes trauma care in this part of the world as “cold, dark, distance and dangerous.” The cold poses its own challenges, and Dr. Gilbert and the team see a lot of hypothermia from ski accidents and people who’ve fallen out of fishing boats falling into the water.

Dr. Gilbert was on call 24 hours a day all week when we were there. He is 62, a rangy man with the energy and enthusiasm of someone half his age.

“What we do with emergency medicine — be it airway breathing, chest compressions, bleeding control, treating hypothermia — is to slow or even stop the death process. So it’s really the struggle between life and death and I always feel like we’re standing on the shore with the tide coming up. We’re trying to pull people from the tide of death and onto the dry land of life,” Gilbert said with a flourish.

Hours after we arrived, his team scrambled in the middle of the night, putting on jumpsuits and helmets and climbing aboard the helicopter ambulance. The temperature was just a degree or two above freezing as the helicopter lifted off and a chilling rain soon began to fall. A young man was suffering from an uncontrollable seizure, and the local doctor wasn’t sure whether it was an allergic reaction or something more serious. The helicopter ambulance team brought the patient back to the hospital.

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Anderson Cooper | BIO
AC360° Anchor

Health care workers in Indiana and Tennessee were among the first to receive the H1N1 vaccine.

David Puente
AC360° Producer

“Is Sanjay still in the building?” that’s what I heard a senior producer in New York shouting across the newsroom at almost 6PM today.

“Not likely at this hour on a Friday,” someone else mumbled. But sure enough Sanjay said he’d be ready to be on the set to pretape a segment with Anderson on the rapid rise in pediatric deaths from H1N1. I was assigned to produce the segment so I reached out to our medical unit’s producer and formulated questions.

Then CNN’s medical unit confirmed that there were another 19 deaths of children and teens from H1N1 reported in the past week around the country. That brings the total number of fatalities to 76 among those younger than age 18.

There were two deaths reported in Maryland, three were in Tennessee, seven in Texas and one each in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.

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