Between Life and Death: Physician Accounts Near Abdali

Jordan's spirit traditions are shaped by the country's deep Islamic heritage, its ancient history as the crossroads of civilizations, and the surviving folk beliefs of its Bedouin and settled communities. Like other Islamic societies, Jordanian supernatural belief centers on djinn — beings created by God from smokeless fire who inhabit a parallel dimension and can interact with humans in various ways. Jordanian folk traditions are particularly rich in djinn lore associated with the country's dramatic landscape: the sandstone canyons of Petra, the desert wadis, the hot springs of the Dead Sea region, and the ancient ruins scattered across the country are all considered potential djinn habitations. Bedouin oral tradition includes elaborate accounts of djinn encounters in the desert, including djinn appearing as phantom animals or travelers, djinn fires that lure travelers off course, and djinn who guard buried treasure.

The ancient Nabatean city of Petra, carved into rose-red sandstone cliffs over 2,000 years ago and later abandoned, occupies a particularly powerful place in Jordanian supernatural imagination. The local Bedouin community, the Bdoul, maintained oral traditions about the djinn who inhabited Petra's elaborate tomb facades and temples, and these beliefs influenced the site's reputation for centuries before it became a major tourist destination. The Treasury (Al-Khazneh) at Petra is traditionally believed to hold ancient treasures guarded by supernatural forces.

Traditional Jordanian healing practices include ruqyah (Quranic recitation for healing), the use of protective amulets (hijab or tamima), and rituals to counteract the evil eye (al-ayn or al-hasad). The hammam (bathhouse) tradition, brought to Jordan during the Ottoman period, also carries spiritual associations, with bathhouses considered liminal spaces where the boundary between the human and djinn worlds is thin.

Jordanian perspectives on near-death experiences are primarily shaped by Islamic eschatology, which describes a detailed journey of the soul after death. The Islamic tradition of the soul encountering angels, experiencing a review of one's deeds, and glimpsing either paradise or punishment provides a framework within which Jordanian NDE accounts are understood and interpreted. Jordanian researchers at the University of Jordan have explored death anxiety and afterlife beliefs among Jordanian patients, finding that strong religious faith — whether Muslim or Christian (Jordan has a significant Christian minority) — is associated with reduced fear of death. Bedouin oral traditions include accounts of individuals who returned from apparent death with descriptions of journeys that parallel both Islamic eschatological narratives and the structural elements identified in Western NDE research, suggesting that these experiences may reflect universal aspects of human consciousness that are interpreted through available cultural and religious frameworks.

Jordan's miracle traditions span Islamic, Christian, and indigenous Bedouin healing practices. The country's Christian minority, among the oldest Christian communities in the world, maintains traditions of miraculous healing associated with holy sites, particularly the Baptism Site of Jesus (Al-Maghtas) on the Jordan River, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Islamic healing traditions, including ruqyah (Quranic recitation), hijama (cupping), and the use of prophetic remedies such as black seed and honey, are widely practiced. The Dead Sea region has served as a natural healing center for over two millennia, with the unique properties of the Dead Sea water and mud producing documented therapeutic benefits for conditions including psoriasis, arthritis, and respiratory illness. Bedouin traditional medicine, including the use of desert herbs and animal products, continues in rural communities, and dramatic recovery stories following traditional treatments are part of Jordanian folk tradition.

Midwest winters near Abdali, Amman impose a seasonal isolation that has historically accelerated the development of self-care traditions. Farm families who couldn't reach a doctor for months developed their own medical competence—setting bones, stitching wounds, managing fevers with willow bark and prayer. This tradition of medical self-reliance persists in the Midwest and influences how patients interact with the healthcare system.

Midwest medical students near Abdali, Amman who choose family medicine over higher-paying specialties do so with full awareness of the financial sacrifice. They're choosing to be the physician who delivers babies, manages diabetes, splints fractures, and counsels grieving widows—all in the same afternoon. This choice, driven by a commitment to comprehensive care, is the foundation of Midwest healing.

The Midwest's Catholic Worker movement near Abdali, Amman applies Dorothy Day's radical hospitality to healthcare through free clinics, respite houses, and accompaniment programs for the terminally ill. These faith-based healers don't distinguish between the worthy and unworthy sick—they serve whoever appears at the door, because their theology demands it. The exam room becomes an extension of the communion table.

Midwest funeral traditions near Abdali, Amman—the visitation, the church service, the graveside committal, the reception in the church basement—provide a structured healing process for grief that modern medicine's emphasis on individual therapy cannot replicate. The communal funeral, with its casseroles and coffee and shared tears, heals the bereaved through sheer social saturation. The Midwest grieves together because it has always healed together.

Great Lakes maritime ghosts have a peculiar relationship with Midwest hospitals near Abdali, Amman. Sailors pulled from freezing Lake Superior or Lake Michigan were often beyond saving by the time they reached shore hospitals. These drowned men are said to return during November storms—the month the lakes claim the most ships—arriving at emergency departments with water dripping from coats, seeking treatment for hypothermia that set in a century ago.

The Midwest's meatpacking industry created hospitals near Abdali, Amman that treated injuries of industrial-scale brutality: amputations, lacerations, and chemical burns that occurred daily in the slaughterhouses. The ghosts of these workers—immigrant laborers from a dozen nations—are said to appear in hospital corridors with injuries that glow red against their translucent forms, a grisly reminder of the human cost of the nation's food supply.

Dr. Kolbaba wrote that he 'learned that there are still people who care about others, and who try to help someone in need every day. I learned that even though physicians value their careers, that family values rank even higher.' For physicians in Abdali who have lost sight of this balance, the book is a lifeline.

The prioritization of family values over career achievement that Kolbaba observed among his physician interviewees runs counter to the prevailing culture of medicine, which rewards long hours, professional sacrifice, and an identity almost entirely defined by one's role as a doctor. Yet the physicians who had the most extraordinary stories to share — the ones who had witnessed miracles, who had been transformed by their patients — were often the ones who had maintained the strongest connections outside of medicine. This correlation suggests that professional fulfillment in medicine may depend not on career intensity but on personal wholeness.

Physician suicide remains one of medicine's most tragic and under-addressed crises. An estimated 300-400 physicians die by suicide annually in the United States — a rate significantly higher than the general population. Female physicians are at particularly elevated risk, with suicide rates 250-400% higher than women in other professions. For the medical community in Abdali, every one of these deaths represents a colleague, a friend, a mentor, and a healer whose loss diminishes the entire profession.

The Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation, named for a New York City emergency physician who died by suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic, has advocated for removing invasive mental health questions from medical licensing applications — a change that may encourage more physicians in Abdali and nationwide to seek help. Dr. Kolbaba's book contributes to this effort by normalizing vulnerability among physicians and demonstrating that the most extraordinary physicians are not the ones who suppress their emotions, but the ones who remain open to being moved.

The concept of "death by a thousand cuts" has been applied to physician burnout by researchers who argue that it is not any single stressor but the cumulative effect of countless minor frustrations that drives physicians out of medicine. Dr. Christine Sinsky, vice president of professional satisfaction at the AMA, has documented the "pebbles in the shoe" of daily practice: the EHR login that requires multiple passwords, the prior authorization fax that goes unanswered, the policy that mandates documentation of a negative review of systems for every visit, the meeting that could have been an email. Each pebble, taken individually, is trivial. Collectively, they create an environment so friction-laden that the fundamental acts of medicine—listening, examining, diagnosing, treating—become secondary to the administrative apparatus that surrounds them.

Sinsky's ethnographic time-motion studies, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, provide the most granular data available on how physicians in Abdali, Amman, and nationwide actually spend their time. The findings are sobering: for every hour of direct patient care, physicians spend nearly two hours on EHR and desk work, with an additional one to two hours of after-hours work at home. These ratios invert the purpose of medical practice—the physician exists to serve the record, not the patient. "Physicians' Untold Stories" represents a conscious inversion of this inversion. Dr. Kolbaba's accounts center the patient encounter—in all its mystery and wonder—as the irreducible core of medical practice, reminding physicians that the pebbles, however numerous, cannot bury the bedrock.