So, when do you think your spirit leaves your body? Until this week, I thought it was when you are dead (You are pulseless and apneic with no electrical activity), but now I am not so sure...
No idea. When the spirit leaves, you are dead... the incorporeal separated from the meatsuit. If the meat keeps on functioning, so?....
I ran a pt working EMS that had not been seen alive for 20 minutes. He was as dead as fried chicken. Pulseless, apneic, asystole (flatline/ zero electrical activity) for 27 minutes after that. Three minutes before we called it, we got pulses back. My only thought was "Man I would be mad." None of us expected that to happen at all.
I wouldn’t deviate from what you thought. Exceptions don’t make for good processes or good theology. Sounds like God was gracious to this guy. Gave him more time on Earth.
Is there a reason the spirit can't leave the body and subsequently return to it? It does raise all sorts of questions about exactly what it means to die.
Just thinking around the original question, in a case like this one I wonder if the spirit never left (in which case the question is just when it does leave) or if it left and returned.
I can imagine; I would be exceptionally depressed short of a face-to-face, "here's why". The soul leaves the body whenever it leaves, but who knows when that is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't think we're properly human in an incorporeal state, but that's a different question for a different thread. (I have a friend who is an emergency room doctor. He once told me a story about a basically DOA patient who they worked on for a bit. They declared him dead, then a few minutes later he sat up, screamed the most horrible scream my friend has ever heard, then fell back down dead.)
Or is it possible for the individuals spirit to leave, not return and something else inhabit it? That would be bothersome.