“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

So last night, less than two days after she’d held her last session, I asked Jane for some material about the central theme of her days in the hospital, both from her own viewpoint and that of the doctors who probed, examined, and discussed her and her problems. Some of them talked about her right in front of her as though she weren’t there—and, Jane said, with her hearing still much impaired at that time, she almost felt as though she wasn’t there.

Actually, I came to realize, Jane was so terrified by the thought of those operations that mentally she shunted aside all such prospects. Only when she was home did she begin to fathom the possible depths of the physical reality she’d created for herself, with my help. To coin a phrase, she was “truly, deeply shocked.” The doctors wanted to literally cut the major joints out of her body! To replace them with metal and plastic joints inserted into the bone ends and cemented in place. Jane cried. Her voice shook. “But in spite of everything, over all those years I never felt sick until I went into the hospital,” she wailed. The glowing reports we heard and read about successful joint-replacement operations meant little to her. “Sure, for one joint, or two, maybe,” I said, then shut up, not wanting to add my own fears to her fears. But four of those operations? And why stop there? If they fixed her knees and hips, what about her shoulders? She couldn’t raise her arms level with them. “Oh, they’d operate on the shoulders, too,” a doctor told me in front of Jane, without inflection, as though we were discussing an inanimate mechanism that needed rebuilding. Six operations, then. But what about my wife’s elbows, and her fingers? Somebody at the hospital —I forget who—told us that joint replacements for the fingers and/or knuckles usually weren’t all that successful: The bones in the hands were pretty small and delicate. But it could well be argued that Jane needed to be able to write with a pen or pencil, to express her basic creativity in that particular elementary fashion, even more than she needed to walk. (It would be great if she could at least use a typewriter!) So there could be eight operations, or ten, or …?

Let me quickly add that all of the doctors who examined her advanced their suggestions while trying to be helpful, and in the name of “truth” as they saw it—with individual variations, of course. To us, however, in all but one case their general unconscious biases were negative. The exception was the youngish doctor Jane had referred to at the very end of her last session. As it happened, he was the one who’d had her admitted to the hospital to begin with. He’d offered Jane encouragement as she is, and she had felt an immediate psychic rapport with him. But he was a neurologist, and we saw less and less of him as it was determined that his special skills wouldn’t be of continuing help in Jane’s situation. In the overwhelming medical view, then, as Jane said, the operations were the only way for her to go….