“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After a long pause in midsentence Jane began to doze. Her head dipped down. Her body began to slowly lean against the right arm of her chair in what has become a characteristic pose, for both her thyroid activity, and therefore her energy, are still below par even though she’s been out of the hospital for 24 days now. By 9:17 she was asleep. Watching her tilt more and more, I wondered whether she truly had the psychic and physical reserves to heal herself—whether anybody would under the circumstances. Perhaps her challenges were too much for her. What were her limits, how much more could she take after some 17 years of ever-increasing struggle, whether or not those challenges had been chosen—some of them far in advance—for whatever reasons?

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 …?