“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Several of the brightest young rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons had my future all mapped out for me, or so it appeared, as they discussed my case. When they spoke to Rob and me I tried to listen, but my hearing was still so poor that it was nearly impossible to make out one full sentence at a time. All the doctors seemed to agree that I had a kind of burned-out case of rheumatoid arthritis, with little active inflammation. But one doctor soberly told me that I’d never walk again, or even put my weight upon my feet again, unless I underwent a series of joint-replacement operations—if, he cautioned, I proved to be a “proper candidate.”

(9:05.) The particular group of young doctors I saw, the specialists, were probably the fanciest-looking dandies that Elmira has known. They were superlative-looking young men, dressed in the latest of fashions, and even in the hospital it was apparent that they were properly clothed in the finest of social mores as well. They were in their collective way like magicians, producing wonders out of the clear air, stunning you with their charming smiles and manners, trying to win you over to some strange cause.

As I wrote in the first essay, “the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it.” Even if Jane had all of those operations—even if she ended up able to walk after a fashion—she’d still have arthritis. She was suffused with it. Our beliefs said so. So did her body, as everyone could see. “Your joints are destroyed,” Dr. Mandali told Jane, after getting the opinion of the young out-of-town rheumatologist she’d asked to examine my wife. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life inside, in a wheelchair? That’s a pretty limited existence you’re talking about there….” And Jane, trying to protect herself from the negative suggestions that had been administered to her like psychic hammerblows, ever since she’d entered the hospital, could only weakly demur on the subject of operations.