“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The “blue” middle finger on Jane’s left hand was better, and has been slowly improving a bit each day, yet the visit to see Dr. Sobel was a disaster as far as Jane was concerned. Even now she still feels its aftereffects, five days later—much more so than I’d anticipated she would.

(The irony of the whole affair is that during the visit I thought he’d helped Jane by advocating doing nothing about the finger at the time—which was what we wanted also. While we were there Dr. K. called him and gave him the results of the blood tests begun in the hospital the week before: One was normal, one said vasculitis could be present, the third one didn’t work—so after all of that the results were very meager and frustrating. We haven’t seen Dr. K. yet, or heard from her, although presumably Dr. S. has given her his opinion, whatever that may be.

(During the visit, after he examined the finger, Dr. S. seemed to me at least a bit surprised that Dr. Wilworth had ruled out the possibility of a blood clot; because of its sudden onset I gathered Dr. S. thought this was a possibility. He described an angiogram to us, an out-patient sterile procedure in which a dye is fed into the circulatory system then traced via X-ray to see where blockages might have occurred in the finger. He also described how a catheter could be inserted into a vein in the arm and snaked back to the heart—again painlessly—to see if and where clots could have originated. Jane evidently listened to all of this with horror. Dr. S. also described a couple of drugs—penicillin being one—that was used to reduce the clotting ability of the blood—and also reduced the body’s natural defenses.

(While we were there Dr. S. repeated several times that he wasn’t a vascular surgeon himself. He called a colleague of his who was in Ithaca, and described Jane’s finger condition to him, but if memory serves he received ambiguous information again. Again, I thought the visit at least preserved the status quo for us, since I could see that more and more Jane was turning against the idea of preventative drug treatment for vasculitis, say, or anything else. She was convinced the finger would mend itself, and it appeared to be doing so in its own way. There are more normally-colored patches on it now intermingled with darker spots.

(I also knew she hadn’t wanted to keep the appointment, and that she blamed me at least partly for her keeping it. At the same time she said she wanted to talk to an “expert” on arthritis. I felt caught between these opposing ideas, and didn’t really know what to do. I figured there were reasons for the finger thing erupting so suddenly to begin with, and leading us against our conscious wills into the whole hospital scene at St. Joe’s, so whatever lessons there are in those experiences are still being assimilated. It wasn’t until we returned home Friday afternoon that I began to see how upset Jane had become by thoughts of arthritis, vasculitis, angiograms, clots, drugs, operations, etc. I kept thinking that she was on her way to adopting a stance in which she would turn against medical help and/or advice if at all possible.