“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I brought Jane back home from St. Joseph’s hospital in Elmira, New York at about 4:15 PM yesterday. Her doctor, Marsha Kardon, had had her admitted at supper time the day before [May 20, Thursday] because the middle finger of Jane’s left hand had begun to turn blue from the last joint to the nail.

(Jane first became aware that something was wrong with the finger at 2 PM or so Thursday, as we were finishing an interview with Peggy Gallagher about our experience in the 1972 flood in Elmira. The finger began to ache as she sat with it in her lap as we congregated at the kitchen table. At the same time it began to feel colder than the others, and Jane had pain in the palm of her hand and midway up her arm, on the outside and underneath—these points forming a rather straight pathway down to the finger, we noted. However, it was apparent at once that circulation to the finger was impaired. Peggy left, after saying a situation like that shouldn’t be allowed to go unchecked.

(Ever since she’d gotten up on Thursday, Jane had talked about increased muscular activity in many parts of her body, as though the body was trying to free itself in a beneficial way. She’d been quite uncomfortable at times, especially in the legs. Thus the finger business was a complete surprise to us. We noticed increased redness, also, around the nails of the other fingers on the left hand, but that situation had prevailed to varying degrees for a long time.

(I called the doctor not long after Peggy left. Dr. K. said, “I think I’d better take a look at that.” She’d been out of her office, but returned my call to her nurse almost at once. She was at the house by 6 PM, examined the finger and gave Jane a quick general checkup. She talked about a possible blood clot, “other causes,” and mentioned vasculitis, a condition that results in restricted capillary blood flow to the extremities, and can accompany arthritis. She’d suspected vasculitis when Jane had been first admitted to Arnot Ogden early in February, but tests had ruled it out. Dr. K. went home to call Dr. Sobel in Ithaca, and Dr. Wilwerth at St. Joe’s. The former is a rheumatologist who examined Jane at the Arnot, the latter is a specialist in circulatory matters. She soon called to say that Dr. Sobel was out of town for at least a week, and that Dr. W. didn’t think a clot was involved from the description she’d given him.

(Jane had to have an EKG before she left, though, so we waited for that. The results of the tracings on graph paper were excellent, Dr. K said, going over them with me. They looked like three lines of beautifully fluctuating, regular tracings. I asked for the graph, but Dr. K needed it for reference and record. The results made Jane feel good, though.

I guess I think that all disease, to one extent or another, anyway, is fear (pause), and I felt a few minutes ago my neck doing some odd things. And I don’t know what these are. But I felt tubes coming down my neck where they’d been so rigid that they bent where they shouldn’t, and the blood flow wasn’t as good in those bends. And I visually and mentally saw the one in the back side of my neck that went down my neck and shoulder relax and straighten out, so that the blood began to go down easier and quicker. And I felt the same thing happening down toward the arms, and that there was one long tube in particular in my left arm that had been bent and twisted, like a portion of a rubber hose —and that also had to do with the release of wrist and elbow motion, and that that was releasing, getting straighter and unbending.