“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 …?

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.

(8:47 A.M. Our original idea was to insert the session Jane gave this morning in one of the earlier essays. This would have been a very mechanical approach. More, it would have involved altering dates, and changing or eliminating some of the copy to make the rest of it fit—all things I dislike doing. After Jane came through with her dictation I told myself I’d know what to do with it, and awoke the next morning with the clear understanding that her session should be presented just as is, and when we received it. Jane said okay. The subjects discussed are deeply charged for us, and the physical and psychological aspects of some of them could be devastating if we allowed them to be. Presenting the session in a more isolated manner here, then, may give the reader a clearer idea of how we felt during Jane’s early days in the hospital [and later too, for that matter]. This course also lets the session serve as an automatic bridge to some of the material in the earlier essays.

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.

I should note, by the way, that her bedsores weren’t infected when she went into the hospital, but were less than a week later. [...] “If the infection in that ulcer on your coccyx reaches the bone, it means at least a six-week stay in the hospital,” exclaimed Jane’s principal doctor, Rita Mandali (not her real name). [...] And I began to read up on how many kinds of staphylococcus bacteria alone there are, and indeed how common infections are in hospitals, since by their very nature those institutions are far from being the cleanest in town….

That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. [...] Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the events in our lives that preceded—and then followed—the hospital experience that affected us so much.

Indeed, I didn’t learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she’d returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it on March 30, amid others in her writing room. [...]

Jane has been home from the hospital since last Sunday, March 28. [...]

(Yesterday marked the beginning of Jane’s third week home from the hospital, and lately I’ve been trying to gently encourage her to begin a series of private sessions in an effort to learn what we can about the whole hospital-health-establishment belief system, and our part in it through and with the Seth material. I was eager to get Jane started on a program of self-therapy through the Seth material in order to help her counter—or at least supplement—the standard rigid medical framework we’ve been encountering for the last month, or since she went into the hospital on February 26, 1982. [...]

(A note: I haven’t answered fan mail since bringing Jane home from the hospital on March 28, and already it is beginning to pile up. I kept up with it religiously while visiting Jane each day for the month she was in the hospital. [...]

[...] [The contract was countersigned on March 22.] “Don’t worry,” I said to Jane in the hospital, “I know who’s going to do the rest of the work on the book....” [...]

(A note: Jane has mentioned several times since returning home that Seth may dictate a biography of her—presumably including her hospital experiences, etc. [...]

[...] JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL

[...] Today’s question was simple enough—but I wanted to know what would be different at the house when she returned home this time, compared to the situation at the house before she went into the hospital. [...]

(See my hospital notes today for details regarding my talk with Fred Kardon here at the house this morning. [...]

[...] Rather a strange thing to realize that in these hospital sessions she’s giving trance material while laying down—something I recall her doing only a couple of times in all the years previous.)

[...] JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL

[...] The will to live is strengthened in your own environment more than it is in this (hospital) one, and can be revived to a remarkable degree. [...]

[...] It hadn’t sounded like him—only her, speaking somewhat haltingly and not too clearly as she lay flat on her back in the hospital mud bed, with her broken right arm held snugly against her ribs and chest by the blue and white canvas sling. [...]

‘The hospital obviously represents the jumping-off point into another reality for Jane. [...] But more often than not people go to hospitals to prevent their physical deaths, to stay away from realities like the one Jane is in for as long as possible. I also think that at this time in our history the hospital — any hospital — is a powerful social symbol for our species’ strengths and weaknesses. I use the hospital in a positive way by plunging out into the hall; I signal myself that I mean to keep on living physical.

Why do we have jobs at a hospital, when Jane was so afraid of them while she was physical? I interpret our employment there, and her joyful mood, to mean that from where she is now she no longer fears hospitals and the medical establishment — that she’s moved beyond that deep apprehension she began to build up around the age of three, as her mother became gradually, and permanently, incapacitated with rheumatoid arthritis. I think that my own much more pleasant earlier experiences with the hospital in Sayre, including my doing free-lance art work for some of its doctors, helped me place the locale for this adventure there, rather than at the hospital in Elmira, where Jane died. [...]

[...] Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. [...] We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. [...]

[...] I was obligated to spend many months finishing a Seth book — Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment — that we had started way back in September 1979, long before she went into the hospital; as I had planned to, I resumed work on that project the day after she died. (Jane was cremated the next day, in a process we had agreed upon several years ago.) I also worked upon two other books we collaborated upon after she had been hospitalized. [...]

(And as Jane and I had discussed while she was in the hospital, she had indeed explored quite seriously the possibility of physical death—much more so than either of us had realized on conscious levels before her admittance to the hospital.)

(This information came through because Jane’s doctor, Marsha Kardon, had told her in the hospital that tests showed Jane’s thyroid gland had quit working altogether—with the concomitant fact that Jane would have to take a synthetic thyroid extract—Synthroid—daily for the rest of her life.)

[...] Well, that image cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience, leaving Ruburt with his more native, far more realistic image of himself. [...]

(We were very encouraged by two points especially that Seth had mentioned this evening: that Jane’s thyroid had repaired itself before—which event now could free her from dependence upon medication—and that the Sinful Self’s superhuman image had “cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience.” [...]

(The above is a partial list of staff members who have had serious medical problems that we know about since Jane came into the hospital last April 20. These are people we have come into more or less regular contact with in our own small circle in the hospital. Magnify their number proportionally amid the 1,000 or so employees at the hospital, and what sort of percentage of sick employees would you have? [...]

[...] I worked on Dreams this morning, and mailed our letters to Maude Cardwell on my way to the hospital this noon. [...]

Jane died in the hospital at 2:08 a.m. on Wednesday, September 5, 1984, after being there, quite helpless in certain ways, for a year and nine months. It was the third time she’d been hospitalized since February 1982. [...]

The Way Toward Health is more than an account of the stay — and death — of my wife, Jane Roberts, in a hospital in Elmira, New York, just 13 years ago. [...]

During those 21 months in the hospital, Jane, Seth, and I said much about her physical/psychic condition, and I recorded it all in my homemade shorthand as best I could under often very stressful conditions. [...]

During all of this time, we told no one in the hospital what we were specifically doing — staff accepted our conventional explanation that we were writers and “just working.” [...]

(This evening she lay nude on her back in her bed in room 330 in St. Joseph’s hospital. She’s mentioned trying to have a session for the last two days, after I’ve been mentioning it briefly to her recently, as per our agreement to see if she could have Seth sessions while in the hospital. [...]

[...] Their visit was most unusual at night, and we hadn’t seen Bill at the hospital for months. They left after an exchange of the usual hospital-type visit and conversation at 7:36.

[...] Actually, I thought, this was almost an ideal time to try for a session in the hospital, for after supper she wasn’t apt to be bothered by staff people for some little time. [...]

(There followed a very confusing [and to me upsetting] several hours during which Jane and our neighbor, Leonard Yaudes, tried contacting Miss Callahan’s doctor, her relatives, her friends, our landlady, and a hospital. [...] There were mix-ups, in which Miss Callahan’s doctor was waiting for her at the emergency room at the hospital while Miss Callahan stayed home, and during which time Jane called the relatives several times, pleading with them to help, etc. It finally ended when Jane and Leonard secured the help of another doctor, who arrived by midnight and stated that Miss Callahan should be in the hospital.

(After midnight, the relatives finally showed up, and with Jane’s help took Miss Callahan to the hospital.

[...] Joe had lain in bed in the trailer, and Margaret had resisted sending him to a hospital. [...] As I drove John to the hospital, he said the date of my dream checked with developments Margaret had described. [...] John took the car after leaving me at the hospital, and called at 6:45 to say “mission accomplished,” that all were home now. [...]

(On March 6, 1984 I wrote this in the daily notes I make each day at the hospital: “This afternoon I described to Jane my dream last night about Joe Bumbalo. [...]

[...] I’d told Jane to use suggestion so that she wouldn’t be bothered by whatever Roe might say, but suspected that Roe would want Dr. Kardon to examine the bedsores, and probably this would lead to a demand that Jane would go back into the hospital. [I didn’t tell Jane the hospital part of my suspicions, though.]

[...] At the same time, I wanted material on why Jane might be perpetuating behavior that might lead her back into the hospital—an experience which she’d found to be so traumatic last time. [...]

[...] It would be of some benefit at least to be a little less intimidating, always using the hospital’s precise designation for bedsores (decubiti), the term, used as it is, simply impresses upon you the greater strength of medical theory. [...]

[...] Just before going outside I’d told Jane a capsule of my current thinking—that we were at the end of the line that she was going to end up hospitalized again, or in an institution where she could receive constant care. [...] I’d mentioned while she was still in bed this morning that I was going to call Dr. Kardon tomorrow morning, and tell her I wanted Jane back in the hospital. [...]

(I got a horrified reaction from Jane in the bedroom this morning when I’d mentioned the hospital to her, and that I was reaching a turning point in my struggles to care for her myself. Seth had recently said the hospital experience had been a traumatic one for Jane—so why was she doing again the very things that could lead to a return to that situation? [...]

[...] Not a word from Seth about why she’s been so miserable for the past five days, or why her decubiti are worse, or my suggestion that she go back into the hospital, or the role the sinful self plays in all of this. [...]

[...] I probably won’t call Dr. Kardon or the hospital tomorrow, but will simply wait for nature to take its course, since except for the movement in the knees—which hasn’t increased—it’s been all bad, so the general outcome for the future is all but inevitable. [...]

A Pennsylvania connection, distant, and a hospital perhaps, Ruburt knows of this circumstance.

(Peg has a poor opinion of the hospital above.)

(On February 17, 1964 our neighbor Miss Florence Callahan who lived in the front apartment on the same floor as Jane and I, was taken to the hospital suffering from arteriosclerosis. [...] 1. On March 9, 1964, Seth said that April 15 would be a day of crisis for Miss Callahan in the hospital. [...]

(Jane and I learned later that indeed on this day Miss Callahan had behaved so erratically at the hospital [throwing things, screaming, struggling, etc.] that her relatives were notified she must be moved, since the hospital could not furnish 24-hour care. [...]

[...] JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL

[...] If the former is the case, that portion would know that the quicker we get the organism out of the hospital environment the quicker a true healing can begin. [...]

[...] Once again, her Seth voice was quiet, and I had to pay close attention to hear it competing with other hospital sounds. [...]

[...] “Yeah,” I said, “but how tough can a session be, compared to your daily situation laying in bed in the hospital? [...]

[...] Earlier today Jane had remarked several times that on April 20th she’ll have been in the hospital a year, and she didn’t see how she was ever going to get out.

(My personal opinion, which I haven’t even had the time to discuss with her, is that she ought to continue sessions in this vein, no matter how difficult they may be, simply to break the chains that keep her bedridden and hospitalized. [...]

It is easy to see how people at the hospital, for example, speak constantly of the power of infection, the need to take steps against it before it develops, and so forth, and the little stress laid on the body’s natural ability to ward off such conditions. [...]

[...] Part of this redirection is the result of the hospital experiences. [...]

(Very long pause.) You use the hospital experience to press against, Ruburt even more than you because of his position physically, but you are both beginning to understand issues—or rather, you are beginning to accept issues—much more wholeheartedly than you were before, and that acceptance is the key. [...]

[...] Without being aware of it, I’d begun to lose weight after she was admitted to the hospital, and by now my loss had reached the point where others began to notice it. [...] I became extremely busy after my wife came home, making what seemed like endless calls and trips about getting prescriptions filled, about trying out various kinds of beds and mattresses and chairs and hospital gowns, about insurance, about a commode, about having a speaker phone hooked up to our regular phone so that Jane wouldn’t have to hold the standard bulky handset to her ear. [...]

Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane’s first week home from the hospital. [...]

[...] To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. [...]