Sunday, June 24, 2012

Where is the Substance and the Money?





Today I was invited to go to a psychic healing fair.

It wasn't what I had expected. There was an undercurrent at every booth--money. Fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes of psychic services by twins that work together. Ten dollars for a mix plate of food.  An extra dollar for a cup of Yogi tea. Buy this 'last healing tool you'll ever need' for one-hundred-sixty dollars. A singing bowl made by a priest in Tibet for sixty dollars.

The last one is what hurt the most. The thought of a poor Bhuddist priest working days to weeks on a work of art, only to be sold through a middle man, and shipped to the U.S., everyone taking their cut along the way. The priest will never see the sixty dollars. Perhaps six?

Why is it that the people who tend to go to these events think nothing of charging for their services in an open market, tax-free, under the table, and yet point fingers at the medical community for making money off of health care? And being an industry? Aren't they the same? Healers working to help others, and trying to make enough to survive.

I have news for you. Nobody is going to need the services of a psychic when everyone ascends to 5D, the fifth dimension. Because everybody is going to be psychic on their own. We don't currently pay anyone to see for us do we? Or to hear for us? Well, it is kind of going to be like that.

And I have news for my medical center and all the people who work there. In the fifth dimension, nobody will get sick. Which is a good thing if you ask me.

Last night I had to go to the emergency room. I had a pain in my upper right chest with breathing. Since I was two weeks post-op, the risk of a blood clot in the lung is pretty high. So they sent me straight to the Emergency Department, but fortunately not by ambulance. I took my son to Mc Donalds because he was starving and there was no time to cook. We stopped off by the house to get my phone charger. And off we went.

There was a line at the entrance for security. We were waved past it, since we were going to the ER, not to visit a patient. Then I filled out a form on a clipboard, and gave the clipboard and my driver's license to a man behind a bullet proof window. He kept it.

And we went to sit. I was looking for a plug, and a kind man got up and let me take the chair next to it. My phone was almost dead, and I was going to need it. We started talking. He was an appendix, and I was a blood clot in the lung. Ever the anesthesiologist, I advised him on post-op nausea/vomiting (PONV) prophylaxis while we sat. I also shared how much I hate to be a patient, and how I was scared. He was scared too. He lived in another town, but knew not to go to the local hospital. 'They send the sick ones here' he said, concerned for his well being. I know the Operating Room on this hospital. Our tech used to moonlight there. It is chaos. Our tech quit. All the anesthesia techs quit there. I reassured him and said a silent prayer for him, and hoped perhaps since it was an appy he would be okay.

Triage called my name. Chest pain. Gets you to the front of the line, even when it's not the heart. Believe me, I have seen deaths from massive pulmonary embolus. I was a time bomb, possibly. The people in triage called me right away. My sats were 97%, which was a good sign. Normal heart rate and blood pressure, too.

I asked how long the wait was. The RN was kind, and said that there were two ahead of me, and that many were discharged from the ED recently so beds were opening up. So back to the waiting room.

The appy man was back in his chair, and offered it up to me again. And this is where I started to get upset--this waiting room thing, and forms, has got to go. I saw a grandmother who looked like she had been assaulted sitting in a chair, wiping blood from her cuts. She had a huge black eye. There was a woman with an ankle up on a pillow, and my friend the appy. There were patients with children, worried and holding the lumps in blankets close to protect them as best they could.

When you work in the hospital, you have no concept of the wait. There are admissions or hits that keep coming in. Each one takes lots of work. It feels like a wave of people trying to suck the life out of you, there are so many, an you are barely keeping up. One new admit to the operating room, like a case in the middle of the night, means two to ten hours in that room with that patient. Do not pass go. There goes your life, your plans, your sleep, your meals, your bathroom time...but it's your job so you go do it.

This time in the ED, I spoke up. It was terrible. I was monitored, but they only did my blood pressure the first time and that was it (in the OR it is every five minutes). When I went to the bathroom, they unhooked me from the monitors, but nobody bothered to hook me back up to the EKG, pulse ox, and BP cuff. I had to ask. The portable chest X-ray was easy. The cartridge hurt under my back. And the lady who drew my lab hurt so much. And I have good veins! She said, 'your vein is not working with me'. Yeah, right. She said it was the skin that hurt. I said, 'No, I can feel the needle in the vein' and I knew there is a nerve very close to where she drew. She didn't know that. And the i.v! RN Skip breezed in. He bragged about how long he's worked in the ED. I smiled. I've been in the business longer than him. By far. But he was good. It didn't hurt. He only hep-locked me. I knew contrast was coming, and my ED doc is a personal friend. He had wanted me hydrated first. (Did you know contrast nephrotoxicity shows up about three days after exposure? That right, after the angio and right about the time for cardiac surgery!) So I called Skip and asked. It turned out the ED doc forgot to write the order. When Skip hooked me up to the i.v., he didn't wipe the connection with alcohol. You should ask people to do that when they connect you or inject into you i.v. It decreases the risk of infection.

As they wheeled me to the CT scanner, I saw appy man standing in the hall. He wished me good luck.
And I tell you, out of the whole experience, that heartfelt 'good luck' from someone facing the O.R. and in a hospital gown meant so much.

The CT Tech was thorough, and explained the injection would make me feel warm from my chin down, almost to the point of feeling like I wet myself. He was right. A lot of the contrast leaked but the study was good. D-Dimer was positive (I had clot somewhere) but the scan showed it was not in my lungs.

ED doc showed me there was an incidentaloma--a thyroid nodule. And two in my lungs, lymph nodes. Did I currently have bronchitis? I get to follow up.

But the weirdest thing? My friend did a healing by distance in San Francisco. It was two days ago. She was surprised my problem was not my second chakra (uterus), but rather in my fourth chakra (heart/lungs) and my fifth (throat). She was right on. She did the healing for free.

Healing like this is so much more pleasant than going to the ER, or going to a festival of psychics. My friend healed me, and warned me of what she saw. I had pain, so I went to my doctor. By referral to the ER, I found out my friend was right. And now I have a plan to follow up on the throat, the chest, and I am taking medication for a bronchial infection (if you ask me it was pleurisy).

What are we going to do about the psychics and healers who are making a business? Should we merge them into mainstream medicine, sort of like chiropractic and acupuncture that are billable to many insurance policies?

Cedars Sinai and other hospitals have Reiki available in the hospital. But only on a volunteer basis. How can people make a living in that? And how can the current teachers make a living by teaching others healing such as Reiki? The lure is to be able to teach it and make money, support yourself. In a way, it might look like a pyramid scheme. But in another, if Spirit is behind it, it is putting people in the right place at the right time.

The free spirits I saw today, were having fun. They were feeling and interacting and not confined by the practice of medicine. It takes discipline to work in the healthcare field. But all of them are healers. The obsessive-compulsive RN's and MD's who spent half their lives with their nose in a book, and the tree huggers with ADD and 'medical marijuana'. in both groups we have the spiritually dead mixed in with the spiritually awake.

The sound healing I experienced tonight at the psychic fair makes total sense. And it is a segue to the healing light boxes. For everything is vibrational.  But who is going to run this next generation of medicine where all the healers work as a team? For God's sake, the patient needs all of you! They are suffering!

So pay the Reiki practtitioners enough so they can earn a living at the hospital. Teach Reiki to the medical staff, including docs and nurses so they can have more intuitive guidance on taking care of the sick. Heck, make it a requirement like ACLS and those computer competency classes for HIPAA and computer security we take every year! Wake everybody up!! In the hospital, there is the way of doing business that has been established for a long time. Some of it is not working. There is room for imrprovement. We need to get from here to there, together, so that when advanced technology comes to the forefront, from wherever it comes from, we are able to step up and carry the baton. No one is going to heal anything for us. We must be ready to accept whatever help that comes our way, take the technology and apply it, and take care of all the stragglers so that everyone can enjoy the perfect health and balance of living in the fifth dimension.

Namaste,

Reiki Doc