I did not sleep again last night.  I spent the night out of body.  Many of the individual clients that I kept when I transitioned to a larger, worldwide audience have been diagnosed with a terminal illness.  Some of them are hospital bound and so, sometimes when I have not seen them in person for a while, I go visit them in the hospitals out of body.  Often when I go, I end up interacting with other people who are there as well.  Because I am interacting with the time-space reality on a fourth dimensional level, occasionally I will bump into the thought form (entity) of someone who has just died and who is wandering the hallways in a state of confusion.  Other times I will be drawn to the side of someone who is briefly out of body during a surgery or during sleep.  And sometimes I am drawn to the bedside of someone who is in a great deal of pain.

When I am consoling someone while out of body (when they are still focused into the physical dimension), I am able to influence their nervous systems and they are able to perceive that something comforting is in the room with them. But they do not usually know the difference between me and a random spirit they can only feel and cannot see.  The children are the exception.  They are still open enough that they can perceive some of what is appearing to them on a fourth dimensional level.  Sometimes, they draw pictures of me with the crayons they are given and they explain to their parents that an angel visited them.  They do not understand that to most adults in America, angels are associated with death; and so of course telling their parents that usually results in a dramatic scene where the parents break down into tears thinking that some other worldly messenger is there to survey their child as a candidate to “take home to heaven”.

I have spent so many hours both out of body and in physical person in hospitals in this life.  I was obsessed with obstetrics since I was 4 years old and if I ever got the opportunity to be near a television, I’d watch the shows where they were performing surgeries live on screen.  In school, I excelled in physiology courses (easy to do when you’re a medical intuitive) to the degree that when I graduated high school at 16 years old, I was seriously considering going to medical school to specialize as an obstetric surgeon.  If I had done that, hospitals would have been a second home for me (despite despising hospitals in general).  Hospitals are not a place of healing; they are a place of illness and death.   If I had gone to medical school to become an obstetrician, I would have completed my residency at 25 years old.  This would be my 4^th or 5^th year of practice as a doctor. 

The savant in me cannot be swayed to perpetuate a profoundly sick system of practice.  Right now, the doctors do not rule the medical industry; the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies rule the medical industry.  Hospitals have to have insurance to cover potential hospital mistakes etc. and doctors have to carry insurance to cover themselves as well.   But these insurance companies tie the doctor’s hands by telling them what they can and cannot do.

If you’ve ever been in a labor and delivery ward with a woman, you’ll know that they do not let women eat food when they are in labor.  Would you like to know why?  It’s because the insurance companies found out that there is a 32.8% chance that a woman who is in labor will have to be rushed into surgery for an emergency C-section.  This is it’s own topic entirely, because a 32.8% C-section rate is embarrassingly high!  Much higher than it is in other countries and it implies malpractice.

In the United States, the statistics show that 1 out of 3216 people aspirate vomit during anesthesia.  The worldwide statistics show that 2 out of 10000 people aspirate vomit during anesthesia.  If you’re going by American statistics, this means that of the 32.8% of women, that undergo an emergency C-section there is a 3.1% chance that they will aspirate their own vomit while they are under anesthesia.  If you’re going by worldwide statistics, there is a 0.2% chance that they will aspirate their own vomit while under anesthesia.  If that happens, there is an even smaller risk that they will develop aspiration pneumonia; and long story short, the insurance companies don’t want to pay for any of that.  So they’d rather eliminate the risk all together.  This means, even though according to US statistics, there is only a 32 percent chance that you’ll be sent in for a C-section and even though there is a 3.1% chance (according to US statistics) and a 0.2% chance (according to worldwide statistics) that you will aspirate your own vomit if you undergo a C-section, you cannot eat food while you are in labor.  The insurance companies make every woman who walks through the hospital doors, suffer because of not wanting to take a 0.2% chance.

It is important to understand that asking a woman in the first stages of labor to not eat, is like asking a person who is climbing Mount Everest to do so with no food.  Labor is a marathon of physical exertion.  Women sweat when they are in labor because the uterus is an organ comprised of mostly muscle.  In fact, the myometrial layer of the uterus is the strongest muscle in the human body.  And it is tirelessly working during labor, much like a muscle is worked in a gym.  Imagine doing abdominal curls for over 20 hours.  Aside from the pain aspect and hormonal aspect of childbirth, on a purely exercise level labor is an athletic feat.  And thanks to the insurance companies, it is one that women are expected to do on an empty stomach.  This is especially sad because it’s been proven that women, who eat during the first stage of labor, have shorter labors.

This is only one small example of millions of ways that the insurance companies have caused problems in the health field.  Doctors can be sued and put in jail for making decisions in favor of the patient instead of in favor of the insurance policy they carry.  If I were put in a position (which I most certainly would be) where I had to choose between what I thought was best for a patient and what an insurance or hospital policy said I could or could not do, I’d do what was best for the patient every single time.  And so, if I had gone into the medical profession, I’d probably have had my license revoked by now.

I live in a luxury ski resort town, which means that it is a vacation destination for wealthy people who come here to ski.  Over the years, I have ended up on many a lonely chair lift, sitting next to men who own insurance companies.  There is always that awkward pause when they tell me what they do for a living; before I burst out in giggles.  And the next thing that comes out of my mouth is usually “How do you sleep at night?”  Sometimes they instantly laugh when I say that.  Other times they ask what I mean and the rest of the ride to the top of the hill is reduced to a heated debate; but that question just about sums up my opinion about insurance companies.

There is so much grief in hospitals.  So much grief in fact that on a fourth dimensional level, the frequency of grief is projected, like an aura for miles around the building itself.  Two years ago, I took on a client who was in the hospital with stage 4 leukemia.  I was sitting in the waiting room of the intensive care unit, waiting for her to be moved to her room when I watched a hospital chaplain approach the man sitting next to me and inform him that his daughter did not make it.  The man buried his head in his hands on his lap and started screaming in that way that people only scream when grief rips their soul apart from their body.  He started hyperventilating and yelling through the sobbing that had consumed every fiber of his being “It all means nothing, It all means nothing” and he threw his wallet and car keys across the room against the wall.  I started crying too.  No one was consoling him, so I walked over and held him on the floor of the waiting room and he cried against me while the tears were streaming down my face as well.  Twenty minutes later, he staggered out of the hospital, and I sat there in the waiting room slightly in shock.  I was staring at a sunflower that was twisting in the breeze just outside the window and juxtapose with the level of time crushing grief inside.  The poignancy of the moment compelled me to write a poem about grief.  Given that my time out of body last night was spent in that atmosphere of hospital bound grief again, I wanted to share it with you today…

What did we possess yesterday?

What will we lose today?

When the world is shattered like a window,

No glass remains between you and the sunflower which was always there.

No illusions, no barriers.

Just the opportunity to turn towards it.

For in the smallest of things, therein lies the greatest of things.

There is a grace to be found in those moments.

A grace that is lost to us when we are in the midst of grief

instead of outside looking in.

When the shock and denial and groundlessness that is grief,

makes the world around us stand still.

The stopping point before life flows down a completely different road.

If we resist the current of where life is now taking us,

 if we try to change what we can not change because it has already been written in time,

We are drowning

We are shutting life out.

Just as we shut out the sunflower with the glass of our lives.

It is only when we let go and surrender to the current,

that we have a chance of taking in air.

Today, in these astringent halls above the city,

These windows keep grief in and hold life out.

With a kind of cold devotion, the machines that keep lungs breathing in and out,

tell of our inability to see death clear enough to not fear it or resist it.

Despair is in the minds and movements of people, holding each others grief tightly,

Trying to survive the unknown together.

Every trivial thing erased by the emptiness of loss and

By the earthquake of a moment of change.

A moment ago, someone was here.

Now it is an empty room.

The bed re-made a new.

The machines no longer pushing air in and out are rolled away.

The silence of death lasts only hours before another story of grief comes to fill its place… For another family nearby.

But not for those the silence leaves behind.  For them, the silence lasts forever.

And life does not go on.

Instead, what is lost to them, is their own lives as well.

They go along with the ones we love you see.

When the world is shattered by grief they leave us.

And we only learn to live again when we let go of their life and our life along with it.

And instead, go towards the sunflower…

That was always, always there.