03 Aug READING: SURGEONS
READING: THE SURGEONS
I was reading a woman some time ago, before Covid. It was a phone reading and I had no idea who I was speaking to.
In the reading I saw a tall dark-haired clean shaven man who appeared to be a doctor, in his early 40’s, in his white coat with stethoscope around his neck. He was standing in a kind of thoughtful repose, with his back to a counter, chin in his hand, in an empty exam room. I understood him to have just stepped aside from his rounds and to be considering the direction of a patient’s care and best course of action. I immediately trusted this man and felt sympathy for his role and responsibilities which seemed heavy, though certainly within his capabilities. 
I watched as he stepped forward, apparently having come to a decision. I then became the doctor. It is not unusual in my readings to witness an individual in one second and then to blend with and inhabit them in the next. At least I thought that was what was happening...
I stepped out of the exam room into a wide hospital corridor. I made a left and then a quick right, into what I sensed to be a postoperative room. Within the room was a swollen man in his 80’s or 90’s. He was propped up in an elevated hospital bed, his white hair tousled as if by sweat and laying in bed for days. I sensed this man was actively dying, at the phase when our souls move in and out of our body before the actual death of the body.
On either side of the man were women in surgical gowns, caps and masks; two on his right and one on his left, holding his hands and forearms in the most tender way. It was a scene very familiar to me as my own stepfather passed from cancer earlier in the year and I was bedside with my sister and mother at the time of his passing.
I described the scene to the woman on the other end of the phone, asking if she understood it.
I couldn’t quite understand why this one patient should be highlighted from this doctors career. I told her that her father in spirit was expressing such profound love at this time, witnessing this small scene. I could feel a love expanding beyond my own heart… was it a love of medicine? the patient? the medical professionals themselves?
I asked her if she understood what I was seeing as being special somehow. I knew something had ended or shifted in the reading. Pauses in information from Spirit are meaningful. I explained my confusion over a surgical team or group of nurses holding a patient with such a familiarity.
“Yes I understand” she said, her voice trailing away into deep thought and feeling, as if being carried aloft. I understood her to be experiencing the physical presence of her father for the first time in the reading, and perhaps since his passing. It’s a tender moment when a sitter’s entire paradigm about what life and death are all about is shifting. It’s been my experience that there may be many occasions after a loved one passes when we suspect their presence, but to have that presence validated by someone else intent on and skilled in producing it, in real time, is often a tipping point of acceptance; both of our own soul’s reality, of the departed’s, and of the continuity of that relationship. It is an “I was lost and then was found” moment of grace and and always an extraordinary privilege for me to witness.
Evidential Mediumship is exactly that, it is providing images, words and feelings coming from Spirit, through the medium, that form recognizable singular constellations within recipients own soul’s experience. The information oftentimes has no meaning to the Medium at all. In such moments it is especially understood by the skeptical recipient, that the Medium, ignorant of the meaning of accurately described events, cannot possibly be “cold reading” the recipient but must in fact be translating the thoughts and intent of some other individual intelligence.
When the woman’s voice returned, it was crisp and clear and energetic. She obviously had quick intelligence and emotional agility. She’d just had a profound experience of thought and feeling and was already able to integrate this into an explanation, and that is rare, as most sitters are understandably at a loss for words at such times.
“Would you like me to explain?” she asked.
I knew I was at a standstill with the evidence, and I believed the reading to be over because whatever message I was meant to convey had happened through the evidence provided and without my understanding.
“The man in the exam room, is my father. He was a surgeon. The man in the post-op room, is also my father, but many years later… the three women in surgical dress are my two sisters and me. We are all surgeons. We were all at his bedside holding his hands when he passed.”
*****
I am a stevedore for a living. I offload small ships with a crane. For the past 17 years I have done a robotic job, mostly alone, on a stinky little piece of concrete in a little harbor city. I am divorced and support one child. I have a small life. Mediumship is my sole source of adventure and vicarious travel. What blew my mind about this reading were two things:
I don’t consider myself sexist, but it had not occurred to me the three women surrounding this man were all surgeons, and the patient’s daughters, all at the same time. At the financial level alone, I have considerable trouble supporting one child, so it would never have occurred to me that someone could afford not one, but three medical educations. Further, what are the chances of having three children choosing to enter into the same incredibly demanding profession? Beyond that, what are the chances of one family providing so much in the way of service to their fellow man? It was beyond me and I felt humbled by these extraordinary people.
The second thing about this reading that has lasted for me was this doctor-in-spirit’s poetic economy: he presented himself at 40, blended with me, gave me a sense of his world, showed me himself at life’s end and all that was important to him during that life; his love of his work and his daughters.
Though it took me many minutes to unpack this, he probably conveyed all this information to me in two seconds. His choice and compression of life “scenes” walking out of one room in his forties, crossing a hallway and entering the next room at 90’s is the most concise example I have yet seen of the brevity of our lives.
It called to mind a Buddhist concept:
“Heap all the bones of your previous incarnations into a pile, it exceeds any mountain.”