Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The Ghost Whisperer In the O.R.



I came out.
I came out today in front of my peers.
I came out!!!

I am not gay. I came out as another group that faces haters, the group that gets called 'woo woo' by those that don't understand.

I wasn't expecting it to happen. But when the chance came up, I went for it.

I just got home from a long day in the O.R. The last case took five hours. There were two teams, an ENT one getting a graft at the head of the bed, and the other working team down below.

Tonight felt different. I felt giddy, almost, because I enjoy the tech at night (not my you-know-who I have hopes for), we joke around. And I knew I would be cracking up a lot, and warned the surgeon that 'he started it!' and pointed to the tech.

After four hours, with one up at the head taking over all of my real estate--I had to walk around the room to put medicine in the i.v.!--they started talking. And the tech started to talk about that feeling you get when you think you might have seen a ghost. He had been in a restaurant in Orange, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around, and there was no one there. It happened  twice. Finally he guessed it was a ghost and asked it to stop. It did. He was going on and on. And I asked him to share more. How did it feel when you were with it? As the stories went on, he said, 'you know those people who are kind of like The Ghost Whisperer?'...

And I cut him off. I sensed the misinformation behind that statement. I sensed the Hollywood, the drama, and the ability to sell lots of products from commercial time spent on that subject.  I cut him off at the get-go, and said, plainly, 'I am one of those people.'

The surgery on the head stopped.

'You mean, you see dead people?'
'Yes.'

There was a pause. Now this tech is one of the most soulful, accepting people in the O.R. And all of us are highly education. But I was faced with a wall of disbelief.

'It runs in my family.'
(pause)
'I grew up with ghosts. We had one in the house. One night when mom went to bed, dad was already in bed, and neither wanted to get up out of bed to turn off the light. It was a sconce on the wall with a little twist switch at the bottom of the light fixture. Dad got smart and said, 'Ghost! Please turn off the light!'
SNAP-the room went dark with a click.
Mom and Dad were kind of weirded out, but Dad asked nicely, 'Ghost! Please turn on the light!'
And SNAP-the light went back on.
They repeated this. And the same thing happened. Then they let it go.
Someone had died in that house before my parents had moved in. There had always been a presence. But we  didn't know for sure until that night.

At that, I had an audience. I shared about the three ghosts on the Queen Mary. And then  the tech shared about his father and the teen gang he was in see a pretty lady walk through a cemetery fence/wall one night. How a babysitter in Honduras where he grew up had black magic. His brothers heard voices and didn't want to sleep upstairs. They fired the woman and did not give her her stuff. They burnt it out in the street, and the metal railing on the balcony shook hard the whole time her stuff went up in flames. People were in the street in the small town, watching, and terribly frightened by the supernatural event.  Another aunt was a 'witch', and asked the mom for three hairs when she was pregnant with the tech. The hairs were to 'bless the baby'. Well, at birth, the baby got so sick, he was sent home to die with the parents. The mom remembered the hairs, and told dad, who took a gun to his sister and said, 'If the baby dies, you, your husband and kids are going to die too.' He got better in days.

He saw a lady in the house where his girlfriend lived with her grandmother, who had Alzheimer's really bad. She was down the hall, but looked too alert for the grandmother. He told his girlfriend he saw her, but she asked for description. He described her, and she shared it was not her grandmother, but her great-grandmother's spirit who watches after her. The great-grandmother had a curved spine, kyphosis (a hump).

The best story he shared was how his mom was so sick, that her usual ride (both lived in same apartment building and worked at the same office) went to work without her. The tech stayed home from college to take care of his mom. At noon, there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbor/coworker. He said he was concerned about the mother, and just tell her he said hi. The tech invited him in, but he said, 'no'. He told  his mom when she woke up from her nap at three about the visitor. She said, 'That wasn't him. He can't leave work in the day.' And sure enough, the man was with another coworker at the time of the door knock. But the tech SAW him!

I smiled and described bilocation, which I learned about from my study of the saints, who would heal the sick at the same time they were praying someplace else.

I shared how the OR Manager's mom was present at a birthday party the OR had thrown for her. Her mom died when she was eighteen. I shared how I got the message, weighed the risk, and decided it was better to share it than keep it to myself. And I shared how I told the OR Manager, making sure she was okay with getting a message first before actually giving it. That got weight. My tech friend said,
'You have a gift!' But the circulator nurse, a Filipina, freaked out with her eyes and face, staring at me, but being polite.

The ENT surgeon took it in stride, and was his cerebral self the whole time.

With the stories about the witches and dark spirits, I snuck in some education. I saw lack of knowledge about the Spirit life. Ghosts aren't scary. Most of them don't know they are dead. Some have a message.
And any dark one, you can make it go away. Tell it to go away, and it has to obey our law of free will.

Namaste,

Reiki Doc