Doc and I are always arguing about the hereafter

I went to have lunch to Doc's apt. at his invitation and he was watching a film of a one woman show by comedian Julia Sweeny in which she debunks people's beliefs in the hereafter, God, and such. I thought after watching it that she would have had to go only one step further to belief, but she kept pointing out the ridiculous side of her parents taking her to task for losing her faith, stuff like that. It's a way to go, but perhaps she did not have as many near death experiences as I did to convince me that we go somewhere and oblivion just does not quite describe what I experienced.
When I went into shock after having an experimental tonsilectomy I had the sensation of traveling through space thousands of miles an hour. I knew I was going to heaven and I thought it was going to be a wonderful experience. I could hardly wait, then suddenly I felt myself jerked back down into my body again with a very sore throat and pain. I had a terrible time with that tonsilectomy, hemorrhaging once we got home 90 miles from the hospital. My mother was obviously not one to panic and I thought she did not want to get up and return to the hospital in the middle of the night, as I think I did mention to her I was hemorrhaging blood down my throat. So I went to bed and woke up the next morning quite sick to my stomach with all the blood I had swallowed. I told my mother I still hadn't stopped bleeding, so she took me back to the hospital for my throat to be cauterized. Dr. Duggins was not happy to see me, as more trouble seemed to signal to him a criticism of his skills.
I returned home and pretty soon began to bleed again! Mother sighed and said she would take me to another hospital over the mountain the next morning. I am sure she was thinking of Dr. Duggins' feelings if she should return with the patient still another time.
Now if I were to do a stand-up comedy routine about this incident I could make fun of my mother for taking a hemorrhage so lightly, but I never told her that I had experienced a trip to heaven as well after the operation. Although I had no doubt that if she had not been stationed at my bedside and happened to notice I was turning blue I might have gone to heaven and stayed there. So she did save my life, that I will grudgingly give her, but I was mad at her for submitting me to an experimental tonsilectomy which was using only a local anesthesia. My nerves were very bad, the doctor concluded after wards, so I had not been a good candidate, but my mother was so eager to please the doctor whom she had quite a crush on, she agreed for me to be his guinea pig. As far as I know that was the first and last of Dr. Duggins' experimental tonsilectomies.
My mother knew my nerves were bad, or should have known it, since I had been taken out of the home at the age of 12 due to a nervous breakdown.
At the age of 20 I agreed to an experimental 'death' with guidance from angels in order to prevent the doctors from starting me on shock treatment. The angels said that I needed to keep control of my own destiny because if I just relaxed and turned myself over to the wisdom and care of the psychiatrists I would end up shocked and would very likely be killed the first zap. This was because I had developed a weakness that only I knew about it since I had not told my folks about it either. I had developed such terrible fatigue I could hardly drag myself out of bed in the morning when I just turned 12. It was late in the summer and we had had the usual terrible lot of work, bottling all summer, gardening, along with everything else. The hired girl had quit so I had to do extra work. But this fatigue was so bad I was afraid I might be getting something terrible like leukemia or rheumatic heart disease. The voice guiding me within which had become quite loud reminded me of how I felt and said that after five days of incarceration against my will in a psych ward, this weakness was coming back with a vengeance. The voice kept warning me and pretty soon I again felt such anger and indignation that I realized I would not and could not take a deeper breath. I was done to death. My body had endured all the outrages it could and still act normal.
From that point on I froze, I kept on breathing, but I could feel my body locked so I could not take a deeper breath and I saw how this was gradually going to kill me. The next four hours I slowly died, but at first the angel within me was telling me what was happening and why. The angel said that this would be under my control and I would be able to come back from this possibly and with less damage.
The attendants in the day room spotted me in a frozen position and a couple of them half carried me to my room and laid me on the bed and summoned the Intern who had been put in charge of my case. I was told later that he sat by my bed two hours trying to figure out what in the world had happened to the 20 year old woman he had been just been talking to.
I had told the Intern that I had something wrong with me and should not be given electric shock, that with all the stress I was experiencing it might come back. He couldn't say I had not warned him. Now it was very clear I had something wrong with me that had surfaced before electric shock therapy could even be prescribed and administered. I was told Dr. Branch, head of psychiatry at the University of Utah where I had been apprehended and taken captive by a Mormon Psychiatrist, was still trying to decide whether to listen to me and fore go electric shock therapy or else go ahead and give the usual treatment that most of the patients were receiving.
I figured the reason he was having such a hard time deciding was because this was giving too much power to a patient to listen to her who had obviously done something very abnormal to get herself incarcerated under guard.
Think of what a good movie this would make. My word against the school psychiatrist and his definition of what constitutes abnormal behavior requiring immediate detainment. Well, I will tell you what I did. It was part of an experiment I was carrying out in my classes as well as trying on my school mates. As you might suspect, a society dominated by one religion is apt to be extremely conformist in nature. Most of you have experienced visits from young Mormon missionaries and probably wondered how in the world the Mormons got all these missionaries to sounding alike determined to spread the gospel of 'the only true church on earth' across the earth no matter how unwilling people might be to receive it. In fact Julia Sweeny in her movie this morning had Mormon Missionaries visit her and made fun of the poor brain washed young fellows who only managed to convince her all the more there was no hereafter.
Well, I thought the conformity one encountered in Utah at all levels was just terrible and I was desperate. So I decided to sacrifice my degree in an experiment designed to cut through all this conformity to the core of feeling so as to get a genuine real reaction. So when I got to the Mormon psychiatrist I had refined my technique to strike real feelings somewhere in there to an art form. I would go silent at a certain point and just wait for the other person to notice that I was not answering, but was looking them right in the eye waiting for them to simply observe what was happening and comment on it. Young Mormon Missionaries are trained to try to deliver their message of the word no matter what opposition they are met with. So when I ran into this Mormon Psychiatrist I could see he was not connected to his feelings and as I saw it probably hadn't been for years and was just asking me some rote questions in which he did not put any kind of real feeling. As soon as I saw how conformist he was I went silent and let him ask me three questions while, I, looking him steadily in the eyes, did not answer at all. It took all the nerve I had to do this, and I never thought of the danger to myself.
Well, I can see now that Mormon trained from his early days it would not have been possible for him to say one word about this of course unorthodox behavior of mine. That was it, how I got in the psych ward, I was using the unorthodox to fight the mind numbing conformity I met up with everywhere.
Only God knows what he thought it was as he immediately got up and left the room. I waited and waited for him to return. I actually thought he had gone away because of something that had nothing to do with me, so I was just getting ready to get up and leave when he returned with an armed guard and told me I would now be remanded to the a psych ward. I don't know, maybe he felt he was in terrible danger, and surely the University was.
But the Intern was for me the one lucky break I got after my incarceration. He was a veteran, about 30 years old, not a Mormon, raised in California and more intrigued by my story of how I got in there than frightened. He went to bat for me, and if he had not been there observing everything, it is very likely I might have been given electric shock therapy and killed. He could see that if I lay there frozen for 4 hours something must be seriously wrong and it would not be a good idea to give me electric shock. He came the next day after I had 'come to' with a paper that he said I needed to sign and then I would be allowed to go home without any treatment after ten days to make sure there was no reoccurring of the frozen condition.
I told him I went until I quit breathing altogether and surely had only moments to live and then the block against my breathing deeper simply dissolved and I sat up, breathing normally again, but inside I was a wreck of course. This was the very worst manifestation of chronic fatigue possible due to stress, locking up, unable to take a deeper breath, dying.
I thought it was remarkable how the will to live changed to the will to die just like that, in an instant when the outrage, stress, and weariness reached an unsustainable level. I could see quite clearly how stress could kill a person.
Now this would all make a dramatic movie, but still would not prove there is no life after death. I did not see angels though I heard one. I also nearly died again the next morning, going completely numb until I could only feel my teeth and my bones. I told the Intern which seemed to make him all the more determined to get me out of there out of range of the doctors of electric shock.
I experienced another near death episode a year later in a bad scene with my husband. I had not been married to him very long but found out that under the influence of alcohol he could be extremely violent. He tortured me for about 5 hours in the way that insane husbands torture wives and girlfriends while they are drunk out of their minds. Had I been strong and healthy I could have survived 5 hours of torture fairly well I am sure, but I was not strong and healthy and after 5 hours started dying again. I could feel nothing. No more pain. I looked up and saw a light coming down, and I saw an angel in the light that I took to be Christ. I had the same feeling I had experienced in the tonsilectomy. I would soon be in a glorious paradise. I felt ecstasy, and I believe my husband saw this look in my eyes, and it caused him to drop his hands which he had around my neck. He said that he would kill me but it would not do any good.
I felt that he had seen evidence in my eyes that I had seen an angel, and from that moment on the devil which I thought was possessing him through the gateway of alcohol was never as strong in him again. I believe that people can be possessed by a force of evil. He was possessed and then touched even through his drunkenness by the presence of an angel.
My husband had gone through a terrible childhood that would have embittered almost any child. He lost his mother to pneumonia at four years old and then he gradually lost his father to alcohol. So he knew about the power of darkness that could possess someone through alcohol. His father almost totally neglected him but lived right across the street from him where he could watch him coming and going, and watched how he partied and even starved the little children he had with another wife.
I had also seen my own father possessed by the same dark force through alcohol that led him to suicide attempts. I was also well acquainted with what might cause men to allow the forces of darkness to take control of them.
This is really getting down into the depths and grappling with the evil that gets loose in the world. I had seen my mother consumed by hate for my father and I wowed I would not live by hate. It was the hardest thing in the world to forgive my husband and not hate him, and to live the remainder of the ten years I spent in that marriage, not in hate but trying to help him conquer his demons. After that incident happened I went home because I was pregnant and I feared that my husband lose control again, because one night after that he started torturing me, I saw this vision of lions in a den and a man flicking a long whip at them and them snarling up at him wanting to grab him and tear him to pieces. I snarled at my husband just like those lions, and he said with a satisfied sound to his voice, "That is real hate."
I thought I have to chain the beast back up. I couldn't live like the beasts do. Like my mother and dad did, in terrible hatred, thoughts of revenge and death for the other one. So slowly I got hold of the beast. Once on the way home, in the car, he tortured me again, and I reached out and scratched him, but I thought no, can't do that. Or there will be no end to the hate. And no release either.
Nobody could live with my mother and dad long the way they fought, so I left there and went to Salt Lake to stay with my Grandmother and Grandfather Wilson to have my baby. Before I got to the birth, something else bad happened and I walked down to the psych ward and stayed there a month until I came out to have the baby.
I thought the Julie Sweeny movie was a story in a minor key because it did not acknowledge all the real evils in the world and how powerful a spirit has to be to fight and successfully overcome evil. We have always got evil everywhere, ready to spring up and conquer, ourselves, a state, a country.
And fighting evil is sometimes a long slow tortured process, but there is no other choice. You have to fight evil or risk having everything that is precious to you destroyed one way or another.
Alcoholism, drug addiction, ways that evil can find the door into your home and come inside and live for years, poisoning the atmosphere, destroying health and peace of mind and any possibility of happiness.
These are dramas in a major key. I did not mind Doc's enjoying this movie, but I knew it sort of vindicated his thinking and did not touch his alcoholism. Fighting his alcoholism is a long slow process, trying to impact his mind, find a way to ignite a reason in him to try to conquer the entity that controls him.