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procedure that is acutely uncomfortable and embarrassing. As two nurses with rubber gloves worked on me, I gritted my teeth and thought to myself, “This is the most humiliating experience of my life.” And as I reached out for the Comforter, a wonderful change took place inside me.
    My pride began to slip away as if I were shedding a frayed old skirt. I forgot that I had a body of different parts, some to be seen, some to be concealed. I became one body, one person, one spirit. And as I reached out for Jesus, He laid His hand on my head with such tenderness that I knew He was seeing me as I really was in the world of Spirit. The pain and discomfort fused into a moment of pure ecstasy.
    And then there was a quick vision of how God had originally meant us all to be at our creation. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—happy, carefree, unaware of any knowledge of good and evil, unaware of the need for concealment of anything about their personhood, free and open to God and each other.
    At the same time I felt a sudden infilling of my body with what I can only describe as a torrent of love. It was the love of Jesus for me, ministered through two compassionate women. In turn, I had the intense and overwhelming desire to love Christ with all my heart, as well as all of His ministering angels. This joy and love so flooded me that I thought I might burst.
    There followed a period of sudden relief from pain as though Jesus were saying, “You see now—you can depend upon me to be with you in your moments of agony and despair.”
    This was exactly the kind of reassurance I needed to face the days that lay ahead.

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    T wo days later I was wheeled back into the operating room for more surgery. X-rays now showed that the ruptured appendix had caused a telescoping of the bowel and thus a blockage. As during the first operation, doctors and nurses assumed that since I was under anesthesia, I could hear nothing of what was said. And so they spoke quite negatively about my chances for recovery.
    I have since learned that other patients have had this same experience. A friend of mine named Ida told me that she had been desperately sick in the hospital several years ago. Thinking her completely unconscious, her two children, a son and a daughter, began arguing over who would get certain items of her estate. It was such an ugly scene that Ida, who heard it all, was spurred on to recovery. “I fooled them two ways,” she laughingly told me. “I lived, and then changed my will, leaving everything to my niece.”
    Even when under deep anesthesia, spoken words seem to be received by the patient’s unconscious mind, collected and transferred to the brain in a process little understood. There can be a time lapse of hours, even days, before this translation process occurs and the patient has an awareness of what was said. After both operations I knew by their comments that my doctors considered me a hopeless case. I even recall the jokes about my Florida tan.
    The result was a struggle inside me between two forces—a feeling of defeat which said that I might as well give up, and a fighting determination not to quit but to battle back. I resisted defeat, but I can see how some people might not. And I wonder how many unexplainable sudden post-operative deaths have resulted from patients who heard their death warrants under anesthesia, and in a state of despair gave up and died.
    The problem of negative influences continued in my room for days after the operation. Only family members were allowed to visit me, but I belong to a large family. I’ve since spent hours reflecting on conversations I heard while seemingly unconscious; I’ve made notes and pondered the whole subject of how the vibrations, attitudes and dialogue of visitors can poison the atmosphere in a hospital room—or bless it.
    Three women dropped in for a visit several days or so after my first operation. I later put down on paper the type of things they