Thrift Store Finds

Thrift store finds are always fun, especially in the form of a good book that adds to a collection for our home library. Jonathan Kellerman is one of my favorite authors, and when we dropped off two bags full of stuffed animals this afternoon, Frank found The Conspiracy Club for me in the book section of Shelter Thrift, just a few blocks from our house.

It begins with interesting interaction between a pathologist and a psychologist. I don’t like gruesome, graphic medical descriptions, but I am intrigued by human behavior, so if pathology outweighs psychology I’ll stop reading it and pass the book along to my daughter-in-law, who loves the parts I can’t handle. If psychology dominates, I might hang in there to the end. We’ll see.

A pleasant surprise was on page 35, where the hospital staff psychologist uses hypnosis to calm a patient with lupus, scared out of her wits in anticipation of a bone marrow aspiration. With her lupus in remission, the patient refused sedative medication that might have messed up her system. No possibility of harmful side effects to hypnosis, however, so there you go! Success!

Flash back to when he first used hypnosis with a 12-year-old girl about to undergo a spinal tap. A little too detailed for me as to the extraction itself, but what pleased me was the accurate portrayal of hypnosis in a medical application. Too often in books and movies, hypnosis is misrepresented. Drives me nuts. But Kellerman did a fine job here of being honest with his readers.

One of my favorite real-life stories is about the client who came to see me years ago because she had to have an MRI but was claustrophobic and couldn’t go through with the procedure. Hypnosis made all the difference, of course, but the interesting thing is that her nursing job at the hospital was to assist in conducting – MRI’s!