“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Just over nine weeks have passed now since I brought my wife home from the hospital. And just last week (after another routine blood test) Jane’s doctor again raised the dosage of the synthetic thyroid hormone she’s taking, this time from 75 to 100 micrograms per day.

She’s also done her first two colored-ink sketches, using one of the 4” × 6” watercolor pads I’d bought for her last year. In these sketches, with their simple but very effective patterns of line and primary colors, Jane somehow bypasses her everyday challenges and very clearly reflects her basically mystical view of the world. She does the same with the little poems she’s worked upon, most of which she regards as being not only incomplete but quite inconsequential: “I wouldn’t even type them up, like you did,” she commented. Yet I like lines like: “Let the dirge be heard, sweeping all things before it,” and: “I’ve developed a sense of death, when someone takes a few steps off the known path almost unknowing,” and: “I breathed in the public air and it became private.” Jane also sings in Sumari occasionally, and has written down a few short songs in that “language” without translating them. I’ve been careful to collect for our own records the prose, sketches, poetry, and Sumari she’s produced during this time of healing and testing.

For Jane’s situation continues to be a time of testing. Writing with her right hand is still quite difficult for her. She’s made no effort to learn to write with her better-functioning left hand, as I suggested she do a couple of months ago, so I’ve dropped that idea. “But I could start another book tomorrow,” she said, “only I don’t know what good it would do….”

At the request of Dr. Mandali, a few days ago Jane underwent her routine phlebotomy, or bloodletting, here at the house. Today (on June 18), the doctor informed us by telephone that as one result of the test we can increase Jane’s thyroid hormone dosage from 100 to 125 micrograms—a most welcome development, for we hope it will add to her daily energy. Yet there was unwelcome news, too—for the test also showed that the level of liquid salicylate medication (the aspirin substitute) in Jane’s blood is too low. She’s been taking that product four times a day for almost 16 weeks (see the first essay). Dr. Mandali instructed us to put Jane back on aspirin, to keep any arthritic pain and inflammation under control: “You can take up to sixteen tablets a day.”