Sylvia's Journal

I woke up at 4:30 AM, my usual time for getting up and being in time for an easy commute. But today is not a commuting day so I turned over and slept another 2 hours, full of dreams about things healing, stalling or breaking down.

I had a 3:30 PM appointment for physical therapy yesterday and so I left MSH right after lunch. I had been very alert about walking the right way all day and by the time I parked my car I was ready for a perfect walk into the PT office. I did, but no one was watching. I sat down and read a few pages in my book when I was called in. At that time a stabbing pain, like an ice pick behind my ankle bone, stopped me in my tracks. I limped into the treatment room. So much for showing off!

This is the new phase of healing, sometimes I feel on top of the world and I think I’m done with the healing and then there are those setbacks with muscle pains and the site of the break/dislocation reminding me, with these stabbing flashes of pain, that it was not quite 5 months ago and that I have a ways to go.

Although it was neck and shoulder time for the PT treatment, Julia, breaching insurance policy, gave attention to the muscles in my leg as well as those in my shoulder. Both got a good massage.

I found Axel hobbling up Bridge Street in the darkness, on his way home from the station. He had gone to see his therapist in Brookline, a five hour trip from door to door if done by train, for a one hour consultation. He was exhausted and irritable from the long trip. There must be a better way. Nevertheless, he cooked dinner because I could not stand up all that long for cooking.

And while he was doing that I was reading in my new book about the battles that the 1940 women pilots had to wage to get into the male bastion of war and flying.

“The trouble is that some many of them [women] insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.” (C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane Magazine, 1940)

It is true that I was incapable of cooking my husband’s dinner last night and I do have this thing about flying (no bombers though). But we’ve come a long way, as a society, in our thinking about what women can do. All that in a mere 60 years!