Sylvia's Journal

I was woken up by a call from Shanghai airport that Sita’s plane is delayed and she will miss the last flight leaving Chicago for Boston tonight. I wrote the information down with my eyes closed because of a raging headache but it is decipherable. It felt as if the truck from yesterday morning had not left but simply parked on top of me. It is clearly a new stage in my recovery. After a night sleep the body remembers the hard work of exercises and thinks wistfully back of the days of no movement, pampering and pain pills. I have had physical therapy the last four days and each time I come back with new exercises while none of the earlier exercises are dropped. The exercise regimen is beginning to feel like a day job, just when I announced to be back at work.

I participated in our weekly staff meeting by phone yesterday and it was wonderful to hear everyone’s voices, and discover what is going on and what has happened while I was away. I got my first request for travel and I could not have been happier. After checking with various parties concerned I indicated that I am ready to get on a plane for Kenya in early November. That is about 6 weeks away. If I look back six weeks from today, and considering that recovering is always slow at first, I am very confident that I can handle the travel and the assignment.

The EMDR therapy is progressing well and full of surprises as events and experiences from long ago get kicked back into consciousness by the repetitive stimulation of my left and right brain. I have been exploring the combination of ‘being strong’ and ‘events with potential for much harm’ and discovered that the plane crash wasn’t the first such an occasion where those two things combined. I discovered that, whatever show of strength I have imposed on my self, there have been other events of a momentous nature that weren’t a good match for my level of strength and I felt vulnerable and at risk of being harmed in a big way. I have always known that much of our current cognition about ourselves is shaped early in life, but to trace it as clearly as we are doing in our sessions is quite remarkable. It is also very encouraging because I can lay down new neural paths between these images and memories and accompanying cognition where the old pathways are not serving me well anymore. Part of the discipline of EMDR is about articulating these beliefs and testing them in view of current reality. At the closing of our last session I was able to articulate that if I rely only on my own strength in the face of adversity or harm, I will not be very effective. However, if I can combine my strength with the strengths of others all sorts of things become possible. And the most remarkable aspect is that my body speaks its part in this process, as I become aware of tension, movement or pain. The moment I realized that I do not have to be strong on my own, my shoulder muscles relaxed, and unlike Atlas, I felt like I could take the world off my shoulders and share it with others. My lower back piped in with the phrase ‘stacked right’ and after exploring this for awhile with the buzzers buzzing in each hand, it became clear that ‘stacked right’ referred to a feeling of harmony and support from others in the face of a brewing storm. All this in one hour, imagine that!

We had our wonderful massages from Abi in the morning and before and after that I was busy for most of the day with work, doing my exercises and doing normal household tasks that take me so much longer than they used to. Axel went to the Manchester Club in the evening and satisfied his need for a big slab of red meat while listening, in the company of Manchester guys, to someone who had been hit by lightning and made it his life’s purpose to shield other from having to experience this. More exercises for both of us after that. By the time our night nurse David showed up we had already tucked ourselves into bed and all he had to do was say goodnight.