Sylvia's Journal

This is the week of Axel’s homecoming. It is both exciting and daunting. He won’t have a button anymore to call a nurse, orderly or specialized professional but he’ll have his voice to call on any of his women. The bed situation is still unclear. I can make it to the top of the stairs and have shown I can manage a flat bed as long as there are plenty of cushions to support the various painful body parts. So for me a return to our own bed upstairs is the best of all options. For Axel this is less clear. With his turtle shell come extra complications: how to put it on and off, how to lift himself into sitting position, how to shower. He will try to get some answers to that today.

If we need to rent a hospital bed for him we will need some heavy lifters to clear the room in the next few days and put some things in storage. Please let us know if you can help with either of those two things.

Yesterday was overshadowed by Steve’s departure. Tessa drove him to the bus station in the afternoon after he visited for a last time with Axel at Shaughnessy. We have become very fond of him and he has been a tremendous source of support for all of us, especially for Tessa of course. They will reunite in a couple of weeks for their new life together in London.

Sita and I tackled a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the Dutch crown prince and his princess. The large smiling mouths and teeth were the easy part. The dark navy suit is a killer.

Fatou showed up in the afternoon with enough food to serve an entire refugee camp. Fatou, we have enough!! Fatou calculates caloric requirements based on hour-long marches to fetch wood and water. If you would like to have some West African food, please come by and help yourself, that way you also get an idea of what will be waiting for you when we have our party later this month. If Fatou keeps going like this we will soon have an appeal for additional refrigerators and freezers.

Thanks to Kurt’s ramp it is now so easy to go back and forth between the inside and the outside, I can do this on my own as long as someone holds the door open.

Steve and Ingrid Miles from North Shore Friends Meeting came by for dinner. Even though Sita had told them to not bring anything and that the menu was West African, they wanted to share a wonderful Pakistani dish with us. We sat outside by the cove and had a wonderful time eating, drinking (me just an O’Douls) and watching a young woman who had driven her car too far onto the beach play damsel in distress. It was dinner theatre and just when the mosquitoes started biting too hard the knight in his shiny red truck showed up and pulled her back onto the asphalt. After that we went inside so we don’t know the end of the story. Steve and Ingrid were sent off by Tessa with a large container with African food. (And so did Steve on the bus!)

Sita and Jim had the night off and went to a movie while I went to bed around 8 again and put in another 11 hours of sleep, completed in half hour segments.

Thanks Lynndsie, Joe, Suzie, Marianne, Kent for your wonderful, funny and important words you write in the guestbook. I wake up with those and they do me a world of good. I am equally inspired by you. Thanks Maurits for your good wishes. Scary huh, these photos. After I recover I am never going to crash again. I will be a much better pilot.