Sylvia's Journal

I woke up from a dream that ended with me being given a present. That did not require much effort to interpret. On this day, International Spine Day, we can consider our in-tact spines a great gift; or, better, that we still have each other and that we are alive on this beautiful fall day. We gratefully accept this present of presence; every day!

After our recent visit to Gardner and seeing the pictures of the leftovers of the plane and the path it cut through the trees a movie has come back at night, just before I fall asleep; It is very different from the movie I watched the fist few weeks after the crash. For one, it is taken from a different angle. I had never played the movie from the ground, the landing spot (the bog), always from the sky. And secondly, it does not have a nightmarish quality to it. I have none of the physical reactions I had in the early days; of my head shaking no and my body wanting to pull back from the crash. And finally, it did not produce vivid dreams (or if it did I don’t remember a thing in the morning). Now the movie is more detached and there is a great sense of awe about the miracle of us being alive today and the resilience of our bodies. We have learned more about our bodies in the last three months than in all the years before the crash. They are stories of super heroes and of mission impossible; they are stories of perseverance and patience; and they are stories of system elegance that blow our minds away.

Yesterday, Axel’s neuro-eye doctor treated us to some of those stories which had Axel’s 6th (eye) nerve as the super hero. It was one of the more upbeat visits we have had in some time. The doc is a pilot who flies in from the Cape; so right there we had a connection. Once he heard of Axel’s good eye days he confirmed the good news: the nerve was damaged but is regenerating and sending increasing amps to the eye muscle. There is no need for an intervention. It is doing fine and soon Axel will forget what double vision looked like.

We celebrated the good news with a trip to the Common Crow in Gloucester to pick up 5 pounds of mustard seed. We are expecting an expansion of our Christmas mustard line to accommodate our enormous network of friends. Given the required volume I better get started with Christmas just a couple of months away!

We both had our physical therapy sessions. Arm and ankle are slowly improving but it is a painful process and oh so slow. We both ended the day very sore in various places. The pains are relentless and if we don’t watch out they could really bring us down. Sometimes exercises help, sometimes a strategically placed hot or cold pack, a massage, an Arnica rub or if all else fails a muscle relaxant or pain pill.

Somewhere in all this work got done and promised pieces delivered. Not quite at the before-crash pace, but delivered anyways.

Yesterday was a very moving day as we went to shake the hands of our rescuers at the Gardner Fire Department. We brought a bushel of coastal (Ipswich) apples, pears and cider donuts to this inland apple territory. We also made a donation to the Gardner Firefighters Benefits Association as a token of our gratitude that does not translate itself well into cash.

Sita and Jim drove us to Gardner, a long but beautiful drive that tested the limits of Axel’s endurance sitting in a car (one and a half hours). When we entered the Fire Station Lieutenant Ares who had led the rescue team was waiting for us with a few of his man. They had invited others, including the chaplain and the firefighters from the neighboring town Templeton. Soon there were about 25 people, including the blueberry pickers who had made the 911 call and tied a shirt around Axel’s bleeding head, a critical first step that may have saved him if not all of us.

We added our apples, pears and donuts to the brownies they had prepared and the coffee and drinks. And then the story telling began; sometimes in small groups and sometimes all of us standing in a big circle; the small and the big stories; the fright; the reaction of the children. One couple brought their children to show them what mom (EMT) and Dad (firefighter) do for a living. The Chief showed us pictures of the wreck after we had been extricated and we finally understood how the plane came down and probably how we were saved as the left wing folded under the fuselage at the very end. It was eerie to see pictures of the right wing, dangling high up in a tree and the path that the plane had cut through the trees.

And then we finally got the straight story on how long it took our rescuers to get to us; how long it took to saw us out and why Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Dartmouth got involved; Axel never went there as we had concluded from the hospital bill. It was the helicopter that was sent from Dartmouth because at first none were available from UMass in Worcester and there were three needed. We found out that it took 55 minutes from when the 911 call was made to Axel’s extrication; we also learned why it had been so difficult to get Joan out and how easy it was to get me out after that (2 minutes). As it turned out, my sense of timing had been quite correct; I was extricated about half an hour after Axel. We received a copy of the handwritten log and other papers that the Fire Department had to fill out. They also showed us their file of paper clippings and we made copies of the ones we did not have; for our scrapbook, for later.

We hugged and thanked everyone at the end. It was an emotional event. Our visit was rather unusual. “Usually the people in a plane crash do not survive,” they told us, “and with other accidents, we rarely hear what happens afterwards.” It was like another opportunity for a debriefing and the Chief thanked us for that.

Before we left we were given a tour of the trucks and equipment, especially the extrication equipment that saved our lives. We promised that we would never vote down equipment requests from our own Fire Department if such ever came up in Town Meeting. As it turned out our rescue was the first time they used brand new and very powerful extrication equipment that turned out to be critical. I tried to hold one of those humongous power cutters and could not. We understood the purpose of the exercise/weight room upstairs. These tools require enormous strength. We left with a bag of Gardner FD shirts and an invitation to come back. We also left with great awe and gratitude for what all these people had done for us.

You can see pictures of the event by clicking on the links section and then on the second flickr link (the one with the word vriesneus in it).

Annette is gone and everything is quiet again. Nothing was cleaned or moved yesterday. Axel was also gone most of the day. David took him to his physical therapy session. After that they joined Chuck and Anne in Salem for lunch and a visit to the Peabody Essex Museum. I was curious how he’d do since I have always found a museum hard on the body, even when it is in good shape. It tired him out but the acupuncture session afterwards allowed for some rest after the needles were placed.

While he was away I tackled a growing list of tasks for work, went to my EMDR session and then met up with Axel at the acupuncture clinic in Beverly at the end of the day. I also made arrangements for what is likely to be my first trip, to Kenya, early next month.

I walked around most of yesterday with a fairly intense pain in my neck. And that is how I arrived at my EMDR session. We decided to tackle this pain and inquire into its meaning using the EMDR technology (two buzzing biscuits in my hands). It was a bit of an unusual session in that I seemed to take off on a course that did not quite conform to the protocols but it released some tears. I had started off with an image of a closed gate which I did not know what to do with but now I realize that this might have been about floodgates. I walked out without the pain in the neck. And when it came back later in the evening it was much less intense. I am still not sure what this is all about, other than that the physical therapist has been working hard on re-aligning my cervical spine and the neck muscles are being strengthened. But the pressure of the tears that did not come out was strong. It puzzled me. Ruth asked me what the few that did escape were tears off. I finally settled on tenderness and recounted the two experiences of this last weak where I realized I could have been a widow.

The acupuncturist targeted my belly scar, shoulder and ankle. I told him about the change in sensitivity at the sole of my food and that I wanted more of that. This morning I keep checking it hoping for a miracle and fearing no effect at all. I think there is another change but I am not sure. As for Axel’s acupuncture session, it is too early to tell; besides, he is still asleep so I cannot ask him.

In the evening we fished Lynndsie’s shepard pie out of the freezer and enjoyed it while watching Brother Where Art Thou.

Two things were different this morning. First, Axel is sleeping on his bad arm, facing me. For most of the last few months we have been facing the ceiling or away from each other because our bad sides were in the middle (we could not change places in our bed because then Axel could not push himself up to get out). This may seem a rather tame observation to most of the world but for me it is a big deal. Second, I interrupted the flow of my writing to go downstairs, reboot the router and make coffee so that I am all ready to take Annette to the airport in an hour. Coffee before writing? This would be a daring experiment. It will for once and for all silence the question whether coffee helps with productivity.

One of my new exercises is walking down the stairs normally, that is one foot per tread. This is a huge undertaking for me but to make the coffee experiment work I have to go down again and might as well do the exercise. I am leaning heavily on my arms on the railing. This irritates my rotator cuff tendon which then requires a different set of exercises. This is how we are keeping ourselves busy.

We celebrated Annette’s visit by introducing her to some of our dearest friends. She celebrated it by cooking us a huge Indonesian dinner which took her most of the day. It was a dreary Dutch or London kind of day anyway, and cooking was not a bad way to pass the time. Axel and I passed the time working on various assignments, buoyed by the amazing smells coming from the kitchen. The smells were so strong that Sita and Jim both arrived home for dinner in time, Sita from as far away as Boston.

What we experienced last night, as we set around the table with Sita, Jim, Katie-Blair, Andrew, Annette and the two of us– with dog Bessie under the table – is what I imagine the Chinese call Double Happiness: being with wonderful people and eating royally.

And with regard to the coffee experiment: quod erat demonstrandum!

Last night in our OBTS board-meeting-by-phone we agreed that the annual conference organizers need to have a double, or a shadow or at least someone who is sufficiently informed to take over in the God-forbid-event that something happens. I did not say anything because there was general agreement with the proposal but I did think of my own experience this summer in which such a God-forbid-event happened to us. And in the immediate aftermath I have learned a thing or two about being indispensable. It was humbling, annoying, disappointing and deeply satisfying all at the same time.

The week after we went down I was on the schedule to teach full days for a week in one of Boston University’s Summer Institute courses. I had no double or shadow. Within days colleagues were lined up to replace me that week. They did a great job and the course turned out to be just as life changing for some of the participants as I had intended. And I knew that the world would be just fine without me. That was the humbling and annoying part. I also had to be replaced for an assignment in Zanzibar and Tanzania that I had been looking forward to, in the middle of August. That was disappointing. The fact that the assignment went well without me was, again, both humbling and annoying.

More recently I have begun to get back in touch with the various people I am or have been coaching around the world to conduct leadership training in Nepal, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Myanmar, Swaziland, Kenya and Guyana. They are all doing fine without me. Although that was also humbling, the more dominant feeling was that of great pride and satisfaction; after all, that is what I am trying to do: hand off the baton and hope it doesn’t get dropped. It did not.

But when it comes to the home front I know I am indispensable just as much as I know Axel, Sita and Tessa are indispensable to me. There are many moments that I watch Axel, especially early in the morning like now when he is still asleep. I feel a great surge of tenderness towards him and gratefulness that he is still here. I am acutely aware how utterly and totally he is part of my life and how I nearly lost him. I suspect that these thoughts and feelings were also our daughters’ in those early weeks after the crash.

Doubles and shadows won’t do at home. There is no substitution. But these tender feelings are good to have, to hoard and store in a safe place. As we drift back into normal life again, they make for a great insurance policy against the inevitable crankiness and irritability that comes from seeing the imperfections in the people I am with all the time, who also happen to be those I love most. The saying goes that you have to lose something to cherish it. Nearly lose someone is also true.

Annette continued her cleaning and repair frenzy. Those who remember the nurse’s station and the general rehab atmosphere of our house this summer may not recognize the transformation. She also drove Axel to Peabody and used the waiting time to raid the Lind chocolate store at the North Shore Mall. And while Annette was busy I was able to put in a good day’s work in between exercises and physical therapy. Axel went to a town meeting in the evening. These usually end at a local bar. Of course his was a pretend beer, manly or not.

If you had tried to capture Annette on camera yesterday it would have been hard to get her in the frame. She rushed around the house cleaning, re-arranging, moving, bagging and boxing stuff. If you (and we) thought we’d done all that already, as indicated in my journal entries, then we were exposed yesterday as frauds. I guess we really needed an outsider to see the dirt on the cabinets, the crumbs in the drawers and the unnecessary clutter in our rooms. “Clutter is not good for your mind,” said Annette as she shoved yet another batch of stuff towards the cellar door. Out of sight, out of mind. Of course the cellar is now cluttered big time, but most of the time the light is out there and we don’t have to see it.

We can now move around the house without hitting tchotchkies, stumbling over books, unplugged phones or large bulky computers that are trying to hide under furniture (ours or Sita’s). The refrigerator is spotless again and the oven clean (it did that itself). We also got broken stuff to repair places. As a bonus, Annette also shopped and cooked a fantastic meal and then cleaned everything up afterwards. After all that we sat by the fire and read. Can you imagine, all this in one day! And we have a few more coming. She claims she can even fix the holes in Axel’s sweater. Wonder woman!

Annette’s presence allowed me to concentrate on work yesterday. I was able to put in more than half a workday in between three daily exercise sessions and one PT session. Most of the time I sat at my computer with either an ice pack around my ankle or a hot pack around my neck and my leg propped up on pillows on a table next to my desk. It works for short periods of time and then I have to get up and move and stretch.

Axel had another stay at home day. We are encouraged that his eyesight is often greatly improved in the morning. Unfortunately it tends to deteriorate slowly as the day goes by. He has rediscovered his muscle relaxant pills (Skelaxin) which had been pushed into the far corners of our pill pile. They are doing wonders for his body and mood and allow him to sleep in ways he hasn’t done for awhile. We haven’t quite done our Google research yet on whether these pills are harmless or not; we think (and hope) they are. He has been able to pick up his old business of making the most wonderful note cards out of photos taken around our house. He actually had got an order to fill.

Yesterday our local agricultural fair, the Topsfield Fair, closed, and, as tradition goes, it rained all day. Axel had predicted this, as he does each year. It was hard to imagine that the glorious summer days would end one day and signal a shift to that less glorious part of our fall. We did not go to the Fair this year. We cannot quite manage walking for hours in a crowd. Sita had gone with her friend Tim who is in a wheelchair. They were let in for free. My wheelchair was picked up a couple of weeks ago. I think I would have let it go even if I had known about the free entrance. I was too anxious to remove all traces of handicap from our house.

That is what Axel did yesterday. He cleaned and moved furniture, moved books and muttered under his breath when he could not find something or when he re-discovered something in the wrong place. We are putting our life back together like a jigsaw puzzle and find some pieces missing or placed where they don’t belong. At the end of the day we sat down in our living room which looks and feels like ours again. No longer the place inhabited and managed by a cast of thousands, even if they are our dearest friends. No more surrendering to people who put the teaspoons in the wrong place. And we are still training Sita and Jim; they are making much progress.

I spent a couple of hours doing MSH work, participated in a Quaker Clearness Committee and had another hour of work done on my neck and shoulders. My neck stiffness comes from the vertebra (C4) above the ones that had fractures (C5 and C6), which got rotated slightly and created some misalignment. This is what the physical therapist has concluded and this is what she is working on. We are strengthening the muscles in that area so that they will pull and push everything back in alignment. My range of movement is increasing slowly. I got a new set of exercises and finally was told to drop some old ones or not do them as often as I did. I was a bit too enthusiastic it appears. My rotator cuff tendonitis is slow in responding to anything. I try to do my shoulder mobility exercises gingerly, avoiding further irritation.

Annette arrived from Holland after an entire day of travelling that led her from Amsterdam to Newark to Boston, to South and then to North station. When she was once again told to lug her suitcase up one stairs and down another she had had it with public transportation and took a taxi to Manchester which got stuck in the sand down our beach, in the dark. We rescued her and sent a tow truck to the taxi driver. As soon as she was in the house she zipped open her suitcase and out spilled herring, dropjes (licorice), stroopwafels and cheese. We started on just about all of this before bedtime. All of them are known to have healing properties.

It is pouring rain this morning; so very Dutch, this weather. The sound of the rain brings back memories of biking to school (in the dark, but no hills) and arriving at school completely soaked. Draping coat and scarf over whatever spot you could find on the radiator and then sitting in class, quietly, letting the wet clothes dry on your body. Uncomfortable for awhile and then you got used to it. This is like the sole of my right foot now, the one without feeling. Or rather the one that used to have no feeling. Somehow, the acupuncture re-activated nerves down there. Since the Friday session more of the foot got its feeling back; it now includes part of the arch. I keep checking my foot because I cannot believe it.

I now wake up with tingling hands again. This was normal before the crash. This is why I was going to have an operation on my right hand, to free the nerve from its carpal tunnel. The crash cancelled the surgery of course but also freed the nerve somehow (in both hands). This had nothing to do with stopping to work on the computer. I remember that the tingling, which had been constant, was gone on July 15th when I woke up. I remember this so well because it had become normal.

The word normal is on my lips a lot these days. I used to think normal was boring. I grew up in a household where what was the norm, especially for women, was not respected. As a result I learned that women had to push the boundaries a bit, in order to avoid being normal (boring). That probably accounts a bit for my wish to learn to fly at the ripe age of 54.

But now normal is appealing and we try our hardest to be normal, to look normal (that darn eye patch) and to walk normal (stairs and distances give me away). Last night we were busy making our house look normal again. We moved furniture back where it was before, making the house once again not-wheelchair accessible or navigationable. We are going to put rugs back and make this house look like a normal house, not some post-calamity rehab ward.

Of course we have much extra stuff now, some of which is Sita and Jim’s, some is discarded home health devices and some significant part is the collection of new books that poured in over the last few months; many of which at least one of us read.

What is also normal again is Axel staying up into the early morning hours, designing note cards in his temporary office across from the bedroom and forgetting all about the time (it is called ‘being in the flow’). He showed me this morning his latest card. It has a picture of Lobster Cove, made from an old print that was published in Harper’s Weekly in 1897. If you haven’t gotten a thank you card yet, you may be luckily and get this one. His technique for working on the computer is anything but normal and worth watching: he picks up his left hand and drops it on the keys that need pressing. He’s getting better at it all the time, although it remains a slow process; hence the late bedtime.

I went to Quaker meeting in the morning, then back home for a quick lunch (leftover Nancy spaghetti). In the afternoon I went to a memorial service for Ken Glover’s mom who died in a freak accident while vacationing in Maine, only days after our crash. Sitting in the church and listening to the rather unusual music picked out by her son and husband (Pete Seeger’s Turn, turn, turn and Joplin’s the Entertainer) it suddenly, and for the first time, hit me like a ton of bricks, right in the belly, that there could have been a service like this for us, or for Axel. Intellectually I had known this all along (and was always quickly corrected – quite forcefully I remember, in those early post crash days – by others with the words ‘but it did not happen’). But this was a different experience, solitary, with no one to correct me, and just the music. I did not cry but it took my breath away, for a brief moment.

PS. Caringbridge will remain open a bit longer. We might get to the 20.000 hits.