Sylvia's Journal

I wrote about patience on August 10. I looked for the entry (because I am impatient this morning) so I could take some of my own medicine. I have been suffering from the kind of impatience that is expressed with the words “are we done yet?” Re-reading my journal, in search of that one entry was indeed the medicine I needed: we have probably covered a good part of this recovery marathon and we are now in the last quarter. It’s like I imagine the last quarter of a marathon to be: painfully slow and tedious.

My foot is developing a tendinitis and I was told to hold off on exercises for a bit. One can be too enthusiastic. It may have something to do with walking around the house on slippers; I am told to wear shoes with lots of support and to give myself ice massages (done by tiny Dixie cups with water frozen in them and then peeling back the paper as I massage my unhappy tendon). Since I already have a tendinitis in my right shoulder which is painful and incredibly slow to heal (months and months and months) I hope to nip this one before it gets as bad as the shoulder.

I also asked the physical therapist what do to about my hands that wake me up several times during the night because they are so painful. She told me to experiment with pillows around my body and this seemed to have worked last night. So here we are, both hugging pillows instead of each other, as we try to support muscles and tendons that give us a hard time if we don’t. This is how Axel combats lower back pain in the morning. We really still have a distance to run.

I recovered from the long and intense workday of Wednesday and put in about a half day of work. Much of the work is responding to the increasing number of requests that come in to write this, review that, or fill in a form. It doesn’t feel like very productive work but it helps others do theirs and it does show up as a check mark on my to-do list. And every day there are emails or Skype calls from family, friends and colleagues from around the world who are inquiring about our recovery.

One of such emails came in yesterday from Ummuro, a colleague from Kenya. He is pleased that my first venture outside the US is to Kenya. He stuck a little gift into his email by quoting his grandfather who was a very wise man: “don’t look for meaning in life……human life is pretty meaningless without a sense of the sacred……the answers to your troubles may in fact lie in your own shadow.” I wish I could remember such a quote from my grandfather. I suppose this is the advantage of coming from an oral tradition, you remember words so much better. We end up with journals in hard-to-read handwriting that get stored in some closet. There is a lot to say for an oral tradition and learning things by heart.

Today I am getting ready for a two-day Board meeting at Babson College of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society. It will be another stretch, two days in a row. I will stay over two nights in their Executive Education Center which will be nice so I don’t have to drive back and forth. It will be my first two nights away from home since I came back from the hospital. I will go armed with ice packs, heat packs and my flex band. It’s like a practice heartbreak-hill as I am gearing up for the real thing in another 9 days.

Axel will be in good hands with Sita and Jim who are in a very good mood because the Red Sox won big time last night; a punishing victory as Axel calls it. I of course did not watch (which nobody here understands) and was refueling in Tunis with Antoine de St. Exupery on his way from Paris to Saigon, falling asleep just before something bad happened to him somewhere over the desert (and from which he recovers of course, as the lucky ones always do).