Sylvia's Journal

It is very cold, just one degree above freezing. Coming back from Africa, this is a new experience. It is also a new experience for my foot which takes longer too limber up in the cold. I am trying to fall back in my old routines but it’s hard. I am getting up too early and having more trouble than before the accident in getting myself organized. My desk is still a mess and I have a hard time concentrating. I don’t think I ever had a concussion but I act as if I did with this being a delayed reaction.

The accident and our recovery have been dominating our life the last four months. Everything had orbited around it, including our daily schedules of exercises and therapy. In Nairobi my life was organized around the needs of the task at hand, which filled each day and evening. Now, without this focus, I am feeling a bit lost. I am no longer incapacitated, having proven that I can do the work as I did in Nairobi; yet on the other hand I am not yet ready to get in the car three times a week and head to work and complete the forty+ hour week with two days working at home. But something is shifting.

I think my dreams of last night carry some clues even though it is hard to find them in my nearly undecipherable pencil scribbles on yellow Post-it Notes next to my bed. This is the text I found when I woke up this morning: “Something about (health) services – it is easy to render lots of them of dubious quality or outsource them and no longer pay attention.” There were more scribbles about a feeling that came with the words, a sinister and ominous undercurrent that combined two topics with which I occupied myself: Rwanda’s genocide and coaching. I read the chapter in State of Africa on Rwanda and with my colleagues Lourdes and Barbara I discussed the revision of a forthcoming publication on Coaching. I can only think, at this early hour, that there is some tension between an inner-directed self-centredness (Rwanda) and an outer-directed attention to others (coaching). I have a hunch that this week is going to contain some turning point for me in my recovery and return to normal life.

I started the day with a badly needed massage from Abi. Later I went to physical therapy. In between there was one work-related call (on coaching), an a few tasks such as writing my assignment report and completing my expense report in addition to a half-hearted attempt to organize myself and plan my week. If I apply my work standards from before the crash I was singularly unproductive.

My physical therapist was curious to hear about my PT experiences in Nairobi and announced that she, too, will get more aggressive as the swelling of my foot subsides (which it hasn’t). She worked hard on mobilizing the ankle joints and gave me a new set of exercises to build up the weak and tight muscles around them.

Axel also had his appointment for OT/PT in Peabody to which he still needs to be driven. He found himself in some bureaucratic mess-up related to re-activating his driver’s license that may require weeks if not months to sort out. It appears that someone inadvertently checked a box that should not have been checked on his application for a handicapped parking sticker. He was placed in the category of high risk drivers who are either post-stroke or epileptic. Given our litigious society we fear that no one is willing to take the risk of calling him fit by placing a signature on some form or another. It is a bit of a nightmare of which the end is not in sight. The fees required to pass each barrier (hundreds of dollars) also undo the benefits of the handicapped sticker which absolve us from putting quarters in parking meters. We’d have to park entire weeks at parking meters for the next few months to offset the re-instatement fees.