Sylvia's Journal

This is a long journal entry and needed to be entered in 2 parts due to space limitations.

Part 1 – The night was better than the one before, although sleeping with several pounds of cement fortified sandpaper on my right leg (this is how my cast feels) can never be comfortable. This will have to wait until the middle of September or whenever this cast comes off and I get something better.

Settling in last night was dicey. Axel couldn’t get his shoulders and neck right and Tessa had to be called up several times. He was ready to give up and quite desperate and I felt sad as there was nothing I could do to reduce his suffering. As I am writing this he is still asleep and looks quite peaceful, so I hope that Tessa’s last attempt got the pillows right. These are the really desperate moments when I don’t know what to do and I can only cry to relieve this mixture of sadness, impotence and guilt. It could have been an omen for a bad night but we didn’t let it be one, one lesson we learned from a new person in our life, Joe from Lanesville who is a long time jazz guitar teacher at Berklee but more recently a healer. Hoping or fearing is about the future while knowing is about the present. We know we will all be OK he reminded us of. Using a mixture of Qi Qong, Tai Chi, Polarity and other energy-based traditions and focusing on The One Mind, Joe encircled Axel and later me, during the evening while dinner was being prepared, and re-aligned energies and all that was out of wack in our bodies and heads. This is the lay person’s description, but you’ll get the gist (or may be not).

Yesterday was like Christmas, we were showered with an avalanche of gifts. We are experiencing the notion of Abundance in the Universe in unimaginable ways: anything we need is delivered. It was a very productive day filled with a whirlwind of people and fix-it activities that we all dream off when we make our to-do list. So this is going to be a long entry.

First, we got ourselves out of bed, dressed and fed. Tessa prepares everything the night before so we can do all this on our own while she sleeps as long as she can.. She left at 9 and Marin Imm from my Quaker meeting showed up. Martin is also a new person in our life. I had discovered only shortly before the crash that he is a pilot and sailor and we enjoyed talking and had made plans to fly together. Axel did not know Martin at all. Martin has many talents which we are discovering. For one, he can fix things which don’t work. This came in very handy and we presented him with a long list as he walked into the house. When he left after lunch many things worked again plus Axel had gotten to know Martin better, and we had some wonderful conversations. As a bonus, we learned that Martin used to run a health insurance firm. He gave me a brief health insurance 101 and this took the edge of my fears about the bills that had started to come in. We explored the BCBS website together and he left me confident enough that I spent one hour on the phone with Rachel from BCBS and sorted out the bills and how to handle the new ones coming in and how the airplane insurance figures in all this. During this process I learned that my room and board at the Umass medical center was over 40.000 dollars (not including any doctors’ fees, X-rays, scans, ambulances, mediflight, etc.) for one week. I can only begin to imagine what Axel’s bill was for a week ICU on top of that and a visit at another hospital before he arrived at Umass. Do I need to make a case for having catastrophic health insurance? To be continued in part 2.