Sylvia's Journal

I had considered staying home yesterday as a new snowstorm was blowing our way. Unfortunately our internet connection was (is) not working. Axel talked for hours on the phone with technicians in Bangalore and godknowswhere. But nobody was able to solve the problem. It was clear that if I stayed home, I would not be able to send and receive email; the thought of my nearly clean in-box filling up with emails without me noticing was unbearable so I decided to drive to work.

I left the house in a freezing rain less than 6 hours after I had gone to bed, hoping to encounter as little traffic as possible and zip into town. My 5 AM departure practically guaranteed such a ride. A freezing rain threatened to upset my plans but it did not.

I surprised myself with a level of energy that made no sense given my trip to New York and the little sleep I had had. I was able to take care of things that needed to be done and keep my nose above the email waterline.

And then it began to snow again. Looking out over the Charles River from my window it looked just as bad as it did on that commute-from-hell day last week. I got on the road around 2 PM. This time most of Boston had either already left or was waiting the storm out in their homes or offices. There is such a thing called learning-from-experience it appears. By repeating exactly what I had done last Thursday I was one of the few who seemed not to have learned from experience, but the trick worked as some of the variables were different. It took me 30 minutes to get fairly close to home and only then I hit a minor traffic jam.

I made it in time to my PT appointment, the first in a week. Julia asked me what I wanted to work on (to hell with the body part distinctions made by Blue Cross Blue Shield). I opted for trap(ezoid) work. My upper back and shoulders respond badly to stress, sitting at a desk for hours and travel. Julia put hotpacks under my shoulders and another one around my hip, turned the light off and left me alone for awhile. It was heavenly. I drifted into near sleep, woken up by an alarm Julia had set and, and then submitted happily to a deep tissue massage..

My improved gait has remained and my flexibility in my ankle has clearly increased. Unless I am tired, I walk quite well, although each step remains a bit painful, but tolerably so.

At home I found my office in great disarray because of the internet puzzle; wires sneaking in and out of my closet, and still no access. Axel, with a flashlight clenched between his teeth was still in detective mode and not in a good mood. Tessa stood in the kitchen shoveling leftover food from a plastic container in her mouth. There went my hope for a nice sit down dinner. Axel went to the Manchester Club (aka in our household as ‘the old fart club’) and was picked up by Edward Cushing who promised to watch over alcohol consumption. He did, Axel had diet cokes, and only one weak moment (not sure if that was an admission of guilt or one of weakness).

The absence of internet access turned out to be a blessing. I started a fire and settled into a chair with a pile of things to read while Tessa, hidden behind a huge computer screen (as graphic designers require), worked on various Christmas related projects, one of them our Christmas card and other things I was not allowed to see.

Edward dropped Axel off, their bellies visibly full with roast beef (and those diet cokes) and we chatted for a while. We had not really seen much of each other for at least 6 months and so there was much to catch up on. Tessa went off to see a friend and Sita and Jim were ensconced in the barn where Sita was apparently engaged in near mortal combat with her her sewing machine. I suspect another Christmas project. You’d be surprised to know that there are Martha Stewards in our households.

Today is Eid and many of my Moslem friends are celebrating. Eid Mubarak to all myMuslem friends

Axel reminded me yesterday morning that I am running on an energy level that is 80% in a 120% world and that my tired stressfulness was not surprising. Morsi corrected me; it was probably closer to running on 70% in a 150% world. “Get your rest,” he ordered, “your body needs it. It’s the time when it does what it needs to do for your healing.” He is a doctor so he knows.

It occurred to me that a 40 to 80 point difference is what you get when you put a 40 watt bulb in a 100 watt light fixture. Maybe that is what is stressing me out the most; I want to give more light but I can’t.

The problem with being stressed is that it is hard to center. Being off-center I make more mistakes, forget things. It takes tremendous effort to be mindful. All this takes me even further from the center. My body is also off-center, as shown in my gait. I am sure the mind-body connection holds, once more.

Unfortunately there is something relentless about work. In my line of business you’re either on or off (that light bulb again). When work comes in, usually via email, I drag it into my Outlook task list and attach a due date to it. I used to do this routinely before the crash. It has taken me until now to clear most of my emails and pull out the tasks. But they keep coming in like water over the transom of a boat that is not quite seaworthy on the high seas. I have to keep on bailing. Sometimes I can rest for a moment, stand straight and congratulate myself on a job well done; but then, oops, there’s the next wave.

The trip to New York suddenly felt like coming into port: a single focus, a night alone in a hotel, a bath, then early to bed and a very short walking commute across UN Plaza in the morning. Drawn by this vision I left work early for the airport; ridiculously early. It was a good thing as I needed much more time than I had expected.

Because I faithfully comply with the requirement that I can only use Axel’s handicapped parking sign if he is in the car with me, I did not use the empty handicapped parking spots that were so deliciously close to the entrance of Terminal A. One day I will be rewarded for playing by the rules. By the time I had worked my way through the entire parking garage, the line at security and arrived at my departure gate that was as far removed from the terminal entrance as it could be, I was in bad shape. Everything hurt, foot, hip, shoulder and neck. I decided I was going to get a massage at the hotel.

I did not need to. The Brookstone gadget store was near my departure gate and had an enormous massage chair right by its entrance. It was empty. I asked the sales lady if I could try it. She settled me in the chair and programmed it to give me a 15 minute whole-body massage. It was heavenly and I emerged 15 minutes later feeling great. I could have bought the chair right there and then (free shipping on selected items) but we’d have to add another wing to our house to accommodate the behemoth. It could put Abi out of business.

From then on things went smoothly. I even discovered at the eleventh hour where I was supposed to show up this morning; a little piece of information that had fallen through the cracks and that could have caused more stress. Imagine flying to New York at a cost that could have gotten me and Axel to Amsterdam and back; staying in a hotel that would swallow a year’s income of a rural farmer in Africa; and then searching for hours for my meeting room in UN buildings that probably host hundreds of such meetings each day. I did not even know the title of our meeting. That would have been really bad.

Tessa arrived home just in time for dinner which consisted of a perfect winter soup (potatoes, garbanzos, spinach and garlic) that Axel had made for us. She arrived about twelve hours after she left her home in Canada. After having driven that stretch of the Mass Pike and its extension back and forth a few times, she doesn’t think much about driving it in between snow storms. We are grateful that she made it home safely. After our snow storm adventure last week, so close to home, we hate to think of making a trip that actually does take about 10 hours under the best of conditions.

Axel immediately showed Tessa his no-longer-limp wrist and patted his chest as if he needed to show her that the plastic cast was off. Show off! But we are of course intensely happy about all that progress. Now we are waiting for the fingers to move. He is getting a new contraption from his occupational therapist. It will have dials and stuff. I can’t wait to see it.

Monday was cold and, as a workday, even more intense than the previous intense workday, despite a wonderful and long overdue massage from Abi. Its effect got lost quickly: three telephone meetings and a doctor’s visit. Somewhere in there was also a PT appointment but I forgot it as I lost track of time preparing for my trip to New York. At the time I was asked to go to New York it seemed a good idea and sufficiently far away that I could handle the preparations. But now that it is nearby, the preparations loom are obscuring the entirely view. I don’t know the people and I am still guessing a bit about what they want frome me. Yet they expect a presentation. In between the telephone meetings and health-related appointments there was not enough quiet time to think through what I should be presenting. It will have to be done today and tonight, in my hotel room in New York City.

I went to see the nurse practitioner about my continuing shoulder pains and the various nascent and full fledged tendoniteses or bursitis across the length of my body’s right side. She prescribed anti-inflammatory pills and referred me to a shoulder orthopedist, adding yet another appointment to the already full appointment book. He will probably order the MRI that I never had. It was cancelled in the hospital the morning that I moved my right arm for the first time and thereby indicated that my rotator cuff was not damaged. The physical therapist believes that I have a rotator cuff tendinitis and predicts a slow healing process. But I have not seen much progress after three months of physical therapy. I need to know what really happened to/in my shoulder.

The missing of my PT appointment hit me hard. Partially because I also missed last Thursday – because of the storm – and I will miss the next two days because of my trip to New York. But it hit me even harder because it was an indication of my not being able to hold as many balls in the air as I used to. This was one more instance of forgetfulness that I have a hard time accepting. I could kick myself. Axel is better at accepting these things than I am. He reminded me that it was only the first time that I missed an appointment. But I am less lenient on myself. I cried when I went to sleep because I could not stop my brain from finding other things, however small, that I had forgotten to do. Axel held me and ordered me to sleep. He usually doesn’t go to sleep as early as I do but last night he did and I was utterly grateful for his presence. Somewhere in a corner of my brain the thought emerged that he could have been killed back in July, and that he would not have been there last night for me and that it would have been my fault. It was one of those ugly ‘could have-would have-should have’ thoughts. But I hit that one back like a whack-a-mole.

When you work across time zones, the day starts hours before you even get up. In Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania the day is nearly over when mine starts; in Nepal it is over and in Ghana they are halfway. I sat down for a moment to check my emails while waiting for the tea to be ready and before I knew it I was busy at work. The boundaries between being-at-work and being-off-work have faded so nearly completed that it takes a lot of effort to make them visible again.

Yesterday I drew that on/off line sharply at noontime. That was maybe a bit late for a Sunday, as the line should have been drawn at Friday night, but the stress of knowing how much work is waiting for me in my in-box was obscuring the enjoyment of sitting inside with a raging snowstorm outside.

The snowstorm is actually a great image for this email management quandary. If you don’t respond and deal with emails when they blow in, it becomes like the snow that piles up when you don’t shovel from time to time. And if, after the snowstorm, you have still not shoveled and the temperature drops or the rains start, you are in for a big mess. So too with the emails; they pile up and then you can slip on them, or, you can’t get out anymore. The only difference with a snowstorm is that you know it will end at some point. Emails won’t; I will have to keep on shoveling.

A bit later, with oatmeal bubbling on the stove, and tea made, but still in my jammies, I continue to shovel my emails and all the fun things I did yesterday will have to wait until the next time I can come in to warm myself by the the fire of idleness.

Yesterday, once the office work was done, was wonderful. Sita and I were doing craft projects in the living room while the storm raged outside. The only disappointment was that we could not start the fire as the wind would have blown smoke into the house. We sat around the cold and empty fireplace and pretended it was not.

Axel went out in the morning to shovel and regretted that the rest of the day. In fact, I am not sure he has recovered from it now, some 24 hours later. For him the day has not quite started the way it has for me. He is still in bed.

Shoveling maybe good exercise for tight muscles but the endurance part is something else. He looked like a faded flower the rest of the day but stubbornly resisted our exhortations to go to bed and take a nap.

Tessa called us early this morning to announce that she was on her way home. It seems that most of the roads have cleared. Once she is on the thruway it will be straight east for ten hours. We can’t wait to see her and surprise her. After all, the last time she saw us was August 31st, with Axel still in a brace and me in a boot. We have come a long way since then.

This morning when I woke up everything outside was white. We are in the middle of another snowstorm which is dumping many more inches on top of what is already on the ground. Just as I was wondering what sort of emergency would get anyone out of the house on a day like this, the newspaper delivery guy drove up to our house and threw the newspaper in a wide arc from his car window to our front door. It landed exactly at our doorstep. He certainly earned his Christmas tip this year. Ever since he saw the ramps appear at our house in late July he has gotten the newspaper within our reach; first by hand delivering it. This is rather unusual; most newspaper delivery guys throw the paper somewhere into the yard, never leaving their car, and many miss by a wide range or did not even aim for the doorstep.

Sita and Jim are stuck in Boston, with friends. It’s much better to be stuck with friends than on the road. Tessa was also supposed to be here by now. But after getting on the highway yesterday afternoon she realized that the same storm that is hitting us now had already arrived in her corner of Ontario, creating serious driving hazards. Having read about our commute from hell, she was wise to turn around and went back to wait out the storm. Now we have the house to ourselves. We can do whatever we want. We have dry wood in the fireplace, a big pot of tea and, so far, still electricity. This will be fun.

Yesterday our continuing soreness and muscle aches had made us both very irritable. We were like two snapping turtles and snapped away at each others’ bad habits. It made me think back about the lofty intentions of somehow being different (more perfect) after the accident. Why I thought that such ideas would last is now a mystery. We may be in our second life, but the accident was by no means a rebirth. We are the same people and the baggage we carry on our backs remains with us. It was only temporarily obscured by the trauma. As the trauma gets lighter and lighter, the old stuff begins to re-appear.

Luckily Roger invited us to come over and get our Christmas tree, which got us out of our snapping mode. The path leading to Roger’s trees was too hard for me to handle because of the deep snow. I stayed in the house with Sook, and had a cup of tea. Every year, in exchange for a mussel meal in the summer, we get to cut one of Roger’s trees. Of course this year’s payment did not happen. In fact it was Sook who cooked several times for us in our hour(s) of need. So next year it will be a double feature mussel meal.

Traditionally it is Tessa and Axel who are responsible for the Christmas tree. Frankly, I could care less. I like the trees better in their natural state, outside, where they belong without all the stuff hanging on it. Unlike the rest of the family, I am not flooded with happy childhood memories when I see a tree all gussied up. My warm fuzzy memories are attached to Sinterklaas on December 5. Besides, our living room is too small and our house too full and cluttered for something as big and wide as a tree. And it is not only the tree that enters. It comes with boxes and boxes of little tchotckees from Axel’s childhood, such as reindeer sets, made of the earliest plastic. Many of these old pieces are quite tattered and fragile, with ears or legs missing but Axel cherishes them as if they are the most beautiful things in the world. This has rubbed off on Sita and Tessa and they have added their kindergarten-made stuff to it. You cannot imagine the clutter; Santas, elves and reindeer everywhere! I try to stall the invasion as long as possible. I am often successful and the tree doesn’t enter until Christmas Eve. And within days after Christmas I start asking when we can pack everything up again and put the tree outside. Every year Tessa says that this year she’ll get the tree in early, but she rarely succeeds.

Katie-Blair joined us and chose a gigantic tree that dwarfed her car. The St. Johns have a big living room with a high ceiling and very little clutter. It’s easy for them to have a big tree. Besides, I don’t think they have all these tchotchkees.

Afterwards Roger and Sook took us to Erica Sonder, a fascinating German-born artist who makes exquisite prints of the flora around us after she mounts and dries the plants. This includes many different kinds of seaweed. We had already seen some of her pieces at the houses of friends. She lives on Ipswich neck, a piece of land I only know from the sky. It is beautiful but somewhat remote I imagine in weather like this, with nothing but snow and ice all around.

Axel cooked us a delicious shrimp curry. All the cookbooks in our house now have their shrimp recipes marked. We have many more pounds to consume. Afterwards we watched Harry Potter nr. 5 until my eyes closed. I don’t know how it ended, but since I know the end of Harry Potter nr. 7 it does not matter.

My sister Ankie is kindly correcting my anatomical mislabeling. That is easy for her to do because she learned the names of body parts in medical school many years ago. For me this is new territory. But I am learning. Now I am checking Wikipedia before I write anything down. The humurus is not funny but Latin for shoulder and what I called the IT muscle has nothing to do with storage and retrieval of information. It is the iliotibial band that goes from hip to knee. It is still very tight and I am faithfully doing my exercises, except this morning. I am hurting too much from standing up way too long at Gary and Christine’s Christmas party last night. So I am sitting down with my leg up on a stool and writing while drinking the first of my obligatory large glasses of water for the day, alternating with hot tea.

The house is quiet and cold. Outside everything is still white but the real immediate post-snowstorm beauty is gone. Some snow has melted and some has been contaminated with nature’s debris.

Late yesterday afternoon I was supposed to have flown with Mike, one of my plane co-owners, to Pease Air Force base to pick up our plane that is newly outfitted with a Garmin system. I have never flown with anything quite as sophisticated as a computerized and moving map. I did not quite need such a luxury but my instrument flying co-owners insisted. Of course it is safer because you can’t quite get lost that way. It would have been my first solo, on my way back after dropping Mike off. But it was not to happen. Part of me was relieved. Going solo is the next step for me. It may need to come after re-visiting Gardner airport, rather than before. The Gardner trip is planned for next Saturday.

I put in a full workday to get as much set up for my upcoming trip to Ghana (January 4) as I could. We are launching a leadership program in one region and hope that the results of this program will excite the country’s health leadership as much as it has done elsewhere. We are starting from scratch, with no leadership team on the ground, few connections and a very tight budget. Setting this up from a distance is hard, especially this close to the holidays. I am activating the connections I have and creating new ones through cold calls. The overall design starts to fall into place and I am keeping my fingers crossed that we get the budget that this new venture needs. I am thinking about our peanut budget and how it would barely pay for a day’s worth of work in the settings that Sita now works in. Sita gets to be in the Cadillac events, while we are barely making bicycle status. It’s nice when your kids do well.

I finally got to see Sita, 36 hours after she got home, yesterday morning. She brought me a beautiful wall hanging from India, picturing Krishna surrounded by 6 of his girlfriends, bringing him baskets of fruit. We are looking for wallspace and have temporarily tacked it up on the one remaining space in the hallway.

Under protest from Sita and Jim, Axel and I stunk up the house by cooking more shrimp to bring to Gary and Christine’s Christmas party. And then we left, leaving them in the stink, still protesting while we urged them to get used to it.

The party was nice, with many people we did not know. There were wonderful discoveries of people we’d like to see more of. A band was installed in the living room, taking up half the space. We left when it was just starting to warm up. The music was great and I was aching to dance, but that will not be in the stars for some time. A couple of hours standing up is still very hard for us. Like a bunch of old folks we left when the party was starting to get interesting.

Some days everything is just a bit too much. I went to work and struggled on the proverbial treadmill. I lost my battle to keep my emails down and the box is filled up again. My to-do list is getting longer by the minute and I began to feel the beginnings of panic about getting everything done in time before things come to a screeching halt for the holidays. I am preparing for a trip to New York City next week and then Ghana right after the New Year; these deadlines are quite hard.

Before the accident I was able to hold many balls up in the air at the same time; now I am less agile and I am afraid to drop some. I feel a bit like that famous tightrope walker who did fine until he looked down and then he fell. I am looking down a bit too much. Not surprisingly, the biomechanics of tightrope walking revolve around the ankle as the pivot point. No wonder I am having a hard time! Luckily I am surrounded by people who are willing to relieve the pressure. I just need to figure out when to ask and what to let go. I am having a hard time saying no because the things I am asked to do, small or big, are all exactly the kinds of things I like to do.

Morsi told me in the morning that Joan’s double vision had not diminished at all. A consultation with a neuro-ophtalmologist at MGH confirmed that this was not good. She was told that her eyesight is unikely to improve without an operation. The alternative is prism glasses that will realign what she sees into one image. The news cast a dark gloom over the rest of the day.

A stop and go commute added further to the distress. My body does not do well sitting in a car for over an hour. The tingling in my toes is exacerbated by the repetitive motion of breaking and accelerating, and my shoulders, well, it really is a pain in the neck. Julia, my physical therapist, relieved some of the pains with ultrasound and hot packs. The pain in my hip may be a developing bursitis. I hope not, but it would explain the funny stuff that is going on in my upper legs and hips that makes puttiing socks on or taking them off a painful activity. I have heard such complaints from old (really old) people, and now I understand and am so sympathetic to their plight. It is a tremendous motivator to do those exercises faithfully, at least once a day, probably for life. I now go to sleep with an icepack on my hip for 10 minutes and then my shoulder to get the inflammation down. Julia had to remind me again that is was only 5 months. Still…

Axel went to his OT/PT session and was ordered to walk more. And so he walked into town to buy dinner. On his way back he stopped by the PT office to drop of his groceries (a big cabbage) so that he could walk back home unencumbered. He had never met Julia who knows a lot about him. Of course Axel also knew about Julia and it was nice they finally met. I followed him home a little later with strict instructions to not pick him up.

Axel had gone to Gloucester in the morning morning to pick up 20 pounds of shrimp for a dollar a pound (unpeeled), straight from the boat. So that is what we had for dinner, (not all of it). The refrigerators are now full of shrimp. We take advantage of the short shrimp season by buying large quantities and then we invite friends to share in the bounty and freeze what’s left.

Sita presumably arrived back from India. She called from New York where her plane was delayed so I did not get to see her before I went to bed and of course now she is sound asleep

The mechanics of the body don’t seem to follow simple cause and effect rules. I am searching for what triggered off my most recent crippled-ness. After paying attention to the tight Psoas muscle and doing faithfully my exercises it is more limber now. But then my gait must have changed once more triggering another muscle into spasms, tightness and tenderness. This time it is the Ileo-tibial band (ITB) which runs form the side of my hip to the side of my knee. Last night I tried to take my sock of my left foot, balancing precariously on the still weak right foot, when something happened with that muscle that made me stagger to my bed. And now, the morning after, it is so sore that it takes all my concentration to walk straight.

Currently, someone posted a request at the OBTS-Listserve about teaching system dynamics to students and did anyone have any interesting material. Now I think that I could be that material. My body appears to be one big systems dynamics mess; a headache for diagnosticians, but it’s also the source of its robustness, and its elegance. These days, when I enter Julia’s office for PT I always surprise her with what needs attention now. I can hear her think, ‘what is it now?’ The body parts distinction imposed by the insurance is pretty useless. Yesterday was an upper-body day but she ended up calming down the middle part of my body.

The word patience is beginning to loom large in my life again. I think when I was on painkillers I was much more patient. Julia reminded me that it was only 5 months ago that our bodies got all shaken up and that we should count on one year for everything to fall back in place. One year? Seven more months? In my next session with Ruth we will focus on my patience. It needs some attention again.

A full and long workday at MSH which included a birthday toast and then I had to rush off to PT while the rest celebrated the holidays. It is frustrating that I am missing all the end-of-the-day fun that is organized with some frequency these days.

Margaret Benefiel and Ken Haase showed up with a delicious Thai dinner when I came home from PT; a wonderful treat to have dinner delivered like that. It reminded us of the August days when this happened every night. We would not want to go back to that time but it nice once in a while to be spoiled like that.

And today Sita comes home from India. In fact she is already on her way after spending her last night in Delhi with our friends Nathalie and Sanjay. It appears that Sita is carrying a harmonium with her. This is a habit she started on our trip to Senegal 2 years ago when she carried a Cora back. She collects musical instruments. India must have been a treasure trove. We can’t wait to have her back.