Sylvia's Journal

Many thoughts are swirling through my head as I sit in front of my computer. Outside a wind is blowing that is gusting from 14 to 22 knots. That would usually not bother me much, except that today, I am going to fly. My lesson is still 7 hours away and I used to think little of such winds, but now they make me a little nervous. I will be flying with Ralph, who is the instructor of all instructors at the Flight Center, so I am in good hands. But I’d like my own hands to be good. I am both impatient and a little anxious!

Yesterday was partially an off day as I had envisioned. I spent a few hours in the early morning trying to get colleagues on the phone in Madagascar, Togo and Ghana, all to no avail. I have learned over the years to have a good book open while I try these phonecalls so that I do not get frustrated. I am reading Lee Bolman and Terry Deal’s book ‘The wizard and the warrior.’ It is a good sequel to ‘The State of Africa’ with its many warriors (and few wizards, Mandela being one of them) and I consider it all preparation for my work with top managers in Africa’s health ministries – something that I am getting more and more interested in and hope to get moving on in 2008.

In the afternoon I picked Axel up from his OT/PT session and we drove to Ipswich in the hope to buy up the last bushels of crisp local apples and pears at Russells Orchards. Unfortunately we were too late. Everywhere there were signs saying ‘Closed for the season.’ Even a begging phone call did not help; all the fruit has been shipped off to be made into cider somewhere in Central Massachusetts. We returned home empty-handed just in time to get a 30 minute walk around Smith’s Point in before dark. My pride has become to walk ‘as if nothing happened,’ showing off to Axel who was having a hard time keeping up with me. But I was too fast for my own good and was limping pretty badly by the time we closed the circle and got back home. And Axel did keep up. These ‘constitutionals’ give us a new sense of freedom – there is not much else we can do as easily for cardiovascular exercise these days.

In the evening we went to hear Ashley Ahearn, daughter of friends, radio reporter with NPR, present her 20 minute audio documentary on the Essex River to a standing room only audience at the Essex Greenbelt barn. It was a joyful celebration of this most beautiful place we live in and centered on the experience of ‘messing around in small boats,’ shipbuilding and clamming. Although an audio documentary, our visual needs were amply met with some beautiful pictures of ‘Down River.’ And all the while I was thinking that the views from the river are wonderful but that the views from above are even more fabulous, which is why I am flying again, and hopefully today.

I slept in and got out of bed at 6:30 this morning. Looking out of the right window I saw blue sky, the Putnam’s house, the cove and a piece of the road. When I looked out of the left window I saw the black silhouettes of trees against a brilliant red and purple sky, the kind of skies that are described in Sci-Fi stories. I think the planet Dune had such skies.

To my right is ordinary reality; to my left is extraordinary reality. I stood there awhile pondering these two, realizing that this had been the theme of my night’s dreams in which I spent time with royalty and famous actors, watching how they fare in their fabled, watched and envied lives. I was like an anthropologist, a participant observer, hanging out with them. It was fun and interesting to see what it is like to live in a bubble. And when I woke up and saw the two different views, I saw the two parallel universes in which we have lived over the past four months or so. I recognized the warm fuzzy feeling of living in a bubble, as we did, the attention, the comfort that is offered, the focus on physical well being. It was just as in my dreams with my royal and famous company. Outside the bubble it was cold and harsh, sometimes, a place to be shielded from.

This week I went back out into ordinary reality. And yet throughout, I was reminded of this other reality, my parallel universe. The telling of the stories to others, their reactions, their disbelief of how well we have recovered, stresses that there is nothing ordinary about us being still here, or me being at work. People told me how they thought I was dead when they first heard of the crash. It is a very odd experience to have people tell you this. It is definitely extraordinary reality. These moments make me take a mental look at the pictures of the crashed plane, they are etched onto my retina, the ones we got from the firefighters in Gardner, and I have to take a deep breath. That was us, in there and look at us now! And then there is the ordinary reality of me getting up early in the morning and going to work. The commute, toll at the Tobin Bridge, getting gas, the traffic jam in front of Spaulding. The old routines at work, the meetings, the coffee machine, lunch downstairs, all that is ordinary reality. It has been there all along, while we were in our cocoon, our bubble, and not much has changed.

Today is probably going to be a mixture of the two realities. It will be partly a workday – the reality of needing to get things done, and partly a day of rest to soothe the body and indulge. This week was quite strenuous with the early rises, the commute and the physical therapy after work. But it will also be extraordinary reality as I can ignore the normal daily routines that most everyone else has to go through today. And for an additional dose of extraordinary reality I think I will finish Harry Potter today.

I woke up this morning with my right leg tingling and painful, as if I had climbed up a mountain during the night. It is probably due to the very heavy workout I got yesterday at physical therapy. The usually gentle therapist acted more like Axel’s physical terrorist and after ‘mobilizing’ my ankle to get scar tissue out of the way, made me do a series of exercises that, at times, took my breath away. This included balancing on the bad foot while trying to move my arms, sideways hopping across the room and turning circles and counter circles on the infamous jiggle board, a flat surface mounted on a ball that forces my ankle to hinge in all directions. I emerged sore and tired. This sore- and tiredness was added to the 45 minute car ride from Cambridge to Manchester preceding the therapy which is uncomfortable because the ball and toes of my right foot remain hypersensitive.

I had a wonderful day at work, reconnecting with people I had not seen in a long time. It was strange to be back in the place where I so clearly belong (this week starts my 22nd year at MSH) and yet there were so many new people for whom I am just a name. I discovered how much walking I do at MSH, compared to home. I had much opportunity to exercise my various stiff muscles.

All in all it was good day at work for my psyche, but a hard day for recovering body parts. Somehow this added up to my most bizarre series of dreams yet. I invented another term, ‘vector moms.’ These are mothers who are standing at railroad and bus stations vectoring kids from school to home and back. The word was echoing around my head and stayed with me after I woke up, as some other words have done that turned out to be significant. I believe I may even have woken up mumbling ‘vector moms.’ Ever since I woke up I have been turning the word over and over in my mind, trying to understand what it stands for. Vectoring is a flying term that is used in instrument flying, and moms, well many of us are. How and why the two combine is a mystery to me. The dreams were full of little kids who were both vulnerable and strong and smart. They needed the care of adults but at the same time could fend just fine for themselves when left alone. The kids were so adorable that I remember searching for my camera in my dream but could never find it.

There was also a trip through the house of a woman who collected everything in her lifetime. After she died her house was turned into a museum. It was a wild place, full of discoveries. A bit like my dream-time mind. Full, bizarre and ever so entertaining.

It just occurred to me that all this dreaming may also be triggered by the book I am currently reading, the last Harry Potter. This is the book that Jenny gave us in July and that Axel so valiantly read, using the Buxbaum’s cookbook stand, at Shaughnessy, in August.

Today is the day I had intended, for the longest time, to go back and join my colleagues in a more regular way at work. It has been four and half months now and it is enough. My cold threatened to spoil the plans but I went to bed again at 7 PM with a cup of hot Teraflu medicine. I woke up at 4:30 AM ready to tackle the day. I used to get up at 5AM but now there is so much to do in the morning that I can use half an hour more. I feel pretty good and so this will be the day that I join the world again, this time fully.

My dreams were populated with everything and everyone I remember from the last four months. It’s a bit of a jumble and I would not know where to begin to make sense of it all. I do remember there was much activity, boat rides, bus rides, with much preparation and lugging things around. It is as if everyone came out to see me off on my new journey. This will be it then.

Yesterday was a good recovery day. We took Sita to the airport. She is off to India. After a week of work she will be staying with our friends Nathalie and Sanjay. It is as if Sita is taking up the slack in her mom’s travels. There’s more travel ahead for her. She just got an invitation to scribe at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January. We should all be so lucky.

On our way back from the airport we stopped to see Don and Brenda, Axel’s colleagues form way back when who gave us some office furniture they no longer need. They also offered us another refrigerator, which we politely declined. We have never had so many refrigerator offers in our life.

We had a wonderful lunch in the newly opened Cheesecake Factory at the North Shore Mall to celebrate a momentous development: Axel can move his left hand up an inch or so from the wrist. We hardly dare to believe it but it appears that the nerve is indeed regenerating. In a couple of weeks he will have another EMG to determine whether there is indeed more motor activity than before. This will be the ultimate proof. If this was just a figment of our imagination and there is still nil motor activity he will have to go in for surgery.

It was a night like the ones I remember, painfully, from early on in our recovery; a stop-and-go sort of night. I never slept more than 30 minutes before I woke up again and thus saw all hours of the night pass by. There wasn’t much room for elaborate dreams so there is nothing from which I can get some clues as to why this sleeplessness, except my determination to go to Cambridge twice in the coming week and do real work at home. I may not be quite as productive as I had planned today. After Abi’s massage, later this morning, I may find myself back in bed.

Yesterday I reached another milestone: I rode my bike to Quaker Meeting and back. That is a total of one hour on the bike. Axel had prepared himself for having to pick me up somewhere along the road. He does tend to underestimate my ability or he projects himself too much onto me. But it was too beautiful a day to take the car and I was ready to try it out. After all, I could ride the stationary bike at physical therapy without any trouble. I am glad I tried it. It was a joyous ride and it actually felt good; the repetitive motion seemed to lubricate my joints and the initial discomfort soon vanished. I did not even have to step off at the steep hill where Bridge Street crosses Masconomo Street. Actually, the hardest part of the trip was to put the bike away in the shed. It requires walking on very uneven grass. That’s where the deficient ankle hinges literally trip me up.

Maribeth showed up for lunch with a complete Thanksgiving meal. Having read about peasoup and pumpkin pie she took pity on us. She served us both a very full plate with all the trimmings, which we ate under her supervision. We have been cooking (for) ourselves for quite awhile now but this was a nice surprise. We had to go for a walk around the point to help with the digestion. It is great that we are sufficiently limber and fit to undertake such a walk now. The lack of cardio-vascular exercise and the good food we are eating have brought the pounds that we lost back on. We have to start paying attention to what we are eating and may have to fore go the ice cream that Sita is careful to replace as soon as the carton is empty. Or the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie.

In the evening we went to the St. Johns for an early dinner, armed with our own pretend-beer and pretend-wine. We had not seen each other in weeks and we had much catching up to as well as some progress to show off. We left when my yawning became too frequent. I had expected a good long sleep, going to bed at 9. Unfortunately, that part did not quite work out as planned. Still, I am determined this week to become a more active and visible part of the MSH workforce, both at home and in the Cambridge office.

I woke up this morning without much pain, stiff of course but not much more. It took a while to realize that the pains were minimal and if I could only get rid of that stiffness all would be normal again. Instead of doing my various stretching exercises in the shower downstairs I did them upstairs. As a result the walk down the stairs was good, very good. I could have fooled anyone; that is how normal I can be. The word normal keeps coming up. Normal. Normal. Normal. I so badly want us to be normal again and do the things we enjoyed doing. Like walking the Masconomo-Proctor Street loop. Axel can already do it but I learned, after doing the little loop of Smith Point that an up-and-down walk like that is still a huge thing for me.

We are daring to talk about other things that were part of our normal life, before, like skiing, hiking, kayaking. It’s a bit of a joke right now. But they are actually serious dreams, for next year, not this. Such conversations create images that pull me; a short term vision that fuels my determination to be serious about the exercises, not to slack off. They do the same for Axel. He was told by his therapist that he needs to take his exercises slightly over the edge of comfort. If he doesn’t do this she can see the difference and his progress stops. It is that direct and that simple. So now he is doing his exercises as if his life depends on it. It does!

Yesterday we went on two visits. We are a bit difficult to accommodate on such visits: Axel gets stiff and reverts to his zombie walk when he sits too much, especially in low comfy chairs, and I get a swollen foot when I stand too much. So I tend to install myself someplace and stay there while Axel keeps getting up and moves around.

We visited our new neighbors Ellen and Bill Cross who built a beautiful new house across the cove from us. They introduced us to friends who have recreated the estate (‘Cragsyde’) of George Nixon Black that used to be across the Cove as well in the early 1900s, on which Axel’s grandfather and grandmother, he the gardener and she one of the servants. It was a big rambling shingle style ‘cottage,’ built by architects Peabody & Stearns from Boston. Ellen and Bill’s friends rebuilt the house on Swan’s Island in Maine according to the original plans. The original Cragsyde was torn down in the 1940s. They showed us a video about the mansion and its inhabitants with old folks reminiscing over still photographs. We hoped to catch a glimpse of grampie and granma but they were not in it. Axel had brought a small silver cup to our meeting that was engraved with the words ‘George N. Black for his display of chrysanthemum plants, 1904.’ This cup had been on display in the Magnuson greenhouse with other prizes. As it turned out, Jane, who is a bit of a history buff about Black and his Cragsyde, had an entry in her chronology about when this prize was awarded, November 12, 1904, and that it was awarded to Black and his gardener, Axel Magnuson. It was very exciting to hear about all the history, knowing that Axel’s family is deeply embedded in the story.

Later in the day we went to see Jim’s family for a post-Thanksgiving dinner at their house. We all ate too much, as one is supposed to do and watched football games, which one is also supposed to do. The latter I don’t get and don’t want to get. For me American football is nothing more than a bunch of bulky men with angry faces tripping over one another. This description is considered blasphemy, but I just don’t get the attraction. Having a very large, 40-something inch screen with large men tumbling over one another flashing through the room is a bit distracting for me. I find it hard to converse with others. But for most Americans this is easy and totally normal. Ahhh, normal, some normal I like and some normal I don’t.

It is very early in the morning. After waking up every hour from midnight on I decided at 6 AM that it was OK to get up. I am putting in about 10 hours a night since I returned from Kenya. And still I feel crummy. It must be the cold.

I sit by the window and look out over a pink cove. The sunrise is breathtaking. The water in the cove is flat like a mirror, except when the mallards cross the part I can see from where I sit. There are traces of frost on the ground. It was our coldest night yet. Everything is completely still.

When I shift my gaze from the cove to the yard I see a square patch of brown dirt that needs to be reseeded. It is where the back door ramp was taken away. At the front door the grass has grown back in and nothing reveals that I wheeled myself over a ramp there, some months ago. Inside the house only a few things give away that something happened this summer; the big recliner at the dining room table is still taking the place of a regular chair; blue, red and yellow thera-flex bands hang in various places for our muscle strengthening exercises; in the living room there are pillows on the ground and a yoga mat and bolster are ready for ground exercises. On the refrigerator is the most telling picture, the one where our fingers touch, across our hospital beds.

Our recovery is still in full swing. We have been told to count on a year before we will be our old selves again; that means another 8 months. This phase of our recovery is without drama; it is tedious, at times discouraging and painfully slow, but that is the pace at which soft tissue revives and the nerves regenerate. A study in patience, again.

And then something mundane happens that gives me hope, like when Axel mowed the lawn, something unthinkable even a month ago. The exercise did him good. I watched him from inside where I was holed up in my comfy chair, the entire day, finishing another book. We had a quiet leftover dinner by the fire, more soup and pumpkin pie, more reading, while Sita and Jim when out with friends.

I’m very thankful to be with Sylvia, with Sita and Tessa, and Jim and Steve, with our families and and with our friends in this beautiful world. I am very thankful for all the family and friends who loved us, nourished us and talked with us to bring us back to life, back to this world with all its lights, its noises, it’s warmth, its smells, its surprises and most of all its people. I don’t regret anything. So much has been gained. The time has been one of mending, healing, and relearning. And into that time has cascaded more love then I had thought existed.

That loved healed. And it brought even more than that. It transformed. I am so thankful to all of you who brought that love into our lives

Today passed very quietly with cooking, playing games, baking bread, taking a walk, and talking with Tessa on the phone. I think we were all very conscious of looking back at the last 4 months at this time of Thanksgiving. We surrounded ourselves with ourselves and stayed out of the rest of the world, just for the day. We will touch base with relatives -including the Akerleys- and friends later. We had a very nontraditional-but exceptional-pea soup and breads made by Sylvia and Sita. Sylvia re-crafted 1 of our pumpkins into a delicious pie and Sita created some exotic whipped cream. We retrieved some beloved games from the celler and played several rounds among ourselves. Axel even remembered some of the rules.

So all in all, it was a loved, lovely day in Lobster Cove. Certainly one we will all remember, and be thankful for.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. Most people will be very mindful of what they are thankful for, aside from eating turkey and a whole host of traditional dishes. Not having been brought up in the US, Thanksgiving was not a meaningful day for me. I had none of those warm and fuzzy childhood memories that may be reponsible for this being one of America’s top holidays. But, taking the name of the day quite literally, Thanksgiving Day this year will be quite meaningful for me as well.

Since the crash we have had a Thanksgiving Week (the week immediate post-crash in which our full recovery was predicted). Each time we tell our story to someone and he or she says “amazing (thank god) that you are still alive” we celebrate a few Thanksgiving Minutes. We had a Thanksgiving Afternoon that day in late August when Fatou had prepared us copious foods and we enjoyed the company of all those who had come to our aid. In mid-October we had a Thanksgiving Sunday with the people who rescued us in Gardner. And when I hear Axel’s breathing at night, it is a Thanksgiving Night. Thanksgiving in our new lives comes in various shapes and sizes. It is continuous and without end.

In fact, there is so much to be thankful for that this day could sink under its weight. We will make this a ‘Thanksgiving Light,’ partially because Tessa, Steve and Jim are not with us and also because of the food we will be eating: pea soup and pumpkin pie.

Yesterday was another crummy day for me. I went to bed very early again, while Sita, Axel and Jim were watching a movie. When I woke up this morning, after a sleepless night, with my head all stuffy and feeling crummier than ever, I realized that I am simply having a cold. What I had thought had been my new reaction to travel and jetlag was nothing more than a cold. I had seen many people around me the last couple of weeks with symptoms of the common cold. I naively thought that our bodies, dealing with heavier stuff, would have no room for stuffy noses and things like that. In the last four months we have pretty much only dealt with conditions that were on our discharge forms.

What I had forgotten is that colds were one of those ‘gifts’ that I would often bring back from a trip overseas. Catching a cold like this is part of my recovery and return to the normalcy of my pre-crash life; a normalcy that has its own challenges and bumps in the road.

Wherever you are in the world, and whether you are eating turkey or not, may this be a happy Thanksgiving Day.