Sylvia's Journal

I knew that this week was somehow going to be important and different than the previous ones. I woke up with the idea that I had nothing to write about and then finding my head overflow with stuff to explore this morning.

This is the ‘pregnant’ quality of any transition. It is clear that I am in that phase. I’d recognize it from a mile away. We have a saying in Dutch ‘walking with your soul under your arm’ (met je ziel onder je arm lopen) which is what I did pretty much all of yesterday. Having your soul under your arm, and not being able to put it anyplace is tiresome. This soul is a heavy thing and while carrying it around you cannot do anything else. Axel saw me shuffling around the house, sitting down, picking up a book, putting it away again, checking email, responding to some, and walking away again, and so forth. Restless. Breathless.

I found myself gravitating towards the section of my bookcase where the B-authors are grouped. Transition is Bill Bridges’ territory. He has written much about the topic. I am a big fan of his. I pulled out the book he wrote about his own personal transition after the death of his wife. I looked for the marked pages of which there are many. The very first underlined phrase was “There is no beginning that does not require an ending, and no ending that doesn’t make possible a new beginning.”

So what’s ending? I think this week I am ending my status as a patient. But I am not quite back to where I was on July 13th. I am not whole, or healed. The new beginning is not there yet and so I continue to remain in this no man’s land of transition, with my soul under my arm. How long this wandering will go on I cannot guess. It is an uncomfortable time, a time of suspense and not having much of a focus or direction; it’s time in which I have to admonish myself to “hang in there!’

Having written about what happens inside me, there is, in this household, always much to write about what happens outside me. Our neighbor Kurt and his grounds keeper Paul, who had made our back door ramp last July and then dismantled it again in November, showed up in the morning to do the refrigerator switch again, the old one back upstairs, the new one down to the cellar. Sita had been haranguing us about this fateful switch made sometime in the summer. But all is back to the old normal again and Sita stood in front of the old refrigerator with its freezing compartment at the bottom, beaming.

After dinner Axel, Sita and I sat with three large cookbooks on our laps trying to figure out what to cook for our very small and intimate Thanksgiving dinner. Jim is pulled back into his own family so there will be just the three of us. You don’t cook a turkey for three people. We finally agreed on pea soup, a home made bread and pumpkin pie for desert. That will give me some focus for today and force me to put that soul down for a bit.

Earlier in the day I talked with Joan who is having surgery today on her shoulder and her elbow. The doctor will be removing her elbow plate and loosen up her shoulder joint by removing some of the scar tissue, or something to that effect. She was dreading the surgery, as I would. Keep her in your thoughts. She will be back at home tonight where her son who flew in from California, is caring for her, as Morsi is still in Egypt.

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.

I am sitting in my bed with a pillow as desk and the computer on that pillow; much like I have done since July 21st minus the last two weeks. It is very early in the morning.

My dreams were many and mysterious. I was doing exercises with my foot on a raised platform on a square with lots of people looking on. At some other point I gave directions to someone to a hotel in Kathmandu. The directions were so precise, with street name (Khatra or Khadra street)l, that I could check with my Nepali friends whether it really exists. I also dreamed about being with people who push boundaries and who innovate and in some context or other used the terms innovation and denovation. I think in my dream state I invented a new word. I suppose innovation and denovation are opposites. Maybe coming back to one’s own house, hearth and loved ones is denovation, as in: going back too what was before.

It is wonderful to be home again. This is the best part of traveling after all: coming home. This homecoming was a bit different from all my previous homecomings. I used to be full of energy, no matter how far I had traveled, bring my suitcase in, unpack it, distribute gifts and goodies, have tea, dinner and whatnot, take a shower, put the laundry in the washing machine, clean off my desk, and have everything ready for a new workday. I would go to bed at a normal US time and everything looked as if I had never been away.

Not this time. My suitcase is still sitting on the floor, unopened. The Dutch cheese did not even make it into the refrigerator. I was completely exhausted and went straight to bed for an uninterrupted 8 hours of sleep. That woke me up at 3 AM.

I am stiff beyond belief. Once more I wonder when and if I will ever be limber again. I am curious what my physical therapist will say about my foot; it doesn’t feel like there was any progress and possibly even regress. My neck and shoulders are sore and my range of motion feels limited. I was allowed to travel business class but even there it was a challenge to keep my leg up and get comfortable. I don’t think I slept more than one hour on all the flights combined.

Nevertheless it was wonderful to be out in the field again and do the work I love so much doing. It was worth it and I’d do it again if the opportunity would present itself. But not right away. I think I am going to take it easy for a little bit.