Sylvia's Journal

On Mondays and Fridays I work from home and therefore don’t have to set the alarm for 4:30 AM. This means I wake up naturally on these days, because of the light (or sun) streaming into our bedroom. One effect of this is that the dreams slip away before I can grasp them. They hang for a moment in this in between space where images become untranslatable into words, like feelings sometimes are, slightly out of reach but still present.

On these days I am also witness to how painful waking up is for Axel. He went on a bike yesterday, to the Manchester Club, and went to bed with some trepidation about the effects of this move. His waking up required an emergency heat pad intervention. The heatpad sleeps between us, and has been every night since he broke out of his plastic corset last September. It is permanently plugged-in, mostly used by him although I occasionally use it at night for my shoulders and neck, which remain stiff and sore at the end of the day. Axel needs to do about an hour of exercises after the first pain and stiffness is gone. This is a hard routine to follow when there is so much else to do in the morning.

Yesterday we had our quarterly MSH staff meeting. This means people from all over the world tune in via their computers and we try to be One MSH. I like these meetings. Back in September or October I was able to be part of such a meeting from home and I had not realized how important it was to be connected like that. In the back of the room is a large piece of red cloth and our IT staff puts on the names of countries that are online for the meeting, Afghanistan, Malawi, Haiti, but also some American states where MSHers live, like Florida. I still think it is amazing that we can do this. We heard about work in family planning worldwide, and then about integrated primary health care from a colleague in South Africa, not as easy to follow between the quality of the sound and the accent of the speaker, but I sort of got the drift.

I finished the last pickings from our hambone. There is a saying I learned yesterday: Eternity is a ham and two people. I think the end of eternity is in sight. That this was nearly true on my latest flight out of Kabul earned me a few more hugs from colleagues yesterday who I had not seen. Some people understand better than others what ‘stalling over high mountains’ really means. One of our travel agents is a pilot himself; he gets it and I get his compassion. All this helps. Today I am seeing EMDR Ruth again to help me with some effects of this latest mishap and other stresses in my life.

On my way home I picked up several meals for Fatou and visited her back in her home in Lynn. I also brought her a bottle of wine because of its medicinal properties. We hang out and talked about the US elections, her family and how scary hospitals are. We compared scars and then I got to use her footmassager which felt wonderful on both my good and my bad foot.

It was another early night, affter this first week back at work. My cold is still there and my energy is pretty much gone by 9 PM.