Sylvia's Journal

Five minutes before the alarm goes I wake up. It is a built in safeguard to start the day with birds chirping rather than the whiny Chinese alarm tone. I have my morning routine pat now: a shower, emptying the dishwasher while making breakfast and at my desk at 5 AM.

Getting up so early is especially useful when I need to call Africa. I started with calling those who are the furthest away, in Tanzania, where the work day is nearly over. No luck; then progressively closer to home, ending with Ghana, only four hours away. Also no luck. The intended conversations are then turned into emails, sent off with a small prayer that people are checking their in boxes, and tomorrow we will try again. This is how it goes.

Yesterday was for many of us at work a race against the time. Not because anything special was happening but because the end of the day kept pushing closer through the enormous number of requests, jobs, assignments and chores. Many of them are relatively small things but together the sheer volume is at times overwhelming; there is also a relentlesness to the pace of work; assignments come in over the transom as if there is no tomorrow. There are trips on the horizon that function as hard stops for many of us. At some point they seemed far away and suddenly they are there; there are also new trips added and the juggling begins when a few dates start to slip. It looks now as if I will be going to Ghana on my way to Haiti at the end of this months. The ‘on the way’ part comes from JFK from where flights to both Ghana and Haiti originate.

Axel drove in to Boston with me yesterday for his early morning appointment at Spaulding Rehab. The brain injury work is beginning to reveal things that have puzzled us for a long time. It is as if Axel’s skull is pried open and we are getting a peek inside. We are discovering that the car accident that Axel was in 21 years ago had more severe consequences than we had thought; and not only on his spine. I have often wondered about Axel’s difficulty in staying focused and work systematically on getting things done and when that started; he wasn’t like that when we met in Beirut and when we lived in New York or even Georgetown. The plane crash has exacerbated what may have been an injury from that earlier time and so we are finding ourselves in this place of delayed grieving about a loss we didn’t even knew we had suffered; all of us because it is not just Axel who is affected.

Yesterday’s session at Spaulding had affected him deeply as the nature of the injuries is becoming increasingly clear, explaining much of the agony and frustration Axel is experiencing in getting back on the track he was on before July. We are reading articles about brain trauma and head injuries that seem to pop up in unlikely places such as Harvard Business Review (May issue), Wired magazine and then of course the internet in addition to the articles his therapists are providing him. Memories of my first real earning job as a neuropsychology test assistent in the early 70s came flooding in. I was a psychology student in Leiden at the time and considering a career in neuropsychology. A highly coveted internship in a family therapy practice diverted me from that course before I was whisked off to Geneva/Beirut/Yemen as a new bride changing the course of my life in ways I could not have dreamt up.

On a positive note, we are encouraged by what is known about the plasticity of the brain and grateful for the professional help. Jim has been instructed to initiate Axel into the mystery (and joys) of Sudoku. It’s not Axel’s sort of activity but the specialists are encouraging him and Jim and I think we might be able to get him hooked. For Axel the new insights have caused many emotions and lots of sadness. He writes, “I am beginning to understand what has happened in those 20 years and I’m starting to see what the treatment will entail. I am very sad about getting such a late start on it – I think of all the tension that not getting things done has caused and the huge effort that it has cost to do what I did get done – but I feel like some dam has broken letting all this out.” We are all standing by his side as he works through this.