Sylvia's Journal

The sound of birds rather than sheets of rain coming down woke me up this morning, before the alarm did so. I took it as a good omen. There was too much rain yesterday and it rained all day. Prolonged rain like this always affects traffic. My commute, both ways, was long and painful. The stop and go action on the accelerator is hard on my ankle. It feels like it heats up, from the inside only, not to the touch, and the pain travels up my leg and settles in my right hip. I limped from the garage to the classroom, a five minute walk, wondering where this new development came from; a new pattern of pain, psychological or not, that feels very real. Once in the classroom I got distracted by the task of teaching.

Nuha surprised me with a poetic piece of prose, written in Arabic after a failed attempt to express her feelings in English. She explained that after our conversation the previous evening, her heart was all aflutter and she could not sleep; so she wrote – something else we have in common. I asked her to read the piece in Arabic. I love listening to this language. Having studied it for a while when we lived in Beirut, I was able to pick out a word here and there that I recognize. It was difficult for her to translate the piece into English and I am sure much was lost in translation but I got enough of it to cover my heart with a warm blanket. Another warm blanket came from Magid’s comments on my blog in an email. He is a fellow OBTS board member and hails originally from Egypt. I want him to meet with Nuha. This cannot happen of course without me as a chaperone which I will gladly do. The three of us will drink hot chocolate in Harvard Square sometime. Magid is a great fan of drinking hot chocolate and knows just where to go.

The bad weather of yesterday included a rare occurrence: something resembling a tornado not far north from where we used to live in West Newbury. It damaged hundreds of southern New Hampshire (vacation) homes and left many people injured and one dead. I feel for the people affected. For them it will be forever that fateful July of 2008, as July 2007 is for us. I think of the future plans that will need to be adjusted; my future plan adjustments are somewhere in there, between thousands of others – a consequence of stupidities, freak accidents, natural catastrophes and human errors, causing many untold stories of grief and despair, the nonstop sheets of rain so many tears of all those crying.

My own sense of despondency and despair this week has been put in perspective by that of Linda and her children. Linda lost her husband, Axel’s cousin Erik, a little over a year ago, still in his early fifties. We are hearing that she is now dying herself of breast cancer. Her children, about the same age as ours, have to deal with a near certain prospect of both parents gone that was only a fleeting possibility for ours.

These were some of thoughts I had while lying on my back, part way in the enormous Philips MRI machine that was taking pictures of my sick ankle. Headphones provided background music to my thoughts; they were also supposed to mask the loud noises coming from deep inside the machine, but the MRI is like a jackhammer at work inside Symphony Hall. Haydn’s Clock Symphony’s trio and minuet couldn’t quite outdo the clink-clonk, mandmandmandmand, and ratatatatat that were trying to trip up my heartbeat. I eventually hummed along with the sounds, right through the classical music, because it is true that if you can’t can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em. It made the time go faster.

The experience of not being able/allowed to move for a long time brought me back to the destroyed cockpit and the pain and discomfort I experienced while the rescue crews were trying to cut us out. Feelings and reason were in near mortal combat to master that situation. Abandoning to feelings is easy but causes a deep panic that makes the waiting excruciating and difficult; letting reason take over requires a mastery and discipline that come from mediation practice, which I don’t possess, although, at the time, I was able to focus on my breathing as if I was in a yoga class. This time it took similar effort not to panic about the discomfort and cramps that started to set in, working their way up my leg into my hip while my foot was immobilized in a cradle inside the machine. I have discovered that physical pain can start as imagined (psychological) pain and that it takes tremendous effort to not go that route. When I could no longer stand it I asked Mike, the technician, how much longer, preparing for another endless 5 minutes, but he said we were done; I had been a good (still) patient and the pictures were clear. Relief.