Sylvia's Journal

The last day of the year is a day of looking back; everyone does that. But this year I am looking ahead, wanting to put this recovery stuff behind me and move on. My ankle has recovered as far as it can and I am learning to live with it and hope to stave off the inevitable deterioration as long as I can – this may be years. But now something else has come up that makes looking ahead a little more troublesome.

During the crash a seatbelt had kept me from going through the windshield. Axel who had not had a shoulder harness, only a lap belt, nearly lost his life because of that. But the shoulder part of the seatbelt left the right side of my upper body deep purple and severely traumatized. This included a right breast full of ‘debris’ as the ultrasound technician called it. Quarterly mammograms and ultrasounds have monitored the absorption of the debris in the surrounding tissue and the last reading some 5 months ago had been encouraging enough to stop the monitoring.

But now a new bump in the road appeared in the shape of a hard pea-sized 1 cm lump that requires further investigation. I am being shoved to the top of the waiting list for another mammogram and ultrasound but still have to wait a week which is about 7 days too long. I have closed off my feelings for this new development by shutting the door against possible future scenarios, as if I have no feelings.

The only hint about my mental state came in dream form where I was trying to get myself together for a journey on a bus. I let the first of two busses pass because I was not ready. I needed to find my boots and collect my belongings first. This required walking back to where I had been. Once there I noticed some things were missing and I had to walk away from the bus stop even further, to places I had never been and did not want to go. And every time I thought I got what I needed another distraction was put in my way.

I woke up with a headache and achy all over. There’s nothing mysterious about this because they are exactly the symptoms of the ailment that has kept Axel in bed the last 24 hours. What a way to end the year.