Sylvia's Journal

“Oh,” said the perky radiology technician only minutes after the ultrasound was completed, “it’s just a cyst. It will go away by itself. These things come and go, not a big deal.” She surprised me with her big smile and confident tone just when I expected a stern but compassionate looking specialist to come into the ultrasound room and give me the bad news. It took me the rest of the day to unwind from being taut like a compressed spring for two long weeks. You don’t know how (up)tight you are until you can relax. I had snapped earlier at Axel like an angry turtle for not being ready to go, a full hour before we had to leave for the hospital; he could see the tension and worry while I pretended everything was just fine.

I remember from our Beirut days how we were always on high alert for bombs, explosions, kidnapping and such. We were in a permanent state of adrenaline overdose. The permanence makes that you stop noticing. Until one night when we walked back from a midnight movie in safe and quiet The Hague and a car backfired and the adrenaline surged back in; then we realized the difference. I can relax again but getting back to that state was not that easy.

I arrived, still in a daze, back at work at noontime and was immediately drawn into a meeting about a project we are part of that operates in two of Pakistan’s more complex places to work: the Free State of Jammu and Kashmir and the much larger North Western Frontier Province. The project is part of ongoing post-earthquake emergency aid. The conversation was about ownership and leadership and how to get this when much of the aid is brought in and spent by outsiders.

There was no breathing space between this and the next meeting and so I remained in my daze, trying to concentrate on what was being said while holding an internal dialogue with myself about what was going on in my life.

And somewhere in the backdrop where pieces of conversation about my upcoming trip (this Friday) eastward and schedules being changed (someone forgot that Chinese New Year is being celebrated in Phnom Phen), only one of the two visas stamped in my passport and still no itinerary. So now there is this big mess of feelings, relief, anxiety, worry, anticipation, excitement, sadness that have glommed together like that most disgusting ball of spent chewing gum that teenage Sita built over many years and that she hid somewhere in our house.