Sylvia's Journal

I woke up from dreams about vacation spots and navigating them in a wheelchair, quite well I remember. There was also something about an ancient expresso machine that had Axel’s name on it and intercontinental flights; none of it makes sense anymore, now in broad daylight.

There is much to do this Saturday morning. I am flying at 9:30 with Bill to Laconia and still need to do my preparations for that flight and call the briefer about weather and other things I need to know along the route. Then I have to get everything ready to pick up my new E-bay acquisition, the Alden shell whose owner requires cash and a ride to the Cape. We have decided to continue, after picking up the boat, to see Alison who lives further up the Cape in Truro during weekends. Armed with his allergy medicine, Axel thought it would be a nice outing, a mini vacation of sorts and Alison extended the hoped-for invitation.

Yesterday was a very productive work-day-at-home. I got many items off my to-do list and feel less anxious about the very full and short week that starts on Monday. I also went to see Ruth again after a two months hiatus. The scary flight out of Kabul and other stresses led me to make an appointment with her. I biked over to Beverly Farms since Axel had the car to go to PT and besides, it was a glorious day. I left the house early and took a little break at West Beach in Beverly Farms. I sat on a bench looking out over the ocean, smelling the fishy seaweed that was drying in the sun and that transported me back to Holland, eating haring in the port of Scheveningen. A young woman and her mother were playing on the beach with a three year old (grand)child. The kid has no idea how lucky he is.

Ruth and I explored the tangled up post-crash relationships and how they mingle with work and produce a constant stream of stressful events. We didn’t get to the EMDR until the session was nearly over; just explaining everything took most of an hour. The brief EMDR session that followed produced some images about hands, apart, together, and a fear about losing my compassion. There is more work to do and we will pick it up again when I come back from Ethiopia and Holland.

Back home there was more work to do and more accomplishments that made it OK to sit out in the sun with Andrew, Axel, Gregor and later Jim as we all called it a (work)day. We had a mountain of interesting cheeses in front of us, a cooler full of smililarly interesting beers left over form our party last Sunday and I let go of all restraints. I had two beers (for the first time since July) and too much cheese. I paid a price for that when finally Andrew, Axel and I sat down for a meal and I was both too sleepy and too full to participate much. I managed to stay alert enough to watch Andrews slides from Madagascar from which he just returned. Familiar pictures of a place I once thought Axel and I would live for a while, five years ago. It is funny how life goes. If that had come to materialize I would not have taken up flying, and I would not be writing this blog right now.

Yesterday I had my last session with EMDR Ruth. I have been seeing her since August and this was session number 17. We looked back on those first few sessions when I got myself anchored in a safe place. Finding that safe place was more important than I realized at the time. Axel is now involved in doing the same. The therapy stirred up all sorts of surprising dregs from my past. The conversations that needed to take place, at least those that could, have taken place and things have been put to bed. No longer do I have those intensely physical reactions to memories of the crash. I can look a windsock in the eye (sock) without blinking. Gone are those fleeting sensations that take my breath away even when I am up in the air or preparing for landing. I am not sure if one can get cured from the aftermatch of an accident, but this feels like it. So we said our goodbyes with a big hug and I closed yet another chapter.

The rest of the day was an intense battle with work streaming in over the transom in waves. Everything wanted my instant attention. I could not have handled the multiplicity of tasks a couple of months ago, but I look back on yesterday and I think I managed OK.

This week brings memories from the plane crash, three years ago, that ripped three young colleagues from MSH out of our and their lives in the distant mountains of Western Afghanistan. This was a week of much crying and embracing and finally a trip to Topeka Kansas to be with Carmen’s family. I wrote them, as I do every year, and remembered their daughter. The Africans have a saying that as long as someone is remembered they are not truly dead. Of course that plane accident now has a different emotional load for me as I discovered how easy it is to be suddenly gone.

Yesterday I went to see Ruth again. She had asked me to think about an image that would capture these subteranean ‘whooshes’ of tangled up feelings and biochemical processes that remind me of the crash. Two images came to mind as I drove to her office: gnomes (kabouters in Dutch) and trolls. The gnomes are lovely creatures that populated the stories of my childhood (and even young adulthood with Rien Poortvliet’s magificent book about them). They are harmless and do good things. Trolls I only know from Scandinavian stories. I don’t think they live in Holland; maybe too much sun. I think that I choose those two sets of mythical creatures because they belong in the subterranean world of the unconscious. The gnomes were responsible for all the good things that happened as a result of the crash; the trolls were still messing around with sharp things like the glass and metal shards that flashed through my mind from time to time. They represented the bad consequences of the crash. They were gnawing at the roots of my confidence.

Ruth walked me once again through the protocol that EMDR requires: a clear articulation of the negative self cognition associated with the images that is generalized and untrue and then the positive self congnition; each are rated for their strength on a scale from one to ten. After that she gave me the left and right hand clickers (buzzers) and set the right intensity and speed, and off I went. This is like a discovery journey into the subterranean layers of the mind. I wanted to see those creatures in their own surrounding.

What I found, after some settling in, was the dark image of water surrounded by trees. While I am in this netherworld, Ruth intently watches my face and body for clues about my journey inside. When she sees something she stops the buzzer and I tell her what I saw. Water and trees were prominently present during the crash. “Go there,” she commands and turns the buzzer back on. This time I saw a landscape of young bright green trees but they were tilted at a 90 degree angle to the left. Of course, that is how I came back to my senses, lying on my left side, as the plane had landed on its left wing.

Ruth asks me to pay attention to my body while I am following the frantic imagery inside my mind. I notice the tight left knee and leg, as if I am bracing myself. The muscles in my right side are also tightening and suddenly my neck feels painful, as if a heavy load is dropped onto my shoulders.

Later in the hour my visual imagery takes me up into an attic. I am let in through a mirror that opens like a door. Someone holds the door open for me. It is a woman but I can’t see her face. The attic is a wonderful place of discovery and I enter with excitement and a sense of anticipation of the treasures I will find there. It is dimly lit. There are cobwebs and piles of dust everywhere. I see the outlines of old toys, pieces of furniture, trunks, an old leather elephant that must have been a stool once. And then some little creature that looks much like Tinkerbell zaps through the air and disappears. I try to find her again but my eyes are drawn to a trunk that is open with sewage seeping out of it. Another, trunk, next to it, has scorpions crawling over the edge. The sense of excitement and loveliness makes way for for another set of feelings. The attic is dark and dreadful now.

Ruth notices my frown. We talk about what I saw. This is about flying: both the excitement and the dread. The excitement is well represented by the magical trip Axel and I took with Alison on July 3 to the Cape and the islands. It was like going into the attic with all this anticipation and then discovering so many treasures. The trunks spilling over with sewage and scorpions represent the dread of a failed landing. I am holding both of these side by side in my head. It is probably no coincidence that my return to flying has brought these images back.

More images follow, now tilted to the right. It’s true that before landing on its left side, the plane tilted to the right and then lost its right wing in the trees, which turned it left. I see swallows flitting by. My brain kicks into action and is busily interpreting what the mind’s eye is seeing: in my dictionnary swallows are about bad weather coming. But Ruth says it could be much simpler than that; swallow is also a verb; and when I later see the image of an artichoke, she repeats the word with the emphasis on the last syllable; swallowing and choking. My body remembers something and the mind is holding the clues.

I feel a tremendous urge to yawn. It feels impolite to do that in company but Ruth enourages me to go with the flow. “Yawning,” she explains, “is about release.” I yawn, and yawn, and yawn. This is not about being tired.

The rest of the day was overshadowed by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and listening for hours to the BBC’s coverage of this momentous event. This is the work of big trolls that have come up from their subterranean hide-out. There is a theme today, both in the world and in my mind of good versus evil, kabouters versus trolls, God versus Satan.

I listen to the stories because they are about a strong woman, which is a big theme in my life. I hear the same stories over and over again but it never occurs to me to turn the radio off. I must have listened for 6 hours non stop. And while I am listening I am doing stuff that is rather mundane and domestic: baking and sewing, I also think like a mother. I wonder whether this event will set Bhutto’s children on their life’s path as it did for their mother.

We had another party last night, to celebrate Jacek and Sula’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Axel has known them for 46 of those years; so he felt a little old, even though at least half the people there were older than us. We also felt a little old because we have to sit down frequently which is awkward with everyone else standing. Stand-up parties remain a challenge for us. And of course the topic of conversation was nearly always the crash. We don’t quite know what to say when people tell us how happy they are that we are still around. It is a strange experience, to have almost died, and for people to tell you they are happy you did not. It’s like you are listening in on your own funeral when people say how much they cared about you or loved you. Except now it is in the present tense.

Once again I was astounded about how many people are pilots, were pilots or grew up with pilots. Aviation was certainly a big part of the Makowski family; Jacek’s father was one of the founders of LOT Polish Airlines and stories abound about pilots and wars.

I finished reading Spitfire Women; more stories about the war and pilots, but this time the women pilots. I am sorry I finished the book; I feel like I have gotten to know some of those remarkable women, and as the book ended, had to say goodbye. I feel privileged that I have at least known one of them, Ann Wood Kelly. Jacek knew three of them; one of them was the daughter of Jozef Pilsudski, head of state of the second Polish Republic. The stories about the Polish pilots who escaped during WWII and then served with the RAF is written up in another book, Forgotten Heroes. It does not talk about the women, but is remarkable as well. The only thing wrong with those books is that they make war seem glorious. In the war you could be somebody; that was true for the women as well as the men. I am sure that has attracted thousands of young American men (and some women) to fight in Iraq.

With the internet connections still problematic at home, working from home has become a little more challenging. Tessa sits in back of her huge screen in the living room, Axel upstairs and I in my own office. We negotiate who gets to have the Ethernet cable now. Since my work actually brings in money, I usually had first dibs, but not always. Working as a reviewer on a proposal was somewhat problematic because my colleagues communicate per email and assume that I am instantly informed. I was not.

I saw Ruth for an hour and we talked about Joan not being OK yet and my strong reaction to that news and the stressful week that followed. I also told her about these occasional flashes of memory that zap through my mind and, for a millisecond, take my breath away. They are moments of understanding or illumination about the crash that are hard to describe in words; I think I experience them as the biochemical processes that they are; synapses firing and synapses receiving, carrying messages encoded in chemicals. They are very different from the memories that come up when I talk with people about the crash. That is very superficial stuff; I use words that are not connected to anything. I am reading a book called the Synaptic Self in order to understand this. I marvel at the complexity of our brains and wonder, like so many others, how the mind fits into all that. Clearly, Ruth and I have some more work to do. My homework for next week’s session is to find an image that captures this tangle of feelings and biochemical processes. And then we will ‘emdr’ it.

The St. Johns came by for tea and we exchanged gifts. I managed to write a poem (while the Ethernet cable was with someone else and I could take a break) that tried to capture what Andrew and Katie-Blair had meant to us during our ordeal. It made Andrew’s eyes go wet, so I think I succeeded. We sent Katie-Blair off with this most Dutch contraption (theebeurs met knip), a rather serious tea cozy that snaps closed and with a handle to carry it around. Andrew got a framed picture of his beloved, taken at our beach, reminding all of us of warm weather and love.

I woke up from a dream in which I was meeting two friends in a museum. I remember asking one to come and sit down with me because I was in so much pain. It was arthrititic pain. I could hardly walk. Once seated, I still could not get comfortable. All my joints ached. Then I woke up. And all my joints still ached. The common cold has taken on flu-like symptoms. The frustration I am feeling about this came through in an earlier dream. I was in China. I had passed immigration but somehow emerged without my passport. I knew that without that passport I would not be able to leave the country. It was Friday afternoon and too late to get a new passport from the US Embassy; besides the US officials wanted an X-ray and I could not find a place to get this done. People with me said I should simply wait for Monday. But I did not want to wait till Monday.

I was so ready to start going in to Cambridge and work a full or nearly full load this week. But my body is protesting. It does that by resisting a good night sleep and by producing all sorts of pains that are new, or at least different than the ones I have been coping with. It is very discouraging.

Yesterday, after a wonderful massage and a very long shower I felt ready to tackle the day. Despite my sleepless night I had sufficient energy to finish my trip and expense reports and sort through my accumulated e-mails. At the end of the day I had my usual foot physical therapy with compliments from the therapist about my progress. I have fewer exercises to do because many are embedded in functional activities like walking and biking that I am now doing more of. Still, I have these sharp jabbing pains that remind me that something was dislocated and broken down there and the walking and biking remains a bit of a challenge.

My EMDR therapist Ruth Conway is in between two new grandchildren, one born and one about to pop. I had not seen her for four weeks. We were able to squeeze in one session, before she goes out to welcome the next grandchild. We focused on the cold sweats of landing the plane that I experienced in September and may experience again soon, as I made an appointment for flight lessons this weekend. The session brought up images of sledding down a mountain at full speed and out of control. Over the course of the hour the imagery changed to something that is more likely to produce a soft landing, with imagery of fluffy heaps of snow and piles of stuffed animals. In particular a soft fluffy bunny, like one I gave to Tessa some time ago, became a prominent actor in the show, taking first the pilot and then the co-pilot seat. I left the session less anxious about the lessons for this weekend, but also with a warning from Ruth to take it easy and not push myself to do things I am not ready for.

Axel had prepared another Thanksgiving meal out of the leftovers from Maribeth’s leftovers. I went to bed with a cup of hot Theraflu medicine and then the night went pretty much the way the previous night went; except for the dreams, and the pains.

After two rainy, foggy and rather dreadful (weather-wise) days the blue sky looks promising and the colors of the leaves are awesome. It will be a nice weekend.

We woke up late after having gone to bed late. We watched and episode of Foyle’s War followed by one from Perry Mason, with Sita and Jim, eating home-made pizza. Afterwards we could not get the Perry Mason tune out of our heads and we all kept humming it. We even marched to our bedroom in step with the tune, Axel in the lead, doing his zombie act, me following with tears (of laughter) streaming down my face. Only the brace was missing from the show. It is sitting, rather mildewed, out in the yard on a lawn chair, waiting for us to figure out what to do with it.

It was a dream-filled night for both of us and we recounted our dreams to each other in the hope of capturing as much as possible. Axel’s dream was rather revealing about what is going on in his arm. He was trying to get together and then re-assemble something that he had lost and that was disassembled. It consisted of tubes and pieces of cloth and there was some connection with the pain that comes from change and turning over; in his dream he almost finished assembling the piece. The dream turned out rather descriptive of the big event of yesterday. Here what happened in his own words, taken by dictation:

“Betty, my occupational therapist was working on redoing my brace. I sat looking at my hand and wondered if I could try to move it and concentrated on doing just that. After a couple of minutes I noticed a few tiny spasms of the muscles in my forearm. Not that the wrist was lifting or anything like that but there was a flicker of activity. I pointed this out to Betty and she asked me to repeat it. She said “omigod, there is some movement there.” Then she had me repeat it again while she closed her eyes (“I will feel your forearm and close my eyes so I won’t be fooling myself, because I want to see movement so badly.”) And when she felt the movement I started to cry and she said, “Axel, we’ve finally done it, there is something there!” She called another therapist over to confirm her observation, and she felt it too: tiny little movement of the muscle. You could see it. We looked at the pictures in the big book on anatomy and she showed me all the extensor muscles that govern the fingers and wrist which are all controlled by the radial nerve.”

He called Sita and me at home and if I had not been taking my hot and cold water footbaths at the time we would have danced in the kitchen. The nerve is coming back!

I had another rich EMDR session in which we explored my going back to work and the fears of not being able to deliver up to my own (high) standards and the difficulty I foresee of falling back in step with the pace of the world out there. It is a pace that is too fast for a recovering broken ankle and many sore muscles. The reflection and insights were triggered by the words ‘in step’ that popped out with images of relentless marching bands and a little child trying to march to the beat but not quite able to do so. That would be me.

We ended another week of busy schedules with our two simultaneous acupuncture sessions. For me these sessions, after the needles are in, are very relaxing. We both felt limber and in high spirits when we emerged an hour and a half later. And that is when I cooked up the idea of making a pizza from scratch (Axel wanted to buy one but I talked him out of it). I have also gotten an early start on the Christmas mustard making. There will be so many more pots to deliver this year. Sita is my apprentice and she made her very own mustard which is so delicious that we are already eating it.