Sylvia's Journal

Last night, at one of the many moments I woke up the words ‘track changes’ flashed through my mind. I was awake enough to write them down on piece of paper. This morning I woke up with a soaring headache, a stuffed nose and a radiating pain in my rotator cuff tendon. The note caught my attention and its message instantly interfered with the despondency of waking up in pain. Tracking changes over time has a healing effect; so healing in fact that even the thought of doing so leads the headache to subside and the tendon to quiet down (for the stuffed nose I resorted to chemicals). I keep marveling at how the body and mind conspire to bring about our complete recovery.

The pictures that we received from the Fire captain in Gardner (now posted on my Flickr account, see flickr/vriesneus at the Caringbridge link section) were on my mind all day yesterday. It is one thing to see them as small prints as we did on Sunday, but something altogether different to see them on an 11 inch screen, in your face in full color. I looked at them several times and the amazement never went away. If there was a shotgun seat in our plane (left front), I was in it! The pictures say something about resilience, both the resilience of the human being and the non resilience of a plane.

I became curious to know more about how the mind and body, together, produce this resilience. I have a file with readings about resilience because I have some fantasy of doing research and writing about organizational resilience but now I was more interested in the personal. From one study about girls I learned that the most resilient ones (we are talking about girls who have nothing going for them) come from households that encourage risk taking and independence with reliable support from a female caregiver. The research also found that a mother who is gainfully and steadily employed is a powerful model for resilient girls.

In the EMDR therapy I have come to talk much about my mother (doesn’t everyone?) and the role she played in the choices I made. This includes flying at a time that others start thinking about knitting for their grandchildren. But now I come to realize, in a slightly different way than before, that she has played and continues to play a role in my recovery, many years after her death. In the first few days after the crash Sita had brought various objects to my bed site that she thought would speed up my healing. Among them was a framed passport photo of my mother at the age of 21. In those early post-crash days, as the miracle of our survival became clearer and clearer I began to think of her as one of the spirits that caught me (Ann Wood Kelly being the other one). And now I realize that this was true. Not quite in the literal sense of a shrouded and translucent white figure holding her arms out but in how she let me grow up.

Yesterday was an off day for Axel, meaning he has to do his exercises on his own. He combines that with endless computer challenges and sometimes I fear that his computer gets more of his attention than his body. I went to see the nurse practitioner about the piece of internal suture in my belly that keeps jabbing at me like a needle from the inside when I bend or get up from lying down. She decided it is time for a surgeon to take a look and so I added a new doctor’s appointment to our schedule. The idea that a cut has to be made in that still tender place gives me the willies but I try to focus on the end result.

I delivered another piece of work that had a deadline. I am increasingly back-at-work, in fact so back-at-work that I am actually driving in to Cambridge today for two meetings that are best participated in in-person. It will be the first time I set foot in MSH in more than 3 months. I have never been away that long in all the 21 years I have worked there. It will be strange, wonderful and also a little bit scary.

The truck has now become part of the waking up routine but I am cool about it; I know it will be gone as soon as I step into the shower. I woke up with/from a coughing fit just as I was pondering how to clean up a gigantic mess at a party and organize some sort of raffle for a gift that was too spectacular for the flimsy scheme I had in mind. It was an organizational nightmare and no one was cooperating, only making more messes, and I am glad I woke up.

With Sita stuck in Chicago and Jim out in Western Mass, last night was our first night home alone. It had not dawned on me until quite late; too late to call in a reserve. It was one more step towards our full recovery and being in charge of our own lives. It felt a bit naughty; imagine, home alone, without supervision from our children!

We did just fine. This means that we don’t need night nurses anymore. Nevertheless, we have taken a subscription to (Thursday) night nurse David since it is fun to have him and he brings the cutest little dog, and bagels and lox for breakfast. He also brings something else: David’s presence makes us sit together at the table for breakfast and talk, instead of consuming our food at the counter, a bad old habit that is coming back as we recover. We are discovering that ‘normal’ includes a bunch of bad habits, things we regarded during our times of helplessness and dependence as a part of our old life that we did not want back. But I have noticed them slipping in through the back door. Last night Axel was upstairs messing around with his computer while I was working downstairs. It was after 9 PM!

After my super busy day on Thursday, yesterday was a cinch. I had no appointments and instead focused on work and exercises or just puttering around. As my colleague Sarah had promised/predicted, the work is gushing in and so this part of my life starts to feel normal as well (bad habits and all). It was a glorious day and I spent part of it outside.

Axel and David came back from his OT appointment and a shopping trip around 1 PM; just in time for his follow up visit with his primary care doctor. Annie Madden came down from West Newbury to drive him and visit with us. They came back with good news: off the iron pills, all blood work is normal and his ears are clean!

The Pulkinnens from Quaker Meeting came by to drop off a casserole and salad and spent some time catching up with Axel who they had not seen for months while I was on the phone for nearly two hours talking with my youngest brother in Holland about events in our family I have been exploring during my EMDR therapy. I had written him about these and asked what he remembered. It is amazing how different our memories are and how big the holes. And yet we lived under the same roof, with the same parents for many years, witnessing the same events.

And then we went to bed, all by ourselves, yeahhhh!!!

I was woken up by a call from Shanghai airport that Sita’s plane is delayed and she will miss the last flight leaving Chicago for Boston tonight. I wrote the information down with my eyes closed because of a raging headache but it is decipherable. It felt as if the truck from yesterday morning had not left but simply parked on top of me. It is clearly a new stage in my recovery. After a night sleep the body remembers the hard work of exercises and thinks wistfully back of the days of no movement, pampering and pain pills. I have had physical therapy the last four days and each time I come back with new exercises while none of the earlier exercises are dropped. The exercise regimen is beginning to feel like a day job, just when I announced to be back at work.

I participated in our weekly staff meeting by phone yesterday and it was wonderful to hear everyone’s voices, and discover what is going on and what has happened while I was away. I got my first request for travel and I could not have been happier. After checking with various parties concerned I indicated that I am ready to get on a plane for Kenya in early November. That is about 6 weeks away. If I look back six weeks from today, and considering that recovering is always slow at first, I am very confident that I can handle the travel and the assignment.

The EMDR therapy is progressing well and full of surprises as events and experiences from long ago get kicked back into consciousness by the repetitive stimulation of my left and right brain. I have been exploring the combination of ‘being strong’ and ‘events with potential for much harm’ and discovered that the plane crash wasn’t the first such an occasion where those two things combined. I discovered that, whatever show of strength I have imposed on my self, there have been other events of a momentous nature that weren’t a good match for my level of strength and I felt vulnerable and at risk of being harmed in a big way. I have always known that much of our current cognition about ourselves is shaped early in life, but to trace it as clearly as we are doing in our sessions is quite remarkable. It is also very encouraging because I can lay down new neural paths between these images and memories and accompanying cognition where the old pathways are not serving me well anymore. Part of the discipline of EMDR is about articulating these beliefs and testing them in view of current reality. At the closing of our last session I was able to articulate that if I rely only on my own strength in the face of adversity or harm, I will not be very effective. However, if I can combine my strength with the strengths of others all sorts of things become possible. And the most remarkable aspect is that my body speaks its part in this process, as I become aware of tension, movement or pain. The moment I realized that I do not have to be strong on my own, my shoulder muscles relaxed, and unlike Atlas, I felt like I could take the world off my shoulders and share it with others. My lower back piped in with the phrase ‘stacked right’ and after exploring this for awhile with the buzzers buzzing in each hand, it became clear that ‘stacked right’ referred to a feeling of harmony and support from others in the face of a brewing storm. All this in one hour, imagine that!

We had our wonderful massages from Abi in the morning and before and after that I was busy for most of the day with work, doing my exercises and doing normal household tasks that take me so much longer than they used to. Axel went to the Manchester Club in the evening and satisfied his need for a big slab of red meat while listening, in the company of Manchester guys, to someone who had been hit by lightning and made it his life’s purpose to shield other from having to experience this. More exercises for both of us after that. By the time our night nurse David showed up we had already tucked ourselves into bed and all he had to do was say goodnight.

I am not sure whether it is because the more painful body parts are healing now, and asking less attention or whether my new found mobility is creating new misalignments. At any rate, new muscle aches and pains have surfaced. I asked the physical therapist whether she could help me regain range of motion in my neck and upper arm and she said yes, but I needed a new referral and make a new set of appointments because right now all she was authorized to work on was my ankle. The insurance company pays for the treatment of body parts, not for the whole.

My sister found the poem I was looking for. Her internet searching skills are superior to mine. It was a line from A.R. Ammons (I look for the way/ things will turn/ out spiraling from a center,/ the shape/things will take to come forth in…not the shape on paper — though/ that, too –…summoning itself through me/ from the self not mine but ours.) This ‘spiraling out from the center’ line has remained in my head like a tune that won’t go away. Not surprisingly it emerged again during my EMDR therapy session yesterday afternoon. Just before we crashed I did indeed ‘spiral out from the center’ although I only experienced the first veering away from the central course I was on before I blacked out. May be that is why the line has such power for me.

We focused on a particularly distressing image (there are a few but for now I picked the one of Axel, de-gloved as the medics call it, and running fast out of blood). Although I did not see this myself it was described in sufficient details that it gave me the willies and created a strong physical reaction. I cannot quite describe in a simple way how EMDR works (go Google) without it sounding rather odd. Suffice to say that I gradually lost the powerful reaction to the image.

I dreamed of an island or a group of people adrift, frozen in very cold place or may be they were left behind bobbing in a cold stream. I went back to get them and bring them to shore (warmer, safer). It was full of imagery about being stuck and cold and when I woke up it stayed with me and seemed perfect imagery for what I did in the therapy, where we retrieved my frozen emotions triggered by the imagery of Axel’s injury and brought them over to a warm and safe place.

We had breakfast with Jim and Judy and then Jim interviewed and videotaped Axel and me about how we had used the methods we learned through ICA and how we had been transformed (or not) and transformed (or not) others. Jim and Judy are collecting stories as they cruises around the country from people who are connected in one way or another to ICA. I have many stories and I love to talk about them. I certainly was transformed by ICA’s methods even though I have since supplemented them with many others. The methods helped me find others who share a basic philosophy about groups (‘the wisdom that the group needs to move forward is always in the room’) and eventually helped me articulate what my life is all about (life 1 and life 2) – helping people have productive conversations.

Ellie Cabot spent a good part of the day driving Axel to doctors’ appointments, the biggest of which was the eye doctor who subjected him to an enormous battery of tests. The outcome of all this was that the prognosis for his double vision is good although it may take as long as a year.

Patti Woodlock from Waring picked me up at the therapist and made us a wonderful dinner and also promised to introduce us to the owners of the new home across the cove who she knows well. “En zo breidt de wereld zich gaandeweg uit,” as my sister wrote on Caringbridge, which means, “and this is how the world expands slowly and steadily.”

Today it is exactly 6 weeks ago that we got up to drive to the Beverly Flight Center for our trip to Gardner and beyond. I can still feel the excitement. I can see myself walking to the car, swinging my flight bag onto the back seat. I revisit this mental image often because the start of that day was about pure joy: gorgeous summer weather, the anticipation of the freedom of the skies and being with people I love. Axel’s camera survived the crash and has the images that prove how joyful this occasion was, until that fatal moment. It is good that we cannot foretell our future.

Sita woke me up at 6:45 from my Benadryl-induced sleep to announce the good news that the work was done early and she got herself on an earlier flight home from Dallas. She is arriving before noon, rather than in the early hours of Sunday morning.

A potentially huge problem was averted by the combined efforts of neighbor Ted and his brother Jerry and, once again, plumber Jack Manderson who showed up within an hour of our distress call about a broken shower, leaking straight into the cellar. Even more so than the dishwasher (or the vacuum cleaner or anything else that has started to break down), our shower is hugely important. It keeps us from going rancid, especially in these hot and humid days, with our plastic shells, cast and the accumulation of sweat from all our exertions.

Tessa had decided it was time to take us on a field trip. When we left, the shower problem was still undiagnosed but Jack alerted and Ted on standby; when we came back some four hours later everything was fixed and back to normal and we can shower again. Such a miracle! We really intend to be ordinary customers of Jack but he keeps treating us as extra-ordinary!

Axel had his first visit to our regular family doctor and spent one and a half hour with the doctor adjusting medications, checking wounds, etc. He got all the attention he needed and he came back in high spirits. Imagine that, simply from a doctor’s visit! As reward for good behavior Tessa took us on a Cape Ann outing to Rockport where we visited D.J. in his leather shop. Inside, Tessa instantly transformed into a sales lady and fitted Axel with a pair of comfortable moccasins. I used my walker and it was fun to see the world from a standing position for the first time in nearly 6 weeks. The store is too small for a wheelchair but with a walker I can squeeze into tight places and even go up steps. More reward for good behavior: Tessa bought us an ice cream (we can have anything we want, the real stuff, full fat, any size!).

On the way back Axel and Tessa dropped me off (it is not quite as simple as dropping) at my new therapist’s office in Beverly Farms where I spent an hour and a half getting acquainted, testing our interpersonal chemistry (which was great) and filling in BCBS forms (“Have you had obsessive thoughts about sex lately?” No) Ruth Conway is a therapist trained in EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) which has been used successfully on people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.. We already identified one obvious trigger for me (orange windsock) and I am looking forward to my next visit.

While I was with Ruth, Tessa, being the tireless social director, took Axel to the shopping center for an expansion of his rather limited wardrobe; things have to fit over his plastic carapace and not make him sweat. At first he refused to walk into the store. After all he looks rather peculiar: pants pulled up over his brace to nearly under his arms, a bright blue eye patch (all the new eye patches arrived) with little fish on it, a shaved head with a a huge scar, walking very slowly with an cane. He says it feels like walking into a public space without any clothes on. But no one looked, said Tessa.

In the evening our meal, a very local lamb curry with all the trimmings, was delivered by Ellie Cabot and her friend Richard. While the rest of the world was sweating profusely in hot and humid weather, we were eating our curry sitting in the cool breeze by the cove, until the mosquitoes chased us in. We finished our day by watching Little Miss Sunshine with Tessa who put us to bed way past our bedtime.