Sylvia's Journal

I don’t know if curiosity about other people’s lives drove me to psychology or whether psychology made me more curious. Maybe both are correct.

The social networking sites are a dream come true for me. Not only do they show what goes on in the lives of other people I am interested in, care for or am curious about, they also keep me connected in ways that would have required a huge amount of work before (and therefore often did not happen).

We learned about the (healing) power and saving grace of a strong network when you are in trouble as we were last year. Also, the older I get the more I realize that nothing important gets done without the help and support of others, doors stay closed, knowledge obscure, etc. And finally, seeing the life throbbing through places like Facebook or Myspace or any of the thousands of more specialized networks give me hope that when push comes to show, we are there for each other and this isn’t such a vast cold place with people glued to their screen, disconnected. On the contrary, I see my younger colleagues (few of the older ones are on Facebook) embedded in a life fabric that is much richer than what I see at work. I see colleagues who left MSH, sometimes intensely angry and frustrated or bored out of their minds, who found the right place, doing important and meaningful work and being happy; I stay in touch with the ones who went on to study, and can cheer them on in ways I would not have been able to do before.

This is all about the here and now, or at least my connections from the last 10 years or so. But what is also beginning to happen is that characters from my Dutch life in the 60s and 70s are beginning to pop up, one by one, with pictures, memories, news on him or her that you would only get at school reunions. In Holland we don’t quite have those the way Americans do; besides, they would not be accessible even if there were any. My high school in Haarlem had a celebration of its 600th year sometime in the 1990s (it was founded in the 1300s!) and I missed it.

One of the things I found on Facebook is a bunch of photos from a car accident that looked very scary; they were posted on the site of my friend Pia. I discovered she was in an accident that could have killed her, just weeks ago. I now know four people (five if I count myself) who have recently survived something that is rather miraculous. You’d think we still have something important to do in life. 

Not much happened yesterday. I left early and came home relatively early while Axel slept late and went into Boston for his evening class. We did not see each other. I did not row, did not get my act together in between meetings which was a shame, such great weather. Lots of ‘nots’ yesterday.

Tessa left me a nice salad for dinner, taking good care of her parents. We are traveling into Boston together tomorrow. She will spend a day with her new colleagues picking up trash on one of the Boston Harbor islands. Sounds like fun. Tessa can’t show me what she is doing for the company as it is one of my organization’s most fearsome competitors on US government bids (occasionally we are bidding together, but mostly not). She’s with the for profit world where they pay interns. We don’t do that.

A long pre-dawn conversation on Skype with our team in Pakistan this morning about how to connect disparate pieces of technical input and bring various parts of the health system at the lower regions of the health pyramid together to focus on the needs of the population. I think our leadership program can do something about it. I could sense the energy that emerged in this conversation across 10 time zones, with a group of people who work in a very difficult place. This was a conversation about two ‘nots’ cancelling each other out; a not-not conversation if you will. Two ‘nots’ making one big yes!

During my vacation while seeing Joe going into work early and coming home late and exhausted, I saw myself and vowed that after I’d come back from Abidjan I would do things differently: go in later so I could actually get up with the rest of the family, have breakfast together and come home a bit later just about the time that dinner would be ready. It sounded perfect and I wondered how I could not have thought about that before. I found the answer to that on my way home yesterday.

I executed the new plan. Things did not quite work out the way I had imagined. When I got up everyone else remained sound asleep, even though it seemed late enough; so there went the nice family breakfast. I left the house a bit before 8 AM and arrived at work a little after 9. Not bad, slightly longer than if I’d gone in at 6:00 AM. But going home at 5 PM with the rest of Cambridge and Boston turned out to be a really bad idea. It took me 10 minutes just to get out of the parking lot and nearly 50 minutes to get out of Boston. I arrived home about 2 hours after I walked out of the office, at 7 PM. Dinner was not ready either.

So, all in all, a nice idea in theory but not very practical. This morning I got up at 4:30 AM again. I have a new coffee maker, a dinky cheap machine that may not last long but for now it is delighting me with its timer feature that has coffee ready when I get out of bed. It helps, now that it dark and, this morning, also cold again.

I had not been in the office for over a month and found new arrivals and others leaving. There was much catching up to do, and so I was not very productive (but very social!). And then there was (is) the overflowing mailbox, discouraging, and requiring much discipline about what to do with the new stuff that’s coming in over the transom.

The fall canvas is being colored in with trips that may or may not happen, always a tentative affair, nothing quite sure yet. Good news from Ghana; the seeds we planted in January are sprouting and the local team is being put to work, exactly as we had envisioned this when we first met as a group of strangers. I pulled out the vision we created together, and we are indeed creating what we had in mind. I can teach about the power of vision because I experience it over and over again.

It would have been a good day yesterday for rowing. I realize that if I want to get my money’s worth for this rowing season I better use every available day before hand (and possibly ankle) surgeries take me off the water for a bit, and before the boats are ordered off the water later this fall. My last row is usually sometime in October.

Now that I have a better understanding of what is wrong with my posterior tibial tendon I am a little nervous about the current arrangement which has the tendon positioned right over the ankle bone instead of behind it. It has been like that for over a year now but I had not understood the cause of the continued swelling. Now that I know it seems more fragile and I am worried that it will tear. I am suddenly getting very impatient to come to some conclusion and get all those other opinions in; but that will have to wait until the end of November which seems a long way off.

My half of yesterday was devoted to seeking the opinions of orthopedic surgeons while Axel’s half, the second, included another visit to an MRI facility to give his physiatrist a better picture of how everything is healing/has healed.

My first visit of the day was to new orthopedic surgeon for a second opinion about what to do with my ankle. He referred to the practice in which doctor nr. 1 works as ‘the evil empire.’ I understood why, as it is a large orthopedic solutions factory with a rather hurried feel to it; a place that is about doing something to the patient rather than being with the patient. After all, time is money and being with the patient is not cost-effective. This is one of the reasons I went to see doctor nr. 2 whose office felt very unhurried, even though housed in the ugliest building one can imagine. He considered my ankle problem of great interest to the orthopedic community as it was rather rare and some docs might want to take pictures and write about it. In fact he said he never seen anything like it before (the description and MRI of my ankle did not match what I was able to do) and suggested I climb higher up the expertise ladder and see the top ankle doc at Mass General and another at Brigham, who might actually make room for me because I presented such an interesting and publishable case. Axel had already tried to get me an appointment at MGH but never got a live person on the line during the two weeks he tried. He also told me I was right to seek more opinions because the operation proposed by doctor nr. 1 is a big deal, with some risks.

By the end of the afternoon, I had gotten myself an appointment with doctor nr. 3 at MGH. It’s far into the future, a few days before Thanksgiving, but that’s what happens when you want the best of the best. This probably means that surgery around Christmas is unlikely to happen because doctors like number 3 and 4 get all the cases that no one else can fix or is entrusted to handle. I also suspect that the catchment area of MGH and its top docs is rather large, not just Boston, but the entire world.

The other doctor’s appointment was with the hand surgeon who was supposed to have fixed my right carpal tunnel problem 11 days after our crash. At that time the body had forgotten about the tunnel obstruction as it was busy with more important matters. But lately the tingling has gotten so bad that even holding the steering wheel numbs my fingers. Surgery is scheduled for October 1. I am not seeking any other opinions; a wait of two weeks feels already too long. I am impatient to get it over and done with, so I can row again and sleep through the night. “I’ll get you fixed,” were the parting words of the doctor. I know he meant well but it did feel a bit as if I am a dog or a cat.

Our visits to the various medical establishments took up most of the morning. Back home the beach beckoned and we had lunch there with the idea of a post-lunch swim. But Axel was due for an MRI, and we were late, so the swim was cancelled.

The rest of the day I spent unpacking, washing, putting things away and putting my receipts in order. With that the decks are cleared for attention to the next trip (probably end of October) and anything else that needs attention before then.

All day strong winds cleared the sky. I wondered if these winds were the tips of hurricane Ike’s tentacles. By sunset they had blown themselves away over the Atlantic or into the stratosphere, which brought the mosquitoes back. At dinner, while we feasted on fajitas, they feasted on us.

I woke up with an image that looked like a computer screen with sentences running, telex style, along the lower side that I could actually read, word by word. It was remarkable because all my dreams are in images. If I had not fallen asleep again I would have been able to remember but now I can’t. What I do remember is that some of the words seemed, even in my half awakened state, nonsense and some were, to my great surprise, totally intelligible. Now I wished I had not fallen asleep again, as I am very curious about the message that was telexed in from my unconscious.

Today is the day after Labor Day. It is back-to-work day. We are also gearing up for the presidential election a few months from now. I am gearing up as well. The suitcase is half packed. My MSH Outlook box has several hundreds of emails to sort through; the documents I have to read are in my hand luggage, waiting for attention during my 8 hour layover in Paris. The vacation is over and I am on my way out, on the 5:30, to Paris today. I have no regrets and am very grateful for this first vacation I had since last July which is among the best I remember.

We celebrated the end of our vacation with a beach fire. It was a 10+ night – a clear sky filled with stars, planes taking people home, the occasional satellite and one falling star, accompanied by my wish on its way down. Joe had gone off to bed, having burned himself out with last week’s intense work. Tessa and Steve joined us later, hoping to find s’mores but there were none, only two squares of chocolate and a small glass of cognac. They stayed for awhile and we talked about nothing and everything, as one does around a fire. Puppy Chicha came along too and showed that she can retrieve sticks even at night and we kept sending her off in the dark. As only a dog would do, she kept bringing the stick back over and over again.

Yesterday, I started preparing for my trip while Axel and Joe sat in front of their computers taking care of stuff. After lunch we could no longer stay inside and kayaked/rowed to Tuck’s Point in Manchester’s harbor. We set out against the wind and through choppy waters which made the return trip fast and splashy. At the outer harbor we watched a stream of sailboats leave for the open waters or return home. When you are on the water you also have a front seat to see million dollar houses being built or remodeled along the water’s edge. We felt very small amidst the large luxury boats and MacMansions, but also quite content with our share of the bounty.

In the afternoon we drove to Brookline, alongside much homebound traffic, to say goodbye to colleague Miho who is off to Washington (State) to pursue her MPH and to congratulate Chris and Kairos once more on their June marriage. It was nice to see colleagues and ex colleagues again and find out who had been doing what and where. Many had not seen us for some time and commented on our physical fitness. It’s true that you cannot tell how crippled we were only a year ago. Today Axel is shipping back a torture like apparatus that he had rented many months ago to flex his wrist. He’s done with it now and his guitar-strumming of yesterday proved it.

Still, we are not quite there yet, if we ever are. I am seeing the doctor later this morning with a list of several body parts that need attention, sacrum, ankle, toes, and wrists. The carpal tunnel surgery that was scheduled a week after the crash, is needed again as the rowing had made abundantly clear. I enter this fall with two surgeries on the horizon that will put a temporary halt to my progress and interfere with writing (right wrist) and walking (right ankle). It’s hard to select a date for these interventions which cannot be done at the same time, each require a certain length of time for recovery adding up to several months in total.

Axel’s tiny lobster boat finally went into the water yesterday; without the traps. It was the first time in two years that it was launched – last year it never even left Andrew’s barn. Taking his dory out is one of Axel’s summer joys and it nearly looked like it wasn’t going to happen for the second summer in a row. Once on the beach, where it stays anchored to the big tree when not in use, Axel used to be able to take it out into the water on a set of wheels, all by himself. Yesterday he found out that this is not possible anymore, the strain on lower and upper back too much. This will cramp his style a little bit but since we have Steve living with us, he can call on him to help him out for the remainder of the warm weather days.

In the afternoon we had nearly our whole fleet out: Axel in his boat, Steve in the red kayak and I in my Alden (while Tessa was selling leather goods in Rockport). Rowing on machines is much of what Axel does at the PT office and so doing the real thing seemed to make sense; but it is a little harder with waves and wind. Axel tried the Alden and did well for a first time but from his face I could see he was not enjoying it, wanting instant perfection, not practice.

Back in his own dory we made the first outing onto the ocean a short one, not quite to Singing Beach. It was my second in the Alden shell that day. It is wonderful to surf the waves and feel the spray. When this summer comes to a close I will have rowed more in the Alden on the ocean than in the much narrower single on the Charles.

The second first happened after dinner when Axel played the guitar. I think he was truly shocked that he could do that, the left hand and fingers moving as if nothing ever happened to them. It may have looked like a familiar and ordinary scene – man strumming guitar – but it was extraordinary as we all remembered the lifeless left arm, hand and fingers, only a year ago. We were all moved by this new milestone. Our diner guests, Anne and Chuck, didn’t even know Axel played the guitar. I was happy he picked it up again as it brought back memories of Beirut when he wooed me with his improvisations while muttering that he had no idea how to play. I thought a guitar-playing man was very romantic. I still do.

I am looking out over an empty cove under blue sky. It is a shame to sleep in on such a day. The air is chilly; it is, after all, the last day of August, right on cue the summer is ending and the fall starts with the frenzy that accompanies back to school and back to work. I went to Staples to buy supplies for my upcoming trip and realized too late that my timing was really bad. The usually quiet store was filled with weary parents and whiny kids. “Dad, I don’t want that plastic ruler, it will break!” “Sorry, you will have to be more careful!” (plastic ruler lands in basket, dad grins, son pouts).

I have finished my last two vacation sewing projects, something for myself and something for a doll (for whom? asked Axel, in a typical utilitarian male way – not for anyone, just for the fun of it, I answered). The sewing table has been cleared so that there is room to put out everything that has to go with me to Abidjan. The table is filling up with electronics/facilitation supplies and stuff to give away; there is a little to make myself comfortable in my hotel room (teakettle, coffee and tea, watercolor set, books)’ the remaining space in my suitcase is for clothes (very little).

I used to prepare weeks ahead of time for my trips but lately I stopped doing that. Partially because I did much of that in my own time (which happened to be vacation in this case) and partially because I will be working with a team and it is not good form to arrive with everything thought through already, even though they may prefer that. And maybe the third reason is this card I bought at the bookmill in Montague with Sita on Thursday. It is from Brian Andreas who makes whimsical illustrations of well known but ignored truths. The card shows a woman holding on to a pole with her body and feet in the air and underneath the words ‘If you hold on to the handle, she said, it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it’s more fun if you just let the wind carry you.’

One of my team mates is Oumar who I worked with years ago in Guinea. When we write to each other we always start with the words ‘cher frère, chère soeur.’ He was also in a terrible accident (road) and we haven’t seen each other in our recovering states. I am looking forward to see him.

Joe and Axel went to the ballgame last night, which left me with a delicious late afternoon and entire evening alone. I worked in the garden planting our fall crop, sat on the porch reading, and puttered around in my room, going through my library and making a four-feet high pile of books to give away. It was a trip down memory lane as I read scribbles or flagged pages that indicated what I was learning when; some books were signed and took me back to lectures attended in a period when I was like sponge absorbing everything I could about organizations. The books that landed on the pile seem boring, irrelevant, or stating the obvious; I got rid of all the Tom Peters books and wondered what happened to him, a meteor who disappeared into a comfortable retirement maybe?

Joe is finally done with his work for MSH. I watched him from my vacation vantage point as he got up in the dark and came home exhausted, in the early evening, day after day. It is as if I was watching myself. I have enjoyed not getting up at 4:30 and have decided, by way of experiment, to start going into work late, after the morning rush when I get back from my trip – I am liking this waking up and going to bed at the same time as Axel does – our clocks more in sync.

We went for a visit to Sita and Jim in their new home in Haydenville, just a little further into rural America after Northampton where droves of students were busy finding their way around town and the Smith College campus.

The village of Haydenville is so small that you could easily miss it when driving through. There is no cell phone coverage, no signal to get any interesting TV or radio, no fast internet connection and in the beginning no phone either. For a couple whose livelihood depends on good and fast internet connections, this made for a slow start. Now they are somewhat connected and living (very) rural at the same time.

They live next to the police station and across from the fire station. An empty lot next door has been turned into a badminton court and no one has complained. There are no fences and gates and little of the ‘me and mine’ attitude that is so present in Manchester. There is a brook down the street with a lovely little beach that includes a bunch of small waterfalls with stone seats beneath them; those are good for upper back and shoulder massages.  Someone told Sita there are water snakes and so she is not using this free offering of Mother Nature.

Their house is lovely, half of an old farmhouse with porches front and back and brightly colored rooms, one yellow, one orange, one pink and a large turquoise and black kitchen. The cats adjusted quickly and seem less neurotic. The yard has a joint vegetable garden, an apparatus that produces sun dried tomatoes and other vegetables, and a little boy on a swing set while his mom, their neighbor, plays the guitar. It is the kind of scene I remember from record album covers of American bands that stood in contrast with the large, fast and big image that I first had of the USA. I fell (then) and still fall now for such a romantic scene.

Sita took us to the Montague Book Mill, a half-hour drive to a most picturesque old mill, next to another brook, and, as the name says, full of books. Their motto: ‘books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.’ It is way off the beaten path, on the Connecticut River and not easy to find if you don’t know about the place. Axel and I happened to know about Montague, or Turner Falls as it is known on the aeronautical map because of its tiny airport, where we landed and picnicked on July 14, 2007, hours before the unhappy ending of that day at Gardner airport.

Axel was the only one who exercised self restraint by not buying any books; Sita and I had no such restraint and we each came home with a few more books ‘we don’t need’ while our mates rolled their eyes.

By the time we got back to the house Jim had returned from his Manchester-by-the-Sea office which is in his dad’s house. He still needs to be there several days a week until he has sorted out how to do his job, which I still don’t understand, from their rural home.  Jim was too pooped to cook or think about dinner at home and so we took everyone out to a sushi fest in Northampton, followed by ice cream and coffee before we parted to our respective homes.

We drove down (East) on the Mass Turnpike while listening to Obama’s acceptance speech. All through it I marveled at this wonder that put the grandson of a Kenyan farmer on a direct road to the White House. It’s a very American story.