Sylvia's Journal

This morning, for the first time ever, I got very busy (coffee, hot pack, toast) before I started writing. We’ll see how this new routine affects the creative process (not so great).

I went to bed very early after Sita, Jim and I returned from serving a lasagna dinner with our Quaker meeting in a church in Beverly to about 70 down-on-their-luck or very low income income folks. It is usually a bit of a feeding frenzy. People come primarily to eat and they do it fast. Panera had donated various breads and pastries that would have filled a few bathtubs. Much of that went too, although we helpers also got to take some of that home. We will be in full carbo celebration for about a week I estimate.

That was about the most strenuous activity of the day. For the rest it was a very low energy day. I felt I got nothing accomplished other than checking email and sending a few out. I struggled a bit with that feeling as I counted the hours of work and non-work. It was rather lop-sided. Much of the day went into recovery work anyways.

In the morning Axel accompanied me to the surgeon in his Beverly office. We waited one hour in a small and dreadful waiting room (painted in grey – what were they thinking?) with the TV blaring at us. The surgeon explained that my abdominal fascia were probably sutured with fishline (no kidding, Axel recognized the name from his fishing years) and that the sutures from below and from above came together just about at my belly button and that was the knot with its sharp ends I was feeling. He explained about the risk of snipping these off (hernia) in the early months of healing but that the intervention was easy and that it was up to me. Later in the day he called me back. He had obtained the report from UMMC and the sutures were of the kind that gets absorbed. He counseled patience and told me that the discomfort would probably go away. Axel and I had already decided to wait it out.

Axel was dropped of by Ted for his OT and PT and picked up over an hour later by Diane and her husband Dr. Curt Prout, the oldest practicing doctor I know. I am sure Axel had another consultation from him on the drive home, a multi-purpose drive. Axel is anxious to get his driver’s license renewed and start driving again so he doesn’t have to call on people all the time for these rides. His eye sight is improving quite remarkably and not being able to drive is starting to annoy him big time. But Sita is more cautious and is not that anxious to see her dad behind the wheel.

My physical therapist took measures again of the range of motion of my foot. She does it when I feel that I am not progressing much. She proved me wrong and told me that I had made huge progress, more in some directions than others. I have held off on many of my exercises fearing a tendinitis. I don’t know whether I have been successful yet, so I continue to take it easy. The sole of my foot appears to be awakening and although it is a good sign, the discomfort has increased.

I am still waking up several times a night. I have gotten used to it and have come to accept it, as much else. I have now a much higher tolerance for discomfort and pain. For the physiical aspect I am relying on heat- and ice-packs, exercises and going to bed early as ways to manage this condition. Psychologically I can live with all of this simply because I can (and because things turned out as well as they did). I remember some years ago getting all upset about the pains in my knee and having to stop playing squash. It was the worse thing that could have happened to me, I thought at the time. Now I know better and I can smile. How little did I know then.

Although I cannot remember my dreams of the night, I did wake up at one time with words on my lips. I have come to pay attention to these as they have nearly always triggered insights or provided a key to something I needed to know or contemplate. There was ‘Track changes!’ which I believe was a command. There was ‘stacked right’ which reminded me of the importance of facing danger and threat together. But this morning the meaning is not that obvious. I am really puzzled. The words came to me in two languages and mean different things but they are both legal terms, and somewhat related as a search on google quickly proved. One was ‘ward of the state’ and the other ‘voogdes’ which is Dutch for female custodian (of a child). The google search led me to a whackie site about Indigo children and the god Wodan. I think I’ll save it for my next EMDR session.

Yesterday was the last day of our OBTS Board meeting. In the middle of the day we walked the Babson Campus to see the various buildings where the conference will take place. It turned out to be a walk that lasted 45 minutes or so and I was truly exhausted. I did not bring my cane or anything to help me walk, not realizing how long it was going to be. It was the longest (time and distance) walk since July 14 and it took the wind out of me. After lunch I sat with my heat-pack on my shoulder and a cold pack on my ankle and managed to hang in there till about 4 PM. I left before the meeting was officially over, in the middle of a series of motions from the president. I arrived home about 5 PM.

I found the flowers that had expired on the birthday chair much as I had expected. I could see how festive it had looked before. All the animals were still standing on the table, looking a bit tired and lonely. I was lonely too since everyone had gone shopping for the evening meal (tacos). I did my hot/cold water foot soak routine and collapsed in my comfy chair. Sita’s friends Brian and Tim came for dinner but not after Tim had gotten stuck on the beach at the exact place where Annette’s taxidriver had gotten stuck a couple of weeks ago. We had a lovely dinner together and discovered that when Axel eats spicy food now only the left side of his forehead sweats. The part on the right side of the scar is totally dry. This is funny because his right side feels ‘woody’ and you’d expect that part to be on fire.

Bedtime (for me) was early and sleep came quickly.

I wrote about patience on August 10. I looked for the entry (because I am impatient this morning) so I could take some of my own medicine. I have been suffering from the kind of impatience that is expressed with the words “are we done yet?” Re-reading my journal, in search of that one entry was indeed the medicine I needed: we have probably covered a good part of this recovery marathon and we are now in the last quarter. It’s like I imagine the last quarter of a marathon to be: painfully slow and tedious.

My foot is developing a tendinitis and I was told to hold off on exercises for a bit. One can be too enthusiastic. It may have something to do with walking around the house on slippers; I am told to wear shoes with lots of support and to give myself ice massages (done by tiny Dixie cups with water frozen in them and then peeling back the paper as I massage my unhappy tendon). Since I already have a tendinitis in my right shoulder which is painful and incredibly slow to heal (months and months and months) I hope to nip this one before it gets as bad as the shoulder.

I also asked the physical therapist what do to about my hands that wake me up several times during the night because they are so painful. She told me to experiment with pillows around my body and this seemed to have worked last night. So here we are, both hugging pillows instead of each other, as we try to support muscles and tendons that give us a hard time if we don’t. This is how Axel combats lower back pain in the morning. We really still have a distance to run.

I recovered from the long and intense workday of Wednesday and put in about a half day of work. Much of the work is responding to the increasing number of requests that come in to write this, review that, or fill in a form. It doesn’t feel like very productive work but it helps others do theirs and it does show up as a check mark on my to-do list. And every day there are emails or Skype calls from family, friends and colleagues from around the world who are inquiring about our recovery.

One of such emails came in yesterday from Ummuro, a colleague from Kenya. He is pleased that my first venture outside the US is to Kenya. He stuck a little gift into his email by quoting his grandfather who was a very wise man: “don’t look for meaning in life……human life is pretty meaningless without a sense of the sacred……the answers to your troubles may in fact lie in your own shadow.” I wish I could remember such a quote from my grandfather. I suppose this is the advantage of coming from an oral tradition, you remember words so much better. We end up with journals in hard-to-read handwriting that get stored in some closet. There is a lot to say for an oral tradition and learning things by heart.

Today I am getting ready for a two-day Board meeting at Babson College of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society. It will be another stretch, two days in a row. I will stay over two nights in their Executive Education Center which will be nice so I don’t have to drive back and forth. It will be my first two nights away from home since I came back from the hospital. I will go armed with ice packs, heat packs and my flex band. It’s like a practice heartbreak-hill as I am gearing up for the real thing in another 9 days.

Axel will be in good hands with Sita and Jim who are in a very good mood because the Red Sox won big time last night; a punishing victory as Axel calls it. I of course did not watch (which nobody here understands) and was refueling in Tunis with Antoine de St. Exupery on his way from Paris to Saigon, falling asleep just before something bad happened to him somewhere over the desert (and from which he recovers of course, as the lucky ones always do).

Yesterday was long, exhausting and wonderful. I’d do it again but not right away. I left the house at 6 AM and pulled up at home exactly 12 hours later. Getting up early was not hard for me; I am an early riser. But it was hard for Axel. He did not have to get up but he insisted on making my breakfast. The drive in to work was OK although longer than I remember, over one hour. Somehow since July the traffic seems to have increased at that time of the day. Being at work with the early risers was nice. Then slowly everyone trickled in and there were more ‘hey you’re back!’ and the surprised look how together I look. I am not sure what people were expecting, but it is true that, with my scars covered up and when I am not walking, I look like a slightly more slender version of my pre-July 14 self.

I had a wonderful time with the team of facilitators. The sort of coaching I was engaged in yesterday is one of the things I love to do and had missed doing. It was the reason I came in for this very long day and why I had dismissed counsel to stay at home. Ready or not, I had been home long enough. Writing and reviewing, writing emails and being on the phone, all things I can do at home, are good ways to be involved and participate in the work, but it is not where I get my jollies. This is also why I agreed to travel again, even though I am a little anxious about it and there are voices again who advise me not to do this yet.

The hardest part of yesterday was actually the ride back. I would have liked a driver to be sitting outside the doors of MSH ready to drive me home. Alas, no one there. I hit the traffic of course at 5 PM so it was a slow start. I wore the wrong shoes for my neuropathic foot and pushing the gas pedal for one hour was very uncomfortable (not dangerous). The first thing I did when I came home was a long footbath followed by an icepack. That calmed things down while we had a wonderful speakerphone conversation with Tessa, sitting around the table as if she was with us. We even had a plate for her. It’s when we had to disappoint her that there would not be a puppy when she’d come back for Christmas.

In the middle of the day I was alerted by colleagues that a new entry had appeared in the Caringbidge journal. It was indeed Axel’s although not, as I had expected, typed in by the computer via Axel’s voice. He is still training his computer and gave me a little demo last night. It is truly amazing, and yes Edith, you are right, it has come a long way, since you worked at Kurzweil Speech Systems, but not quite as long as you thought.

In the evening we watched the videotaped interview that Jim Wiegel and his wife Judy did with us on September 6 for their ICA story legacy project. The beginning part is with both of us on camera. We were astounded to see how broken Axel still looked then, only a few weeks out of the hospital. It is when I see him squinting on camera that I realized he has not done this for a long time. It is easy to understand the exclamations from people who have not seen him in along time; he has come a long way. I watched myself in fascination as I told my ICA stories and explained my philosophy of working with groups. I noticed the fidgeting and constant movements of my arms, hands and legs while in my wheelchair. Part two of the video is about the aftermath of the crash; a related topic since it is still about groups (networks) being productive. Axel had left by then so last night was the first time he saw it. It is an amazing record of the first 6 post-crash weeks and we are very grateful to have it.

I have posted the pictures that Sita took of our ‘Thank-God-We-Are-Alive’ party that was held on August 26, on my flickr website (go to Caringbridge ‘links’ tab and click on http://www.flickr.com/vriesneus). You will see various subsets of our network mingle on a warm overcast August day as well as the remnants here and there of Fatou’s great food.

Axel still needs rides for a while longer (announced on the Airset calendar, another link). We appreciate everyone who has stepped forward.

Another morning that’s not normal, that’s for sure. In a period when the physical challenges have often been novel and the solutions required either cleverness or persistence or both, the types of challenges for the future I imagined would be the ones that had always been there. Challenges of how to be a better, more inventive designer, how to juggle time, how to stay focussed were what I saw as being ahead. And they were the kinds of challenges I had faced before the crash. But ‘normal’ even for the future seems to have changed.

It seems now that the challenges are veering away from the course that had been set – so I thought – years ago: a repeating loop that has filled my journal pages, fueled my counseling sessions and resisted the advances in psycho-pharmacy. I – and I think I can say we here – are emerging from a rather narrow and constrictive tunnel of recovery into a rather larger tunnel of life reconstruction. This newer tunnel is wider, lets in more light and leads me to know that there are changes in me that I know but cannot yet tell about. I get hints of those things now that pain is dropping off me like scales exposing the new skin underneath.

So what are the hints that there’s a new skin? And what’s apt to be underneath? And what hints are starting me on this exploration? For me some of the conceptual and sensory images that are coming up are about my attraction to doing something ‘significant’ with my life, a sort of early fixation with doing earth-moving things in order to fill a deeply excavated hole in me. Wanting to do something ‘significant’ isn’t in itself a good or bad thing, but the need, the compulsion to do the ‘significant’ has always screamed at me to be rooted out. The ‘significant’ was always something handed to me by someone else’s voice, by some other totem, some other netherworld figure, but not me. The crash has hinted to me in a profound way that there are other spirits, other emotions in me that can propel me in more interesting, and less corrosive ways than the quest to do the ‘significant’.

So what has the crash given me to begin making sense of my life? A sense of the power of how I think about and use time. I observed – in my broken condition – that comparing the past to the present can be a poisonous thing to the present. I felt that the present was good, particularly considering that there was a present to begin with. I understood that some visions of the future could also be destructive of the wonderful quality of the present. Both the past, and the future can blank out the wondrous colors of the trees in autumn color, the smell of drying pine needles, the sound of Sylvia’s breathing at night, the beauty of fog, the wonder of hugging Sita and Tessa, the early morning smell of salt air. Life is too short to let these things pass.

So these bits and pieces are working together, leading to what I’m not sure. But I do know I’m smelling the ocean, seeing the colors and feeling all of my body, crying as bidden. Sylvia too has had intimations of new understanding of herself and her role in the world. But I will leave her to reveal that.

And in other ways things are not normal either – whatever normal is. Our dear brother Joe and sister Rita have abandoned their home outside San Diego to the wiles of the fires consuming San Diego county are awaiting the verdict of wind and flame. They had been spared in the fire four years ago and were called as the wonderful people they are to serve the valley and the others not as fortunate as they, changing lives in a positive way when it appeared that all was destroyed. They have a calling and it will be carried out in many ways in this case as well as the last, however painful passing through the eye of the needle is going to be.

And my cousin Anne is being tested in another way – physically something is wrong and she and John and the rest of us who love her await news of its meaning. I wish I could be in Palm Desert to be with them, and in Alpine to be with Joe and Rita. But I am right now here. In the present, where I am thankful to be. I will hold all those others in the light, with all my heart, right now.

This will be a short entry. It is 5:30 AM and my first day going back to work the way I did before the crash: up at 5, out the house at 6. It will be a long full day, more than 8 hours probably to avoid traffic on both sides. I will be training a team of Russian-speaking facilitators at the launch of our first Russian-language virtual leadership program. One the facilitators is a young woman from Baku who I met at a facilitator training in Nepal where I saw her transform from a shy person in a spunky and competent facilitator. That is why we picked her for this job which we will be a stretch for her. This is why I am doing this full day today (in case you wondered).

Yesterday was a difficult day again as I struggled to maintain some work discipline in what is still an immediate post-calamity household. Dreams of big waves taking me out, but at the same time a small sailboat with Sita and Axel in it who are always close by to pick me up. That is sort of the talk we had at dinner last night, the three of us, when I was finally asking for help.

Part of the help offered is Axel joining the writing team; now that he has his voice-activated writing software, this should be a cinch. He has much to say but little strength to type it. So stay tuned.

I am sad to say that Joe and his wife Rita are now in full calamity phase as Southern California is burning (again). They have left their house and their belongings and moved in with a friend in the city (San Diego), waiting for the fires to go out. Those who know them, keep them in the light.