There are three rough stages to a crisis: encouragement, resilience and recovery. Life is never so neat as to organize itself into perfect stages but this is my general experience.
On Thursday we experienced a compressed version of these. Because of the urgency we blasted through the encouragement phase in a matter of minutes.
We went right for the resilience phase where you have to deal with the cards in your hand. This is usually a bad hand of weak cards or it wouldn’t be a crisis at all. It would be Thursday.
But there’s little time to do anything more than roll with what you’ve got. Which includes breathing slowly while in pain, taking needles and general indignities while trying not to die.
But after it all comes the decompression phase – recovery. This is relative fun compared to that courage and resilience stuff. That’s what we intend to start this weekend and carry on through Suzie’s days off.
We hope for fun and frolic. That’s what everyone hopes for in a weekend. Suzie is sleeping late right now as a good beginning.
I have theories of seeing some nature, good food, TV and absolutely no drama. But we’ll see. My plans are really up to Suzie. She gets whatever she wants this weekend.
But with time comes reflection. Depending on the crisis, it can be a long process.
We had a one day, hair- raising thrill ride with a good resolution. We’ve had a lot of experience with this so our goal is to get back to living as quickly as possible.
Re-living intense and painful situations only embeds the event more firmly in your brain, creating a sort of biological feedback loop known as PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just the name is scary enough.
Given our experience, our preparation and a great, if mysterious, outcome, we should avoid that. Some rest and relaxation should do it. Though we will tweak a few plans after reflection.
Suzie’s multiple cancer experience was a great upheaval that kind of changed everything after it, though we didn’t want that. I plan to share some of that here at some point.
But for right now, we plan on having as much relaxing fun as possible. Hope you do the same.
Thanks for joining us.
