cancer – day 28

I lost it on my MIT guy a little yesterday because he’s not responded for four weeks now about giving me something that should have taken him an hour to do when I asked for it and now I’m in this ridiculous massively past due time crunch for a report to all the clients, and I told him that I may be out for 3-6 months starting June 9 and this has to go out next week even if I incorrectly tell the clients that he’s going to do all the analyses I have spec’d out (which is of course impossible). I cc’d his boss on it, the practice VP, and he flipped out a bit about the 3-6 months thing, which I’m pretty sure I’d told him on the phone just yesterday but he apparently didn’t hear, or maybe he didn’t want to hear it. Chain doesn’t seem to understand how severely this may impact my ability to work, possibly to the point of complete short term disability.

I’ve probably been too optimistic with Chain about the prognosis and how well I could be during chemo, because I didn’t want to let them down or worry them. And in the meantime I’ve been preparing the area I manage to be able to be executed in my complete absence should that be the case. Now I’m concerned and trying to figure out how to get Chain in a mindset of not expecting much of me the next several months – they seem to think that me having said a month ago “you’d think I’d be able to work at least part time during chemo” means I’m going to work just as hard and just as effectively during chemo as before I got diagnosed. It almost feels like, because so may of them are also all old friends and colleagues of mine, that Chain is in something of denial that I’m going through this thing at all.

I was talking about it with Mark (ya gotta love calm down-to-earth people), and his comment was that companies always want more than what is realistic. Of course, as I responded to Mark, the problem is that “so do I, which historically has worked really well for them, since I’ll push myself beyond the limit. But I can’t do that anymore.” Mark’s response to that was a big “duh” for me . . . “True. Have you explained that?” Obviously not, eh?