23 E-mail: returned to work this week

Like my mom would do before each first day of school, I had my husband take pictures of me on my first day back to work. I had a new dress and my wig; I felt beautiful.

5/18/2006

ROUND 4 VS. ROUND 3

I survived the 4th round of AC. It was easier than the 3rd round, but still no picnic. I’ve had to take my anti-nausea drugs for more days than last time but I’ve had less nausea problems because the new drug worked better.


BACK TO WORK

This week I started back to work full time.

Today I decided it might be a good idea to back down full time to part time.

The first part of the week went okay. I mean I returned to work, got a lot of heartfelt “welcome back” comments from co-workers, and had a grand time working on projects I didn’t have time to work on before I left. My department has been reorganized, though, and I mixed feelings about that.

For starters, the peer-level manager who temporarily took over my department during maternity leave has become my new boss. He’s not a bad guy, I think, but this was quite a shock. Most of my departmental staff now reports to my boss instead of to me, which makes me feel eviscerated as a manager. That’s the bad side of this change.

The good side is that I’m not immediately embroiled in the full level of management-related stress that I left when I had Kelric. I don’t have to worry about interviewing or hiring people – a management task I dislike. I don’t have to answer questions about a number of things that used to be part of my job. So the effect is that I am free to plunge myself into special projects of a technical nature, a part of my job which I greatly enjoy. It also means I feel a little bit directionless, but that will pass as my workload readjusts.

The spin my employer gave the change is that I’m a “scarce resource” who hasn’t been “utilized to my full potential” because I’ve been too busy with “personnel issues.” He told me that I have a talent for doing certain technical projects for the company that no other employee can do. While I don’t believe that anybody is indispensable, I also know that this compliment about technical skills is a true statement. If my employer’s words were completely honest then I think he did me a favor while protecting the company in case I couldn’t handle a full time return to work. If my husband’s suspicions are true then my employer put a gentle spin on a harsh truth that I’m somehow not a good enough manager. I don’t know what to think and that ambiguity haunts me. It is my hope that next week I’ll have a chance to gain an audience with my employer so I can probe a little on this topic. I don’t like feeling like I’ve been boxed into a special corner because I’m the brilliant geek who can’t handle employees.

There are two reasons I think I might back down to part time hours. One is that I felt yicky yesterday afternoon and left work early to go home and rest. I felt yicky again today, and this is my GOOD week. The other reason is that today I learned that short term and long term disability can apply to part time situations so I can collect disability pay on the hours I don’t feel well enough to work. I ran calculations and found that I’ll only lose around $1.40 per hour in pay if I do this. That’s an acceptable loss so tomorrow I’m going to discuss it with the powers that be and see what we can do. Imagine the relief of not having to make up time during chemo weeks when I’m out half a day or longer on Thursday and for an hour or two on Friday!

Returning to the office brought an event that rattled me yesterday. I have a co-worker down the hall who has recently gone through a mastectomy, chemo, and radiation for breast cancer. There wasn’t time to swap diagnosis stories before I left. Yesterday was my first chance to speak with her. She said that she lost all her toenails on Taxol, the chemotherapy drug I’m about to start taking next week. (I later realized she must have meant Taxotere because loss of toenails is not a side effect of Taxol.)

I want to go home. Oh wait! I AM home. Waaaaah! There’s nowhere to hide. No sanctuary to provide an escape.

This is a long, dark tunnel. I may be halfway through it, but the other half is all uphill and my spirits are starting to flag.


TIME WITH A TRAINER

Today has been the first sign of relief of a sore throat and runny nose that have plagued me since the weekend. I’ll spare you the details on the “tummy trouble” I’ve been dealing with for the last couple of weeks. Chemotherapy is not kind, and the delays in my body’s ability to heal itself are frustrating.

Then again, not everything is Gloom and Doom. This evening I went to my workout with the personal trainer. It’s part of the package I bought from the gym for this first month of getting started with a clinical program. I ended up telling the trainer about all kinds of breast cancer-related things I read about in “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book.” I talked about how DNA replicates only a finite number of times and then the body tells the cells to destroy themselves. Cancer tends to short circuit the message to get destroyed so cancer cells don’t die when they should. I told her about how the pill contributes to reducing risk of ovarian cancer because it causes the body to ovulate fewer times, yet it can contribute to the risk of breast cancer because the extra estrogen hormones can affect someone with hormone positive receptors. I told her about how the body monitors itself for bad cells and routinely destroys malformed cells when they’re new. We get errant cells all the time that don’t become cancer. Medical science is still trying to figure out what allows cancer cells to survive when the normal defense mechanisms should destroy them. The trainer was fascinated and I enjoyed having the audience.


DANCING WITH CANCER

I read a book recently that affected my outlook on things. The book is called “Dancing with Cancer” and my great aunt Arden mailed me a copy because she folk dances with the author. (I really liked the book, Aunt Arden. Thanks for sending it.) In the book the author talks about not wearing a wig and only covering her head with scarves when she was cold. She did this because she used her baldness as a conversation starter to educate people about breast cancer and to encourage women to go get mammograms.

This morning I got coffee at my usual Starbucks on the way to work. I took the opportunity to bring up my condition with one of the staff members there. The people at Starbucks who knew hadn’t told her about my cancer so I got to give her the news this morning. Then I followed up with a query as to whether she had gotten a mammogram lately. She admitted she’d been putting it off. I probably won’t pester my younger-than-40 friends about this topic because I know that the breast tissue of younger women makes mammograms less effective. The breast tissue is generally thicker in younger women and the images produced by mammograms aren’t very useful most of the time. Lately they’ve developed digital mammogram technology which helps with younger women. That’s what I had a few weeks ago. But I digress... The point is that I used my cancer diagnosis today as a gentle way to nudge a woman to take care of herself. That felt good.

I’m not going to stop wearing my wig, but instead of feeling like I shouldn’t tell most people because I don’t want to seem like I’m prompting for sympathy or attention, I think I’ll start bringing it up to remind people to follow conventional wisdom to get mammograms each year once you hit age 40. It’s important.


LOSING WEIGHT

So far I’ve lost about 8 pounds. Three of those pounds came off this week because my appetite has been depressed since my last chemo. I’ve also been faithfully working out three times a week. I’m serious about bringing exercise into my life to improve my health. The real challenge is going to be the week after next when my clinical trial at the gym has ended and I settle into a regular membership. That means I won’t have a personal trainer for two workouts out of three. That means nobody will meet me at a set time at the gym so I’m more likely to blow off a planned workout. If Guy continues being as supportive as he’s been this week about watching Kelric while I go to the gym, then I think I’ll have a chance at keeping to my new routine.

It feels good to have lost a little weight. What feels very good is to see my waistline slimming down and to feel less fat on my back.

When complimented earlier this week by a “welcome back to work” co-worker, I responded to his observation that I’ve lost the baby fat with, “Yeah, and I can even fit into the little stall in the ladies room again!” The first stall in the ladies room at work is smaller than the other three. When I was pregnant I found it difficult to fit through the door because the toilet paper dispenser would hit my belly. Just the fact of not being pregnant means I can fit into the stall again without getting attacked by metal objects. It’s nice. Probably more than this particular vice president ever wanted to know, but nice all the same.

Angela

Update from August 2007
It would seem that my transition from full departmental manager to supervisor did indeed free up my time to persue the projects I found most appealing. I wasn't thrilled about the change initially and part of me still doesn't like it, but I approached it with an open mind and adjusted very well. One of the helpdesk staff recently quit and I wasn't responsible for finding a replacement. I have to admit that was nice.

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