Tag Archives: life

How It’s Going

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Recovery has been more challenging than I expected. While I’ve made progress, there’s still a long road ahead. My strength and endurance aren’t what they used to be, and dealing with the aftermath of losing my gallbladder, a portion of my pancreas, and adjusting to new eating habits has been tough. Even the smell of certain foods can make me nauseous—a strange reminder of my time in the hospital.

But things are improving. I’ve started walking more and working with physical therapists, slowly rebuilding my muscles. Though I still struggle with low energy, the progress is undeniable, and I can see it every day. I’m also addressing lingering back issues with massage therapy after spending two months in uncomfortable hospital beds.

Mentally, the battle has been just as intense. Initially, I struggled with frustration, especially during nights in the hospital when I was overwhelmed by misery. There were times I wanted to leave against medical advice, but I pushed through. Now that I’m home, I’ve left that phase behind. Although there are still hard days, they’re rare. For the most part, I’m just grateful to be alive and optimistic about the future.

Despite this optimism, I had initially hoped that once discharged, I’d snap back to my old self. That hasn’t been the case, but I’m learning to accept that it’s a process. What excites me most is that Lisa and I are now making long-term plans without fear of cancellation, and I’m even hoping to get back on stage in the first half of next year.

I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’m getting closer every day.

Don’t Be A Jerk

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I’ve been threatening for years to put together a presentation titled “Everything I needed to know about Leadership I learned while running a guild in World of Warcraft.” I still might someday, but I’m annoyed with myself for continually talking about it and not doing it, and one of the points I want to make is top of mind today so I’m just going to write it down in a post and consider it pre-work for my epic future Agile Alliance presentation.

I started playing World of Warcraft shortly after it was released in 2004. I had a small group of friends who had been playing City of Heroes together and we all decided to try it at the same time. When enough of us had gotten the game and decided to stick around to do so, we started a small guild (a guild, for those of you are unfamiliar, is a means to communicate and share resources in the game with a specific group of people). Eventually we met another guild that was populated by people who we thought were neat, and we decided to merge the two guilds together.

For some reason I agreed to lead this new guild.

I won’t go into a lot of detail as to why a guild needs leadership, because it’s not really relevant to this post, but the very short version is that there is a lot of content in the game that requires large groups to complete, and part of running a guild is to help schedule teams to take on that content and establish agreements around how any rewards won from beating it would be distributed among the group. Guild leaders also establish the culture of the guild (ours was considered a “casual” guild, with mostly older players who had responsibilities that prevented them from devoting excessive amount of time to the game) and will also set up rules around acceptable behavior by guild members.

When we formed our guild, we had one rule: Don’t be a Jerk.*

For a while, that worked just fine. Everyone understood what being a jerk meant, and we were all pretty good about not being one.

But then the guild grew. We kept adding people who we didn’t know as well as the original members. As our numbers expanded, the line on what everyone accepted as “jerkish” behavior began to get fuzzy. Common sense, it turns out, is not so common. Especially when you’re dealing with a diverse group of individuals who are paying for the privilege of playing a game. People with different backgrounds, who come from different regions of the world, and have a variety of socioeconomic situations, genders, ages, and sexual orientations (not to mention skill levels). Heck, one of our prominent members was a retired grandmother who used to send me cookies every Christmas.

Mardi, if you’re still out there my address hasn’t changed.

Eventually something happened that I, and the folks who helped me run the guild, couldn’t ignore. I don’t remember what it was, specifically. All I remember is that our response to the thing that happened was to create a new rule, so now we had two of them. It wasn’t too long before another incident got our attention, so we created a third rule. Then a fourth. A fifth. You get the point.

When I finally stopped playing the game in early 2009, I believe our rule book was three pages long.

We would make broad announcements about how we have “noticed certain behaviors” and how those behaviors “violate the spirit of our core value of not being a Jerk.” If the person in question continued doing the “thing” we had created the rule for, we could point at the (newly expanded) rules list and accuse them of violating it, thereby justifying our decision to remove the person from the guild.

You know what we never did in any of these situations (before it was too late)?

Talk to the person in question.

Instead of having an open, honest discussion about whatever the infraction was that caused us concern we avoided confrontation entirely and hid behind bureaucracy.

Our reward? More headaches. The bureaucracy that was protecting us from being the “bad guys” continued to grow and become more complex, and eventually got to the point where we spent more time managing rules and people than, you know, playing the damn game.

Eventually it got to be too much for me and I quit playing. All the enjoyment had been sucked out of the game for me, and I walked away. I still have friends who I met playing WoW, and some of them are still playing and in the guild I helped create, but I canceled my account almost 14 years ago and haven’t looked back.

So what does any of this have to do with Leadership in the professional world?

The first, and most important, lesson I took from this was that creating rules to deal with people problems is a no-win scenario. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have rules, codes of conduct, etc…but if you’ve got someone on your team who isn’t working well with others in some capacity, creating some kind of rule, procedure, or process to deal with that person is not being a Leader. It’s managing (and managing poorly, at that).

The other big lesson I learned is that by creating a rule that applies to all members of a team when only one person is responsible for doing the “thing” that caused the rule to be made, you create a situation where the unintended consequence of your action is to cause people who have nothing at all to do with the situation to suddenly worry that THEY were the reason the rule was created. For example, say you have a person in your organization who has some kind of issue with body odor that is disturbing others and instead of having a conversation with that person you send out an all-users e-mail reminding the entire company that “we all have to work together in small spaces” and to “please be mindful of how our personal hygiene might impact those around us.” The person who inspired the e-mail might not think it is about them, or they might realize it is and get horribly embarrassed and/or resentful. Even worse, people who had nothing to do with the original announcement may start wondering if they are the reason the email was sent in the first place.

This lesson shows up in the Agile Manifesto, of course. “Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation” is one of the four values found in the manifesto. Talking with people and working out situations directly is much more effective than hiding behind contracts (and what is a list of rules in an organization but a contract that one agrees to abide by to continue working there?), and how can we argue with the fact that most effective means of communicating information being face-to-face communication?

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have spent a lot more time talking to people and a lot less time managing a list of complex rules. The short term discomfort of having a difficult conversation pales in comparison to the drudgery and annoyance of dealing with the red tape of a ridiculously long rule book.

*In the interest of full disclosure, the word wasn’t jerk. I think you get the drift, though.

Where I want to be and who I want to be

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This post was “written” almost a year ago. I was experimenting with using dictation tools to write a post on my morning walk, and the end result was pretty scattered and required a lot of editing. I got about half way done, had to move on to other things, and promptly forgot about it. This morning I stumbled across that draft in progress and decided to finish it up. Honestly, it was rough. I had to remember what was on my mind a year ago, and I went off on some completely unrelated side rant that was about a thousand words long and needed to be edited out. I think the end result here is worth posting, though, so here it is.

The company I work for recently went through a major reorganization. A new department was created for our business unit and our team was moved into a new vertical under a different executive. A VP position was created to head up the new department, and another senior leader was given that position to help align all of our Agile/Lean/Project/Strategic activities.

It’s a lot of change. I was, admittedly, quite shaken when it happened. I’ve had my cheese moved more than once at my current job, but this one felt overwhelming at first. I don’t feel that way any more, and in fact I’m really excited about all the changes, but that initial jolt was pretty big.

One of the reasons it was such a shock to my system is because I was moved into what we are calling the “process” vertical in our organization. As someone who believes in and supports Agile, being in a group that seems to be on the “processes and tools” side of the “Individuals and Interactions” equation wasn’t a look I was happy with. I’m still not entirely keen on the optics around it, if I’m being honest, but I do believe that in our current structure we landed in the right place.

In any case, I was meeting with my new boss on Monday (the above mentioned Vice President of our newly formed department), and we were having one of many “getting to know you” style conversations we’ve had since the change. While we’ve worked together for many years at this point and have a perfectly amiable working relationship, we don’t really know each other all that well so we’re spending some time working on that. In our conversation on Monday, he asked me where I wanted to be in five to ten years.

Now I need to go ahead and state for the record that he knows about my cancer and said right up front that he realized his prepared topic for the day probably wasn’t something that was top of mind for me at the moment. I concurred and stated that “alive” was really my top-of-mind goal, but since I intended to achieve that one it was totally cool to talk about what else I’d like to be doing and we did so. In the time that has passed I’ve thought about it some more, and that was the path I took to starting this post.

When I reflect on my early days in software development, I see a perfect example of how my mind works. My first job was with a company that sold ColdFusion based auction software. The original person who wrote the code did so in a way that was most efficient at the time he wrote it. The internet was slow, and any extra white space in the background of a page could cause longer load times, so he removed any characters that were “extraneous” from his code.

The result, while readable to a visitor of the site, was a solid mass of text that was nearly impossible to decipher on the back end.

As my responsibilities there grew I eventually got access to that code base and was charged with helping to fix/improve the software. Every time I had to access a page, I would poke around in it and make it better. I would add comments where none existed. I would explicitly name variables from x or y. I would tab-delimit nested code. I would update deprecated functions or replace code blocks that were inefficient. What I was doing was removing technical debt, but I had no concept of what that was at the time. I just wanted to understand how the code worked, and I wanted to help make it better.

Which is a perfect example of how I look at the world. I want to understand how it works, and I want to make it better. So when I think about where I want to be in five or ten years, my answer is really just as simple as that – I want to have made the world a little bit better. To do so I need to keep learning. To do so I need to look for ways I can improve the code of the world around me, whether that is in my personal life or professional one. I want to take my experience, my influence, and my knowledge and apply it in little ways to make incremental improvements for as many people as I can.

But, ultimately? I still want to be here.

Whelp

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I got a call from my surgeon about 20 minutes after my last post went live. He conferred with the two surgeons who would be working with them and they concluded that the procedure is too dangerous for me to undergo at this time due to the occluded blood vessel. He’s punting me back to my oncologist for alternative treatments (different types or more chemo, for example).

So I’m back to square one.

On the plus side I met with an endocrinologist for the first time yesterday and we’re looking at some extra steps to get my sugars under control and give some relief to my pancreas. I’m not a fan of being put on insulin, but at this point I feel it’s inevitable and I’m very much looking forward to having “normal” blood sugars. It would be really nice to get a full nights sleep or be able to see a whole movie in one sitting without having to get up multiple times to use the restroom, not to mention dealing with the other diabetes symptoms I’m seeing.

Still, I’m incredibly frustrated that, yet again, there is no clear cut path towards treating my tumor and my entire life is going to continue being ruled by that uncertainty for the foreseeable future.

I need something to look forward to other that just surviving from day-to-day. One of my major motivators in that regard was my acting career, but I’m feeling more and more lately like that’s over. I’m being over dramatic, of course (which makes sense…because…you know…acting), but it’s how it feels.

Anyway, I just wanted to put that update out here for the one or two people who may actually still be reading my blog now that I’m not really advertising it anywhere.

Not making it up

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It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy or motivation to post an update here. It’s not necessarily through a lack of desire, but whenever I think about doing so I’m usually away from my desk and when I’m at my desk these days I’m generally working.

Excuses, excuses. Not like I was filling this blog with tons of content in the first place.

I’ll start by copying and pasting an update I sent to my immediate family recently…

The tumor did not respond to chemotherapy. This was kind of expected, as the type of tumor I have (Islet Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumor, or PNET) tends to have very thick cell walls that the chemotherapy medication has a hard time penetrating, so this isn’t “bad” news. My doctors have concluded, however, that there isn’t much point in continuing down this path and we are moving on to the next step which, most likely, will be surgery.

The major complication to the already complicated surgery I’m having is that one of my blood vessels has been blocked (occluded) by the tumor. They are going to have to do a lot of work to correct that, and it may require them to take my entire pancreas along with my spleen instead of just removing the head of my pancreas (something known as a Whipple procedure). If that happens? I get promoted to Type 1 Diabetes and become insulin and enzyme dependent for the rest of my long, natural life.

I don’t have any dates yet, but the goal is to have me in there relatively soon. When it happens I’ll be in the hospital for at least seven days, and it will be six weeks or more before I return to work. Due to the protocols still in place since the Pandemic and other health factors I won’t be able to have any visitors while I’m in the hospital other than Lisa.

I’m not sure where I’d be in all this without Lisa, and not only from an emotional support standpoint. She’s been an absolute champion in terms of keeping me on track with my medications, handling all the different logistics of coordinating with multiple medical facilities, and generally making sure I can focus on just resting and saving my limited energy reserves for keeping up at work. When I get through to the other side of this, her involvement and support will have played a major role in my success. Hell, I wouldn’t even have known I had this if she hadn’t encouraged me to talk to my doctor about why my blood pressure and iron was so low every time I went to give blood. I mention all of this in particular because, right now, there’s nothing we really need or that anyone can do for us. Keep us in your thoughts, keep yourselves happy and healthy, and understand that if you don’t hear much more about this until after the fact it’s because things are moving fast and we need to focus on making sure we take care of everything that needs to happen to make it a success.

On the one hand, I’m thrilled to be off of chemotherapy, because chemotherapy sucks. I didn’t have it as bad as folks who have to go into a hospital setting five days a week, but I absolutely had side effects from the treatment that were really rough to live with. The worst was just the general lack of energy. I was tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I got every night. I also lost my fingerprints at one point (a very odd but incredibly common side-effect of one of my chemo medications), had occasional bouts of chemo mouth (metal taste in my mouth that ended up making me decide to use nothing but plastic silverware), and all sorts of fun gastrointestinal issues. The fact that I won’t have to deal with that any more is thrilling and a cause for great rejoicing.

But then there is that whole surgery thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like I was being melodramatic about my cancer over the last year. That because it was “only” stage 1 and wasn’t in and of itself a particularly lethal type of cancer it was wrong for me to make such a big deal out of it. That’s really messed with my head as I’ve tried to navigate all the ways in which my life has changed since the diagnosis. Was I using my cancer as an excuse? Was I just trying to milk sympathy out of others that was undeserved? Was I being a cancer fraud?

Yep. Even when it comes to cancer I’ve got imposter syndrome.

Well, when we met with my surgeon last week all of those feelings went away. The scope of the procedure I’ll be undergoing is huge, and the recovery from it is going to be long. When it’s over, I’m going to have to learn how to navigate the world in a completely new way. Considering the size of the tumor, the fact that I have not developed liver cancer is, as described by my surgeon, “weird.” The occlusion of my blood vessel is a Really Big Deal which, thankfully, my body has corrected the best way that it can but that is not sustainable in the long term.

Reality hit me hard last week, and the speed with which this is all going to get very real is intimidating.

On top of all that I’ve been dealing with some other very personal stuff that I won’t go into detail about publicly but that has had a tremendous toll on my mental health on top of everything else. So much so that, combined with the cancer shit, my therapist and I decided I should go back on Wellbutrin for a while. I haven’t been on anti-depressants since I got divorced back in 2000.

I got sick (again) this last weekend and it took a day or two for me to fully recover. For the first time since my diagnosis, I really felt like I had something wrong with me.  That I was ill. Prior to that I was putting it all on the chemotherapy, but that’s out of my system now. I’m not well, and it’s not all in my head, and it’s a Big Fucking Deal. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t change the fact that I have a giant tumor in my abdomen that needs to come out and that the procedure to do so is incredibly invasive and will have life-changing effects on me. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t make the impact to my health any less significant.

I’m not making this out to be more than it is in my head. If anything, I have not fully respected the magnitude of what I’m facing.

I meant what I wrote about Lisa. She’s been amazing, and so very patient with me. She’s turned her life upside down to make sure I have the best possible outcome in this scenario. I’ve also been lucky to have great insurance, wonderful doctors, and the means to pay for them. I’ve also got a great support network of friends who have been understanding of our inability to commit to plans and our need to frequently change them when we do.

It will be ok in the end. I believe that.

But things really are kind of hard and scary at the moment.

And that isn’t all in my head.

And so it goes…

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2011 is a few hours away from ending, and like twenty bazillion other people in the world I’m reflecting back on the previous year. For some reason I’ve decided that you, my faithful readers, may be interested in this.

I don’t know why.

Probably because I’m an egomaniac.

Yeah, that’s it.

So anyway…

Went back to school this year. That was pretty damn cool, even if I did have to go to an out of state school because the University of South Florida is run by a bunch of chode monkeys who wouldn’t even acknowledge me when I tried to appeal the fact that they rejected my application. Funny, that. One of the things they tell you when you go to a two-year college here in Florida is that if you graduate with your Associates degree you are guaranteed admission into any of the public four-year universities in the state. Turns out that simply isn’t true. Like, at all. In any case, I’ve been attending the University of Maryland University College and I’m doing quite well there. My grade point average is 3.65 and I’m on track to graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in the Summer of 2014.

Work is…work? My company spent a lot of money installing SharePoint 2010 and I spent much of my time this year learning new skills to help me program in and administer that software. Part of my training involved a two week trip that included New York and Las Vegas. It was pretty cool, but shockingly enough after two weeks of intense training even “exotic” locations like Las Vegas get old and you start to yearn for home. Not to mention the amount of weight I put on while I was out there.

Oh, yeah. Health wise? This year sucked donkey balls. I managed to stay off the cigarettes (it’s been about 13 months now), but beyond that it’s been almost nothing but disappointment and setbacks. I was diagnosed with gout and as a result I gave up eating meat back in May. You’d think that being a vegetarian would be good for the waist line, but I’ve struggled mightily ever since. I think part of it has to do with the sheer amount of carbohydrates that go into your body when you aren’t eating animal flesh. Who knows? What I DO know is that I am, yet again, back up over 280 pounds. I haven’t weighed this much since we got back from the Goth Cruise, and I’m up 40 pounds from where I was just a few years ago. The gout episode completely derailed my running routine, and I’m still not fully back into it yet. Most of my clothes aren’t fitting properly, I have low energy, and my self-respect is pretty much in the shitter as a result. The last few weeks have been a bit better in that regard, but I’ve still got a long way to go before I start to feel comfortable in my skin again.

Krystalle and I celebrated our 8th anniversary back in July. Jareth turned 21. Alex turned 16. Kimmy split from her husband. My kids are getting older and I have my best friend at my side. That’s pretty awesome.

Theatrically? Did two shows. Should have done four but two of them were canceled (three, technically, but the second wouldn’t have gone up until January). I had my first ever theatrical role, and I had the privilege of, yet again, being the first actor to play a role in an original production. That would have happened twice this year, as I was supposed to be in a musical where the part I was playing was written specifically for me, but that fell through.

Celebrated my 10th season with Jobsite…but ironically haven’t been cast in anything yet for said season. Still one show up in the air, though.

Managed to whip the finances into pretty decent shape for a while there but the last few months have reversed a bit of that. I pulled a major remodeling surprise on Alex while he was out of town for Thanksgiving, and as glad as I am that I did the work the investment was considerable. It seriously needed to be done, though. That room was a health hazard, and that wasn’t ENTIRELY his fault.

All in all it was a good year. It wasn’t a great year, but it wasn’t a bad year. It was very busy. At times it was hard, and on many occasions the one thing I wanted more than anything else was sleep.

That’s still the case, really.

Happy New Year, my friends.

 

Winding Down

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2010 is drawing to an end, and in only a few days we’ll be hosting our last (and biggest) party of the year with our annual Nightmare Before Christmas party. As I sort through the various Christmas Cards (none of which will be reciprocated this year – sorry folks), I stumble across the occasional Holiday Letter. This is kind of a tradition on the Andres side of my family. I have quite a few of the ones that my Grandmother sent out, and every year my Mother and Uncles do their own versions that they include with their Christmas Cards. I even did a few myself, but with my immersion into the world of blogging it seemed like most of the people who I would send out that letter to would already know what was going on. When you consider the fact that I kind of suck at getting out cards to begin with, putting the additional pressure of writing a letter to include with them on myself seemed kinda pointless.

So it goes.

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I’m afraid of Americans

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It is currently 7:30 AM on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010. I am on vacation, and will be until next Thursday. Krystalle, Rafe and I will be leaving very early Thursday morning to drive to Atlanta for Dragon*Con, but for now I am simply taking some time off and generally trying to relax.

I am…restless.

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Huge successes and epic failures

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You see that one? You see that utter and complete failure personified right there?

That represents my roll to keep this blog updated more often. Wow. Talk about critical failures. I haven’t updated in over two months. It’s certainly not that there hasn’t been stuff to write about, I just…I don’t know what. No inspiration? Lack of energy? Total eclipse of the heart?

Turn around, bright eyes.

Anyway, I thought I’d make some kind of lame effort to put content out here this morning as I’m up particularly early thanks to an overwhelming need to urinate and a gnawing hunger in my belly. Yes, you totally needed to know that.

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Being broke

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Earlier this morning I ran an application on Facebook known as UnFriender. As the name should obviously imply, the application compares your current Friends list to previous snapshots and lets you know who has dropped you from their list since you last checked.

I do this because I am a horrible combination of narcissism and insecurity. I want everyone to like me, and when someone doesn’t I get all angst-ridden trying to figure out why. I blame my lifelong struggle with obesity. I’m sure I could explain that, but it’s easier to just say “It’s because I was fat as a teenager and nobody loved me” and leave it at that.

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