It is remarkable the speed that my team schedules things. I received a call from the hospital today and I received my surgery date. It is May 11th, with expected 5 days in the hospital. Since it is a Tuesday I expect that I will be discharged from the hospital by Thursday or Friday. I ordered an adjustable bed and it should be in by then.
1.) When I was going through my undergraduate degree, I was provided experiences that I am not sure if every student received. In my second year I got access to the animal colony where we began to run experiments. Throughout my whole undergraduate degree I ran different experiments. I would often skip classes to run experiments and my success was primarily due to my friends. I had people take notes for me in classes, and in some instances my friends would attend these classes that they were not in to take notes for me. I was appreciative of this and this was done without any expectations from me. They would tell me when I had to attend classes for a test, but for the most part I was an abysmal student and would not attend the class. My marks were either 90’s or 60’s, depending on whether the course interested me or not. A large portion were in the lower range as I did not spend much effort studying or reviewing the notes. I thought it was more challenging to try and get by with as little studying as possible. Not a wise idea. If I would have known how much money is involved in scholarships at the time I am sure that I would have tried harder.
2.) With the dates now set, Melanie and I need to plan things out a bit. We do not really know what the post-surgery care will be or what we need to do. Melanie is not allowed to attend the pre-admission with me so I need to try and pay attention for that. The pre-admission is on May 4th, the day before my exploratory surgery. I will have my surgery 3 weeks post chemo treatment and the major surgery at the 4 week point. The surgeon does not expect to find anything abnormal in my stomach on the 5th so he went ahead and scheduled the major surgery. For all of the hate about our healthcare system, when urgent care is required it is impressively quick. I am grateful for the level of care that I have received so far from my oncologists and the surgeons. When I have questions or concerns and call their offices they get back to me the same day. They have been a pleasure to deal with and I have a great team.
3.)At work today there was a webinar on growth mindset and positivity at work. It is great that the company runs things like this for everyone and I wished that our leaders spent more time on developing staff with a positive growth mindset. Some of the concepts they discussed was active listening as well as psychological safety. Last year at the beginning of the year, my team and I spent time each week covering concepts like this. It is something that is important to change the culture of an organization and something leaders should be skilled in. The leaders that I deal with primarily have very strong active listening skills and make sure that they acknowledge what was said by their teams and make sure that they have clarity in understanding of topics. There is psychological safety in knowing that concerns may be raised. They may get upset with the situation, but they will then attempt to solve the problem collectively as a group instead of placing blame on individuals. The problems are identified, support is provided and resolutions to solve the problem to move forward are then discussed.
Within two weeks, the cancerous material should be removed from my body and then we undergo chemo again to make sure we kill any residual that may be left in the body. Hopefully by then my taste buds will be back so when I eat half portions I can enjoy what I eat.
Quoc Hao