When I was diagnosed with Rectal cancer back in February I wasn't really sure what my life was going to look like, or even what it meant to be diagnosed.

After going through my first round of chemo and radiation I'm starting to understand a bit more. It means that I'm sick. And not just a bit of a cough, or the sniffles sick ... it means being more than just acutely sick. I won't call where I'm at chronically sick, but some days it feels that way.

What it does mean is that my body is trying to re-learn and figure out all of the awful shit that's going on. It means that every twinge, every bit of discomfort, every thing that feels different is looked at with suspicion.

I check the list of things to be concerned with. The ever growing list of things to be concerned with.

Is this new thing on that list? No, OK. It's fine.

Checking my Blood Pressure. Check my pulse ox readings. Check my Heart Rate. Are they all 'good'? Well, not like they were before, but they are all "within normal limits"

That fucking phrase. Reminds me of "working as designed"

Well, then it's a shitty fucking design.

Within Normal Limits.

Fuck, it doesn't feel normal. At least the old me wouldn't think so. The new me is starting to adjust.

So many follow up appointment post hospitalization. Appointment with the Priority Care Clinic so I can get seen within 3 business days post discharge (actually 4, but that's mostly an administrative process).

Appointment with the pulmonologist in 3 weeks to check on how I'm doing. It'd be sooner, but it's the fucking summer and everyone is taking vacations to get out of the 100F+ heat.

Working to schedule an appointment with my surgeon to get surgery scheduled to cut out my tumor.

Talking with my case manager who is in turn talking with my oncologist.

I know have so many doctors, each working on a specific part of my care plan, that it's easy to lose track.

It's also easy to see that maybe, just maybe, there could be a better way.

This is not to take ANYTHING away from the doctors that are helping me. They have all been great.

It's just the way my mind works. I see what look like inefficiencies and I want to help make them better. This process seems like one big inefficiency. I want to make it better. Not because it will help me now, but because it will help the next person.

When I graduated college in 2001 all I wanted to do was find a job that gave me meaning. My first job was working in FinTech. I told myself that I was helping retirees and pensioners by working at that organization.

My next job was working for an airline. I told myself that I was helping to get people where they needed to be when they needed to be there.

The job after that was at a boutique advertising firm. I told myself ... it's a job.

But really, each of them was 'just a job'. Sometimes they were soul crushing, disheartening jobs, sometimes they were fine. But they were just jobs.

That's when I found my current employer. In healthcare. And I discovered for the first time, I actually was helping people. My first job was to make sure that home bound members had providers seeing them regularly. I had a list of members I had to maintain. It had seven different categories about chronic conditions. Congestive Heart Failure, Dementia, Diabetes, I don't remember them all, but I do remember that there were seven.

The first time I saw a member with all seven columns with a 'Y' I cried. How can anyone have some many bad health things?

But the work I did mattered. It mattered to the people on the list. It mattered to their families. And that made it matter to me. I didn't want anything bad to happen to those roughly 200+ people if I could help to prevent it.

And I've taken that approach to every aspect of my tenure at my employer. Sometimes I'm missing context about a process and I realize it looks inefficient, but actually, given the constraints it is ... I then sometimes work to remove those constraints, but I'm not always able to.

I'm saying all of this because while this process and the appearance of some inefficiencies, once I get into it (after all of this is over!) I might discover that it's the best we can do given the constraints. And it's at that point that I'll start working on the constraints.

For a long time I wasn't sure of my purpose. As I've worked where I've worked I've slowly discovered it over time. Make healthcare better. Make it better by caring. Make it better by getting other people to care as much as I do. Make it better by supporting people who care as much as I do.

So yeah, once this is all over, I'm going to give it my all to make the process that I've gone through better for the next person. Because I've been extremely lucky on my journey, and while luck will always play a role in these types of things ... I want to work to make it less important in the long run. I want to work to make it easier for the next person to deal with learning how to deal with being more than just acutely sick.