Spreading the Word

We had several people to share this new information with and we looked for the best possible avenue to do so. For immediate family, we went to the phone and then we met face to face with the closest - my parents and my daughters. For friends and remaining family members we used e-mail. E-mail is wonderful and tragic at the same time. Telling someone who cares about you something like this by e-mail seems equal parts quick and lifeless. However, Deb and I wanted to get the word out fast and keep dealing with all this ourselves. At work, I also used face to face for immediate supervisors and our department head. For my work team, I tried to find a time to get everyone together, but it didn't work out, so I resorted to e-mail for them as well. Deb sent e-mail to a group of our work friends and others.

I had one other major complication to deal with. I was the chair for Medtronic's annual Science & Technology conference in 2009. This conference is held in the fall each year and this year is going to be our 28th edition. Medtronic's Technical Fellows are responsible for organizing and selecting the content for this conference and we were in the middle of accepting abstracts for potential topics. We were just about to start our review process and then quickly thereafter to begin building the program so we could open registration. My co-chair didn't know what was about to hit him. I had an opportunity to warn him face-to-face as soon as I knew this could potentially sideline me at any time, but the last thing he expected is that he would have to host the conference this year. Co-chairs watch and learn one year and then become the chair responsible for the conference the next year. This year, it was very likely that my co-chair would have to step in to replace me because I would be facing surgery. I let the entire conference planning committee and Technical Fellow community know my situation via the conference committee blog. We were close to having notified everyone we needed to.

Now we needed to focus on finding a surgeon and getting this scheduled. Where do you start something like this? We had no idea how to proceed. Luckily, we had another guardian angel we didn't yet know about who would be instrumental in helping us move forward.

Jon