Transitional Experiences

This entry is from something that I wrote for my Global Management class. It was written in response to an assignment to write about a personal transitional experience. If you read between the lines here, the key to surviving this experience was the prayers of our Christian family and God's Holy Spirit carrying my wife and I through it all.

F. Serious illness or death of a beloved that leads to major lifestyle changes

I am going to bend the transitional experience regarding a serious illness or death of a beloved that leads to major lifestyle changes a little bit to fit my experience. I have not had any experiences of my own that relate to the other situations. When I was a child I had problems breathing through my nose and problems with my permanent teeth in my top jaw not having enough space to come in. After six years of orthodontic work with various appliances and braces it was clear that something else was still wrong and had not been corrected. At my last appointment with my childhood orthodontist, he told me that after I stopped growing I would need to have surgery to correct it. I had progressing problems with my teeth and temporomandibular joint.

So I grew into adulthood with this jaw/skull problem. I worked for six and a half years spending most of that time as an assistant manager making minimum wage scale income and going to college. I did not have very good health insurance at that time and I did not think that my problems were all that bad. After I started working with my current company and my problems worsened to the point that I had to limit what I ate to softer foods I started to work on getting into treatment to help. I also started to suffer from sleep apnea. My health issues were getting worse and worse.

At work, I was on a fairly fast track moving up to being a team leader and then after a re-organization in leadership I was appointed to another half promotion as a service delivery coordinator. I was working long hours and commuting about a hundred and twenty miles per day for work. I was earning bonuses and great performance reviews, but my health was declining and my marriage was not doing very well either.

By the time I started another round of orthodontic treatment my teeth had gotten so badly out of alignment, my jaw so painful, and my sleep patterns so interrupted that it was affecting every facet of my life. I went through another three years of braces and two pretty major craniofacial operations to correct my class three case of mid-face hypoplasia. After the first surgery I was out of the office for twelve weeks with a rigid-extraction-device bolted to my head and attached to my top jaw through an orthodontic appliance. For six weeks my wife and I turned nuts on threaded studs connected to that appliance to move my top jaw forward a millimeter or two each day until it had been moved forward about two-thirds of an inch.

My doctors were in Chicago so the surgeries meant week long stays there, with my wife in a hotel and me in an intensive care unit. These were followed by thirty-eight trips from Durand, Michigan to Chicago and back in something like twenty-two months.

I kept the position that I had with EDS through all of this, but my working position changed. I stepped out of leadership and took a job in Flint instead of Troy. For that twenty-two month period everything outside of my treatment and recovery was little more than background noise. After the first surgery, and eight weeks of recovery, I worked from home for a month before I was called by my manager and told that I had to come back to the office to work because my team mates wanted to take vacations and one of them was going to have total knee replacement surgery on both legs.

After the second surgery I was off for five weeks before I returned to working in the office. Both times it was a little premature. Add to all this, the fact that after each surgery the appearance of my face changed due to the changes in the foundation of bone that supports the soft tissue.

Coming out of this experience I experienced re-entry shock not just at work, but in pretty much every area of my life. It helped to be able to return to a role at work that I was familiar with, something that I could do almost in my sleep. I was able to reconnect with my co-workers. I was able to share my feelings about going through surgery and recovery with my teammate that had his knees replaced. I went through feelings of anticipation about getting back to work.

I felt like a spectator when I first got back to work when I did not have a load of projects and had a bunch of email to review and catch-up on.

I slipped back into the participation stage as my work load built up again and into the shock stage when things at work got tougher and more stressful. I would feel like my customers had their priorities out of order when they would push and nag about some order for a new server, because what did something like that matter when I was still healing from those operations.

Eventually I did become re-acclimated to my regular work life, but my experiences did change my priorities in the sense that people trying to escalate requests and high pressure projects no longer seem like such a big deal when compared to the things in life that really count.