If you are here to find the one takeway that will make a difference in your life and career, here goes:
It is not how you treat your clients when you are feeling well that will matter, it is how you treat your clients when you are not feeling well. One other quick takeaway. It is not how you treat your clients when they are feeling well that they will remember. But, they will most definitely remember how you treated them when you knew they weren’t well.
First.I should say I am writing to celebrate our wonderful home at Diamante Cabo San Lucas. Nancy went down on April 11, her birthday to open our house. I hope I will be able to go May 24. We’ll see how I am doing.
When I started writing blog posts for lawyers I never dreamed the title of one would be I graduate today. My graduation will take place at around 9:50 this morning. I don’t think the doctor or nurses will call in graduation, but I will have lived through six chemo treatments and thirty radiation treatments.
If you are like I was a couple of months ago, you might think that means I can shake the hands of the doctors and kiss the nurses and say goodbye. I discovered, as many of you who have gone through this discovered, that when you are a cancer patient your specialist doctors and nurses will be taking care of you for the rest of your life. The radialogist will start scans with a CT scan in a month and I will visit Lauren, my surgeon’s nurse once a month for the next year (just to check on my neck). Lauren makes all the difference in the world to me and my care.
My friends have asked me how I feel now that radiation and chemo are finished, at least for the foreseeable future. I would like to tell them I feel excited I have finished. There is only one slight problem-I am too exhausted to be excited about anything and if I acted excited I would eventually have to swallow and that will both hurt my throat like you know what. I would like to be excited by that would also mean I would have to be awake. I didn’t know that a person can sleep all day and get up go to bed and be out like a light all night. I would like to exercise, but I have’t done that in some time. I would like to read, but I can only concentrate for one to two minutes at tha most.
I know I should be happy to have gotten through this phase of my care, but I have no energy to show it. I tried to take a photo of my burned neck and ear, but I decided to simply say it is burned skin which has created open sores. No matter what I do I leave blood stains all over my pillow case and sheet each night. Doing research on the Internet, I am among the thousands who have had these same side effects. My doctors and nurses tell me they have seen way worse burns than I have.
While writing this blog post, I received a graduation gift from a group of lawyers I coached who have been supporting me. Our doorbell rang and when I went to the door there was a box. I opened the box and took out paper literally all the way to the bottom. When I got there I found a book the group had created of my blog posts each valued. Each lawyer who contributed received a copy of the book for their bookcase/desk. I am told the printer can print more copies.
Retired Toronto lawyer and my friend Phil Moore wrote a forward. He had sat through the first time I met with McCarthy Tetrault lawyers in Toronto. He wrote about my discussion of Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow.. Seth Godin deserves all the credit for creating the Purple Cow marketing concept. In my coaching I found Seth Godin’s books and and blog posts applied to lawyers I coached.
Today I enter post radiation and chemo care. I have been told the next four weeks will be somewhat like the last couple of weeks when it has been hard to stay awake and hard to wallow.
May I end by saying I am looking forward to the first time I can say I am looking forward to the steak dinner I booked at my favorite Dallas or Fort With restaurant. Since it will be a really big deal for at least me, I could create a big fanfare and like a star high school player announcing where he will go to school. I will have hats for the four finalist steak restaurants on a table and at the appointed time I will put on the hat of where I plan to eat a steak dinner and maybe even enjoy a martini. If I go to all that trouble and make it a big deal, you’ll know my taste buds are back.