This week was really rough.
Wednesday after a long staff retreat, Esther and I learned that her dad has cancer. He had a scare about a year ago. Melanoma on a butt cheek. It was operated on and we thought everything was great. He even went in for a 6 month scan which showed nothing.
He has had an abnormal bump in his groin, but we all thought it was a hernia or some other common ailment. Luckily he is proactive about his health. He went to the doctors and they did a scan. He got his results on Tuesday and told Esther, who told me on Wednesday.
Esther hasn’t been taking it well. Wednesday night we were both a wreck. John and Marina came by and we talked about what would happen. John has an appointment with an oncologist on the 26th of this month. We talked about how we are going to help with the treatment and how Esther and I will be working with them to take care of the yard and any other things that need to be done around the house. I told John that I want to go with him to his appointments. I want to be his advocate and I know that he or Esther or Marina wouldn’t be able to seperate the emotions enough to ask the tough and serious questions. I also told him that I wanted to take him to and from his chemo, if that’s needed. I know the way he thinks, and he wouldn’t want his wife or daughter seeing him weak.
Needless to say Wednesday nights sleep was horrible.
Thursday brought a long planning meeting at work which was good, but my concentration was not there. I know I was helping the group, but I know I would have been more effective had I been rested.
Thursday night was wild. Oscar had 5 seizures in the course of the night, most of which involved him losing control of this bowels. It was not a fun night. I had to clean up a lot of dog poo and it felt like it was happening every 2 hours.
That lead to Friday. Again with less than optimal sleep, I went to work. Esther was taking the dog to the vet and she called me during a very important meeting with an Apple rep. She was in tears and said that the vet had mentioned that maybe putting Oscar down was the best for him. She was going to set it up for Saturday. The hardest thing was that I wanted to cry but I was in the middle of the hallway at work and had to go back into this Apple meeting, so I had to choke back tears. ARGH.
What compounded this situation was that a major project (a 40 page, 4 color book) was sent back by the client saying they wanted a complete reprint by Monday. First off the goal of a reprint by Monday was insane and completely not possible. Second the changes that they wanted should have been caught during the editing process. They should have been caught before the editing process, when the text was coming into their office, but that’s another problem completely. So we, me along with the boss and a co-worker, busted our butts to get the project turned around. The edits all got made, but I don’t think that its going to get printed by Wednesday (the new deadline). The changes that were to be made were really not anything that required a reprint, so it added to an already stressful day.
Other projects that had to be finished on Friday were a theatre card and a mock-up for a newspaper glossy ad. The meeting was about podcasting. We had a rep from Apple come in and demo iTunes U to us. iTunes U will be an awesome platform for us to use. The rep answered alot of our questions and also sparked a lot of creative thinking. It was a good meeting overall.
I’m thinking that I need to talk to the boss about reconfiguring my position to allow me to focus on “new media” advertising for the University. I don’t know what she will think about it, but I think that if I can get out of the hassles of design and move more towards digital produciton (podcasts, vidcasts, blog and web integration) that would make me really happy.
Will recharge this weekend. Will keep updates on John coming.
Tags: work, podcast, “itunes U”, “bad day”, jered, jeredb, jeredb.com
