Crap Happens, Day 7

Here's what today should look like for me:

• Wake at a friend's house near Portland OR.
• Help her get ready (last chemo treatment last Thursday) and drive her into a doctor's appointment and lunch with her friend (who will help her get home).
• I'll go on to have lunch with my favorite accountant and get a tour of the Oregon School of Massage
• And then on to a frenzied ecstatic wallet-draining romp through my most favorite bookstore in the world – Powell's World of Books.
• Return home, spent and elated.

Here's what today will look like:

• Met with the medical team doing their rounds (they're so young!) very early. It's Day 7 of my hospitalization for severe appendicitis. They gave me some good news: I will be released from my constant companion IV pole (switching to oral antibiotics). I will be able to go to the full liquid diet (not just the clear liquid diet), and I will likely go home tomorrow.
• Once released from the IV pole, take a full, unencumbered shower.
• Take a walk beyond the loop of this floor.
• Continue to take necessary naps.
  
  
  This also means that, no (whimper) I will not be presenting "Biz Plans Deciphered" that the national AMTA Convention on Thursday as planned either. (sigh)

But I can't even be too wedded to these plans. I'm a human body fighting off a huge infection in a delicate place. My pain continues. My colon is still healing, Things change. Crap happens.

So it goes with our business. If you're the Planning Type, this will drive you nuts. What's your best response? Flexibility and (ironically) planning. It's a different kind of planning though. Plan for what you want and then plan for things you could not have anticipated (like appendicitis). Plan to not have all the resources you need or need all the resources you have. Specifically.....

Plan for how much money you need to make this year and plan for what you'll do if you don't make it.

Plan for how many weeks / days / hours you'll work this year and then plan for what you'll do when they don't come through.

Plan to take time off for training, holidays, and illness. Add 1-3 weeks for other events that will keep you from working that you don't yet know about. 

Let me give some true examples from my own life – in one year: car stolen, parent hospitalized, won a trip to Japan, offered a move to Australia that was later rescinded, moved a very ill friend out of her apartment and into ours (permanently, it turns out), received notice that our rent was going up 35% and began house- and mortgage-hunting, a blizzard, death of a parent, moved remaining grandparent into nursing home.

Ah, 2005....

You have to plan for (or at least make room for) the un-plannable because it's going to happen to you anyways.

I suppose I should call this the Plan B Plan Approach but I'm so found of “crap happens” because, as I'm sure you can tell, that captures the visceral feel so much more accurately.

Confidential to SP (because I know she reads this): sorry I didn't let you know what was going on. I was simply unable to do more than the most basic communication.