What Lurks in the Woods by Nicole Bell

Author:Nicole Bell [Bell, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nicole Bell
Published: 2021-10-23T05:00:00+00:00

Sorting Symptoms

May - July 2018

I’d worn a lot of different hats in my career. Engineering, business development, marketing. I’d done them all multiple times in various types of companies. Jack of all trades but master of none. On some levels, that label rang true. I wasn’t an expert in any one area. My true passion emerged when I reached across multiple disciplines and made them work better together.

I guess that’s why I kept landing in program management. Since I played various roles, seeing different perspectives came naturally. People who thought differently weren’t a problem; they were an asset. The right answer could often be found within the team, waiting for the courage to be communicated. After all, poor communication topped the reasons why teams and projects failed. I’d seen it countless times in projects I was brought in to fix.

Being a caregiver was new to me, but working with people and problems wasn’t. I tried to see parallels between my work with Russ and my work in the office. The doctor was now my program manager in the most important project I’d ever undertaken. How could I make his job easier? What did I appreciate most about the people and teams that worked for me?

The first thing that came to mind was data: garbage in equals garbage out. If the inputs and methods were bad, there was no way to make a good decision. People gravitated toward the things they believed in and missed the things that didn’t fit their framework. Without data, there was only bias.

The ups and downs of treatment were insane. To say things varied from day to day was an understatement. Most days, they varied by the hour. One minute Russ was delighted to watch Ryan play baseball, and the next, he flew off the handle and threatened to drive to Atlanta. There was no way to be objective in the middle of it. I needed to record everything. I needed logs.

At first, I started with a daily log on the computer, but I soon realized I needed a more real-time solution. If there was a subtle change or comment, I wanted to write it down immediately before the madness of life made me forget to document it. So, I downloaded a symptom tracker on my phone and logged everything I could think of: the food he ate, the pills he took, the symptoms he experienced, and his overall behavior and mood. A good project manager keeps track of everything, at least until they know the metrics that matter.

Pretty soon, pages and pages of information spit out of my printer. It was overwhelming. In the engineering world, those who brought pages and pages of data with no analysis got sent back to their cubes. For the data to be useful, I needed to search for trends.

We were about to meet with Dr. Parker, so I spent an afternoon reviewing my logs a few days before our appointment. I picked a day when Russ was busy in the yard, so I could sit and think objectively.

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