The Grapevine

Since I wrote an entire post about the annoying things my mom does, I thought I should write about some of the useful things she does, which I will emphasize in my response to her e-mail, which is work in progress. One of the things my mom does very well is blab about me to other people. And I honestly don't mean that in a flippant way; I don't mind. I'm not a secretive person and don't really care what other people know about me (as evidence, refer to this blog lol); I'm just not a blabby type of person. And there's not really a way to casually work 'oh yeah and by the way I have breast cancer' into a casual conversation.

When I was first diagnosed, my mom immediately wanted to put me in contact with a few other women she knew who had had breast cancer, also at a young age, so I could hear about their experiences. I don't even know one of the women, and I only sort of know the other one, but not really. I mean, I get that this sort of thing can be useful (which is why I like to read blogs), but... it just seemed sort of weird. I might eventually come to point where this is something I want - for example, I might contact one of these women, who is also faculty at the university, to hear her thoughts on working through radiation therapy. But it wasn't something I wanted to do within 24 hours of finding out I had cancer.

Anyway, the one really useful thing my mom has done for me is to tell my brothers all my news. I don't have a super close relationship with my brothers, but I want them to know. So knowing that my mom is keeping them in the loop is actually a great comfort. And she did ask me if I wanted to tell them or if I wanted her to tell them, and I asked her to tell them. That has been very helpful. One point for Mom. :)

Along these same lines, I've only told a few colleagues at work - the two colleagues I am the closest to, one colleague who covered my classes for me when I was in a severe bind, one colleague who is sort of crazy and basically kind of trapped me into telling her why I looked sooooo tired all the time, and my Chair. I obviously told the Chair because I knew that this might affect my ability to work in the fall, and I felt like he needed to be aware of this as early as possible. The thing is that we are going to have a new Chair in the fall, so he asked me if I wanted to tell the new Chair or if I wanted him to, and I asked him to. Of course. LOL. I said it wasn't a secret, it just wasn't something I was going to be telling everyone about. And I try to be pretty open about the fact that this isn't a secret; in fact, I sort of want people to tell other people so that I don't have to explain why everyone should cut me some slack for being a bitch. (Okay, I'm a bitch anyway, so I probably don't deserve that, haha). But hopefully you know what I mean.

So, I had to go to work today because I'm on a hiring committee for a new faculty member. There are four other people on the committee, and I know that three of them know. The fourth person is close to one of the colleagues who covered my classes for me when I went to see Dr. L for the first time, so I just assumed she knew, too. However, apparently she doesn't know, and apparently no one else in the department other than the people I've told directly knows.

It came up because after the meeting I was sitting around chatting with two of my colleagues when the third one who knows came back and asked me to stop by her lab before I left. She looked really serious, and I thought she was upset about the meeting, even though I thought it had gone well. (This whole committee thing was a huge source of contention throughout the entire semester, so I thought maybe I had missed something, seeing as how I haven't been up at work for almost three weeks.) However, she just wanted to see how I was doing and said she didn't want to ask in front of everyone because she didn't know if anyone else knew. It was sort of alarming since this colleague is the one I was relying on to tell everyone, and she was telling me that no one knows. WTF? What is wrong with my department that no one is gossiping about me?! LOL. I'm sure that EVERYONE in my mom's department knows! And with the help of my daughter, pretty much everyone at her school knows. Am I going to have to tell everyone in my own workplace myself?! When does that ever happen?!

The thing is that everyone knows about my hip/DVT saga, so I just figured people talk. Then again, when you're on crutches, that lends itself to discussion more than 'Hey, have you noticed that Waning seems to have a sore boob?' Ha. I mean, I feel like I want the people I work with to know, but I don't necessarily want to have to tell them myself. But how do you tell your colleagues that you want them to blab your news to everyone else? I really respect that everyone has kept quiet, but seriously, when was the last time you couldn't rely on the good old-fashioned grapevine to inform people about stuff? What type of bizzaro world am I living in?