Jacquie’s Story

In the mid-1990s, I was part of my company’s management team in Colorado Springs, Colorado, US, charged with building a team of support engineers for one of our key technologies. It was a crazy and exciting time. Work was nuts-busy, and my wife and I had just welcomed our 3rd and last child into the post-womb world.

I planned my hiring to include a few newbies, many mid-level experienced engineers and just a few gurus. I had just seated the last hire of the 15-person team, and we were up and rolling. The team was settling in fine. They were bonding in record time – which was fortunate because a large, unforeseeable test was coming.

One morning, one of my newbies, Jacquie, came into my office, closed the door and settled into my guest chair. By this time, she was both an employee and good friend, but she did not look happy today.

“Hi Gary, I need to talk .”

I smiled back, welcoming her visit regardless of what she had in mind, but noted that she looked serious. I pushed my keyboard away and turned to give her my full attention. “I’m ready. What’s up?”

I expected something like she needed to adjust her schedule or something. Then I noticed that her eyes were too large and as she began, her eyes gave me a heads-up to something was terribly wrong. She looked authentically frightened.

Jacquie was 26 years old, a single mom and had a 5-year-old boy at home. When she joined the team, she was quiet, but very friendly and hard working. As one of my newbies, she had little (technically) to bring to the team other than a great attitude, great spirit, hard and consistent work, but her productivity was lower than almost everyone else – as I’d expected because I hired her to learn quickly and become productive over time with the hope that she would love the work and be with us for 7 years or more. She had a great attitude about it all and found several ways to contribute. She did her best to progress along a lengthy learning curve. It was going well, and I was pleased with her progress despite her beginning to get frustrated with how hard this learning curve was for her.

“A few years ago, I had a nasty case of breast cancer,” she said. “After treatment, my doctor thought it was in remission, but I had some tests last week and yesterday, my doctor told me that it was back and – and – (she struggled not to cry) now it’s in my lymph nodes. I don’t know how this is going to turn out this time.”

You most likely know me well enough by now that I’m rarely at a loss for words, but this nailed me. I struggled to find something encouraging or hopeful to say, but, as part of a team paid to fix things, this was not something I could fix. I finally found a discussion path that I could work with, and she gave me all the facts that I needed to know about as her manager.

We settled on a plan that I would work out with HR that included lots of flexible time for her to do chemo and rest from same.

At this point – I’m going to spare you most of the details of her situation. It did not get much better. She did begin working from home – back when my company rarely allowed this, but I’m bigger than most HR types, so I won several of those discussions. But I was beginning to see that she and I were going to hit a wall. Her productivity was dropping fast and lacking that, I was supposed to put her on disability, which would start a timer that after a hard-wired number of weeks, would push her out of employment, leave her without insurance and make it more difficult to carve out a life for her and her son. Cancer is a curse but dealing with it without insurance would only make things worse.

After she left, I verified the timeline and knew that it would not, could not be enough. There was no way for me to avoid what was laid out by policy. The path was well defined and set in stone. I knew it was insufficient – unless I could – humm,

Later the following week, I called a special meeting with the team.

“Thanks all for coming guys. I’ll be quick. Some of you know that Jacquie is in trouble. She has cancer and her working from home helped, but she is falling well below what I need for her productivity. If I can’t – if she can’t get her work up to a certain level, I have to put her on disability,” and I explained what that would mean for her.

“But we have an option that I wanted to offer. I need [an amount of work] to make a case that I don’t need to put her on disability. There are 14 of you and almost all of you are more productive than she is. I can’t pay anyone overtime for this, but would any of you be willing to give her 30 minutes a day? If yes, you will more than cover her daily expectations and my management won’t force me to press the disability button.”

They all looked at each another for a few moments, said very few actual words, but everyone was in. With the decision made, we simply went for it. They started that same day to put her name rather than their own on something that approximated 30 minutes of their time each day and we all stayed a bit longer each day.

Their results were startling. All of a sudden it was like I had a new senior engineer on staff and Jacquie was instantly one of my most productive staff and far from my management’s radar. Some of the ladies on the team began stopping by to see her, bring her things she needed and just being nearby to help and listen and encourage.

Jacquie did not have an extended family who could step in nor, at the time, did she have a boyfriend or anyone who could care for her boy if she lost this battle. We had all heard that things were not going well with her treatments, and she had been worried about starting the whole disability thing because that path would only care for her for a certain amount of time.

She did have a church and from there she collected more friends to help as they became aware of her situation.

Months later, when we could no longer continue because she was fully incapable of working at all. I had to have the team stand down and press the disability button. My team had done a great job, but it was time to wrap this up.

They had more than exceeded our productivity goals, so we had done right by our company as well as by Jacquie.

Jacquie took that extra time to relax about the whole disability thing because these folks, many who had only known her for a couple of months, pushed back her start date for about four months, giving her time to focus on her therapy and – yes – find a wonderful young man to promote from friend to fiancé who both knew her situation, her son and shared their Christian faith. This alone brought a huge sigh of relief from our whole team.

The coolest thing for her, was that her focus on the therapy worked and she managed to push that cancer back once again into remission. Her marriage was more of a celebration than just a wedding. She was able to run the disability course at a time when she was much better prepared. Her new husband was standing firmly with her regardless of how her condition turned out – her boy would have a good father if she lost this battle. Physically, she bounced back some, but was never able to work again because chemo left her so frail.

I was humbled by what this team had done for her, but work is work and things changed. About 5 years later, I was living with my family back in California, working for a different company and now dealing with my mom’s cancer. This one had no happy ending in sight. She was stage 4 mesothelioma and was working with hospice when I got a call at work from: of all people – Jacquie. . .

She was more than still alive, loving most of life and very happily married. Her boy was now almost 11 and they had a rock-solid family up and running. Oh – and she was calling me – to encourage me about the situation with my mom. . . “How did you even hear about us?” I asked.

“You still have lots of friends back in Colorado Springs Gary and we heard. You are in our prayers, and I told them I wanted to reach out to you to let you know.”

I almost dropped to my knees. This woman had twice fought a worse battle than I had ever faced, and she was calling to encourage me. . . And she was very encouraging by the way, and I found myself on the receiving side of some amazing grace from this wonderful woman.

It was something like 7 years later that I got a call from one of those friends I’d stayed in touch with to let me know that Jacquie had finally lost her battle with cancer. I quickly did the math and her son had to almost be a legal adult. His dad and he were as ready as you ever could be for losing mom and wife. Even so, after such a long battle, my heart broke for all of them.

I did take time to reflect on what a priceless gift of time, that team of engineers gave Jacquie.

Don’t let the media bury you with their disproportionate focus on horror stories and leave you hopeless. While we hear plenty about the jerks in our world, I believe there are many more folks out there who don’t need much of a reason to quietly dig deep to help the Jacquie’s in their lives.

To this day, I remain so proud to have been part of that amazing team.

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