Build Your Team

Build Your Team

If you don’t take care of your house, where are you going to live?

Cancer made that question very real for me.

My body was my house. And if I was going to take responsibility for it, I needed help.

Think about building a house or a bridge. You hire people because they know things you don’t. You want their expertise and advice.

But you are still the client.

You ask questions. You expect to be heard. You need people you can work with. If the relationship with a doctor doesn’t allow that, you need to address it.

I began thinking about my care in much the same way.

I had two teams.

At UCLA, I had what I came to call my sickness team: a great surgeon, oncology team and radiation team. Their expertise was essential. Their job was to treat my glioblastoma.

In parallel, I built a wellness team.

Its purpose was different. It was there to help me take care of the house and build the environment I had imagined in Somewhere.

I started with one person I trusted. Together, we discussed what I needed and gradually brought in other expertise.

I also learned to read the room.

Not every question belongs with every expert. You don’t ask a house contractor to build a bridge, or a bridge engineer to remodel your house. Both may be excellent at what they do. The important thing is knowing where the question belongs.

Taking agency did not mean having all the answers.

It meant taking responsibility for finding the right person for the question.

The same applied to my two teams. I didn’t expect my cancer specialists to be experts in every aspect of wellness. Nor did I expect my wellness team to treat my cancer.

But they could not operate in isolation. My medical team needed to know what I was doing on the wellness side so that nothing conflicted with treatment.

And as I learned from each team, I adjusted what I imagined in Somewhere. Visualization became more informed by what I was actually doing. It helped me focus on each treatment and on the environment I was trying to build around it.

Then, eventually, treatment ended.

Surgery was over. Radiation was over. Chemotherapy was over.

But I was still living in the house.

More than twenty years later, I still am.

Medical treatment can have a stopping point.

Taking care of yourself doesn’t.

Continue the journey

Next: Know Your House

Back to The Journey