Someone I know just emailed me that they are having “minimally invasive, laparoscopic ovary removal.” It was a group email, work-related, so there weren’t any other details. I don’t want to pry, but I do want to know if there is cause for concern, both in terms of caring about her personal well being and the impact it would have on the organization if she becomes very ill. Is this sort of thing nothing to worry about, or does it presage something more serious?
This could go in FQ, but I don’t mind intelligent speculation or anecdotes from people who have had similar experiences, so humbly opine away!
There’s certainly something wrong with that ovary. What precisely it is, they might not even know for sure yet: They’re probably going to biopsy it thoroughly now that it’s out.
Ovaries can have benign-but-troublesome cysts, and they can have cancer. And even if it was cancer, removing the ovary entirely might well have also removed all of the cancer.
So your options are, either it was no big deal, or it WAS a big deal but isn’t any more, or it was and still is a big deal.
So a variety of causes, some of which are curative of chronic or acute conditions, some of which are prophylactic of potential future threatening conditions.
There’s too little commonality in “why” for you to guess what the future implications are.
And I suspect your legitimate business interests would be legally insufficient to pierce her medical privacy. If she doesn’t volunteer the information, you have pretty much zero reason to ask.
She’s the one dealing with this surgery, its root causes, and its sequela. In a perfect world, she might share appropriate information about her availability and needed accommodations for planning purposes, but there’s a clear line between accepting that information when volunteered or politely requesting it, and pressing for it.
In matters of personal support, I wouldn’t make it contingent on understanding the details ofnthe diagnosis and prognosis. A simple offer of support without knowing the specifics should be appropriate without being invasive.
If she’s not forthcoming about the reason for it, I imagine she shared those details of the surgery so that you’d have a reasonable expectation of how much the recovery might affect her ability to work. If she were, say, having an abdominal surgery that wasn’t laparoscopic, that would likely put her out of commission longer.
Goodness, I hope that was simply straightforward observation on your part and not lecturing/chastising me for caring. For sure, I was not planning on violating her privacy or being intrusive. She gave enough information for anyone to Google and she’s not stupid, so OF COURSE she knows people will look into the matter. She is also a friend, so when I see her in person next she may choose to tell me more herself. Or not. Totally up to her.
I hope I didn’t come across as a cold-hearted monster who only cares about the work impact of someone’s illness. That was not my intent.
And, in turn, I apologize for coming across as scolding. I have seen scenarios like this play out badly when businesses decide it’s their business to pry into medical issues, often for purposes not supportive of the employee’s rights or well-being. So I immediately went “worst-case” in my response.
To minimally summarize, I think there is just too much variety in the medical reasons for such a surgery to predict anything about the patient’s future, either from a business operations perspective or a personal one.
Ovarian cancer is extremely deadly because, by the time it is even detected, it is stage 4 and fatal. If a woman has a family history of cancer or, if she knows she isn’t gong to have any more kids, she may have them removed as a precautionary measure.
Chris Evert’s sister died from ovarian cancer for just that reason, so Chris decided that her apparently healthy ovaries should be removed as a precautionary measure. When they were removed, it was found that she had stage 1 ovarian cancer! Her dead sister saved her life.
I agree, of course, that further details can’t be actively sought from the coworker. However, it does seem that the announcement goes into quite a lot more question-drawing detail than necessary for what many would consider a private & personal matter. “I’ll be out of the office on scheduled leave” is what you announce when you don’t want to talk about it.
Turning it around to a bit of a less gloomy reason, suppose she announced, “I’ll be away on a second honeymoon in Europe for our special anniversary.” It’s no one’s business but OMG! I didn’t know you were married! How long? Where are you going in Europe? Did it take a long time to get your passport renewed? I hear the mussels in ale there are to die for…
The fact a “minimally invasive” surgery was proposed makes it likely to be both a more benign cause and a quicker convalescence. There are some exceptions, however.
As far as wanting to know more, I almost always want to know more about medical conditions that those around me experience, just out of curiosity about medical issues, not curiosity about the person, which I think is a meaningful distinction. It’s good to know about medical things–not so you can be your own doctor, but so that when you are talking to a doctor, you have some sense of what is going on. If someone in my orbit tells me they are having a medical procedure, especially regarding women’s health, especially regarding women’s health if they are my age or older, I am 100% gonna google around. I’m not trying to snoop out them. I’m trying to learn about myself and this thing I just saw might be a thing for me.
Yeah. I would honestly be shocked to get a note like that at work, because it contained way more information than coworkers need. Unless it was a personal note from a friend, in which case, it kinda invites follow-up. I think the polite follow-up is more “do you want to talk more about it” than “tell me the gory details”, but it depends on the friend, your relationship with her, and your prior knowledge of what she’s likely to want to share.
It’s strange. I wonder if the person always overshares.
If I didn’t know them very well, I suppose, that “Are you ok?” if you are the boss or a good friend, but I would assume a good friend would tell you before blasting it out in a group email.
Of course, she may just be panicking and just telling everyone.
“I’m going to be out of the office for medical reasons” might lead to a lot of speculation, including speculation of very severe medical conditions. Saying instead “I’m going to be out of the office for minimally-invasive surgery” lets people know that it’s probably going to be a few days, but that after that they should be back to full with probably no problems. So I can see adding that level of detail. But there’s really no need to specify what the minimally-invasive surgery is for.
I would expect the blast email to be sometime like: “i will be out of the office starting xx/xx/xx for a planned medical procedure. I expect to return on yy/yy/yy.” Or if the recovery time is harder to estimate, " I’ll be out at least until…" or " i expect to be out about z weeks". And I’d expect the employee to share more with friends, or maybe verbally at a team meeting.
There’s a big social difference if this happening in a 20-person company or in a 20-person department of a 100,000 person company. The size of the company also means a big practical difference on the likely impacts on the other worker’s workloads. And this will be true whether the surgery goes excellently, typically, or quite badly.
That may explain why this email’s contents sound outré to some folks and as expected to others.