Change Leadership, Vaccines and Mask Wearing

Our relationship to change and to its leadership goes on display daily. For instance, all of us have a stake in the change involved in getting vaccinated and wearing masks. My stake includes that I’m immunocompromised, no longer badly, but still the categorization fits.

As you may know, 2017 began for me with a return from the glorious Milford Track in South Island, NZ rapidly followed by nerve roots crushed by a collapsing spine caused by a tumor created by a blood cancer called multiple myeloma, the disease that killed my father. Chemo, extensive surgery, radiation, lots more chemo, and stem cell transplant literally filled the year and spilled into the next, both mine and, more regrettably, my family’s. My physical rehab dominated 2018 and continues with less intensity to this day as does ongoing pharmacological treatment. I came out of all of this altered in a number of ways including physiologically. I also came out of the process as a validation of Penn’s ability (on behalf of modern medicine) to convert a piercingly painful death sentence into a manageable chronic disease-- a state that allows me to go on with my life, albeit with a few more limits in place. I got to spend longer with my wife and to join with her in celebrating the marriage of a daughter. I also got to share the Grand Canyon yet again with our other daughter. I emerged with a damaged immune system, substantially (and remarkably) restored, but damaged nonetheless.

Vaccines limit the spread of Covid-19 and its replication/chance to mutate and evolve. Masks limit my risk by curtailing the viral load floating around. More importantly, vaccines and masks help my cancer fighting comrades in arms, especially the more vulnerable ones—those tragically younger or stricken with less treatable forms of myeloma or of other cancers. Vaccines and masks help those folks even more than they help me-- whether they employ them or whether others do.

You don’t beat cancer. You beat it back. It’s a wolf in the camp. With help, you drive it out, but it stalks us all. Driving it out is a collective act of defiance, of growling back and of idiosyncratically clinging to life as best one can. Family, friends, and healthcare experts step forward and join the struggle, a struggle that will mark, shape and persist for the rest of one’s life.

Change need not be just about WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) narrowly defined. It can include the satisfaction derived from consciously benefitting others, including the more vulnerable. It can include helping to avoid squandering all the resources (personal and scientific) poured into remarkable accomplishments, in this case pummeling a lethal disease into at least prolonged submission.

The archbishop of Philadelphia recently urged one and all to get vaccinated—as an act of charity. And, as my wife has long advised, “we should all have masks embroidered with ‘you’re welcome,’” given the roughly 2:1 other:self benefit ratio of mask wearing.

We all carry our own values. Successful change leadership draws on them, often testing and molding them. How much value we place on tending to one another can matter greatly, especially now in this particular time of change, a time of values enacted and displayed, a time requiring our individual and communal leadership.

Be well.