During the summer of 2013, I worked as a senior copywriter for a company called Straight North. I’d landed the job that February, and was working a few weeks when my late wife’s health deteriorated quickly. She’d been taking steroids to prevent swelling inside her skull after surgery to tackle cancer in her brain. Since late summer 2012, she’d been having seizures caused by tumors. The neurosurgeon told us he could knock them out. We trusted him. On December 26 we parked ourselves in the hospital. She didn’t have to shave her head because it was already completely bald. They put a circular metal clamp around her skull so that they could keep her completely still and then went after the tumors with proton therapy or something else. I can’t remember.

She spent January in recovery at home and I was with her the entire time. I kept looking for a job and through a friend heard about the copywriting position and interviewed. We were excited that I landed the job after months of caregiving combined with unemployment.

All of that seemed to be working out in terms of timing. But once she stopped taking the steroids it was all over. She couldn’t get off the exam table at the oncologist and we called in the palliative care team.

By late March she passed away, but I had not told anyone at the company much about our situation. I’d been through so many messed up situations with employers who found reason to fire me once they knew my wife had cancer that I refused to let that happen again. But once she died, I had to tell them so that I could take care of all the arrangements. The company had a weird vacation policy of ten days per year to use as either “sick days” or “vacation.” As if that were somehow a benefit.

I took the necessary few days off and returned to work the next Monday. That seems weird, but by that point in life, after all we’d been through, the part of me that was sentimental about life, having already lost my mother back in 2005 and my father-in-law just the previous December when Linda was going through surgeries and chemo, I had no holdover emotion left. In fact, I was a bit relieved.

In some people’s minds, that might be a horrible confession. But when you’ve lived with illness and seen your spouse completely compromised over years of chemotherapy and surgeries and the side effects that come with all that, you don’t wish it on her any longer. Plus, there’s something in me that accepts life as it is. I don’t know what that something is. Sometimes, I’ve felt guilt about not grieving over long periods over the loss of my mother or my wife. Perhaps my father was my model for that when my mother died. He grieved in his way and moved on. What can you do? There’s no way to change anything that happened.

Life rolled on. I drove the brand new Subaru Outback we’d purchased back in February realizing that she’d only gotten to ride in the car a few times. We took it out once to lunch with my stroke-ridden father and a few times to make doctor’s appointments. Other than that, she was confined to home after her brain became too manic from the steroids and she had to quit teaching at the preschool where she loved to work. That part made me sad for her. She loved the children and it quite literally killed her in some respect when that had to stop.

The company Human Resources director was compassionate with me, and the President and directors all told me to take as much time as I needed. With just over a month on the job, I didn’t dare press my luck. I didn’t want to be without a wife or job. I went right back to work. That might not have been the best decision, but I put on a brave face and made it work.

The summer months rolled by but I felt an uneasiness growing as the company was not all that supportive about how we gathered information for the team of copywriters I’d been instructed to hire and train. The websites we created were repeats of a successful model they’d built and the goal was to get them up and running quickly and leave the content in the customer’s hands asap.

Classic to my lack of emotional intelligence or business sense and likely a product of my ADHD, I struggled sometimes creating messaging and turning it around into website copy. So did my staff, and we were also instructed to pump everything through a project management system that wasn’t that efficient. The entire company worked with it for weeks, and it was eventually dumped. Meanwhile, I offered to bring our editing processes in-house rather than pay an outside firm $150,000 a year to check our writing. I’d done some good things and some back.

Then an account executive brought in a new healthcare services client that wanted their website completely re-written. I met with the client and wrote the content from my notes, but they completely hated it.

Perhaps I was a bit distracted at the time. As a widow living at home I’d been doing fall yardwork and during one afternoon cleanup session, I stuck my bare hands into a yard waste bucket and felt a prick in my left middle finger. Instantly I pulled my hand out to find an innocent-looking sliver stuck in the finger. I plucked it out and kept working.

The next morning at work, I noticed a red seam emanating from the sliver spot on my finger. During lunch hour, I visited the Advocate Urgent Care center down the road from work and they told me, “You need to go to a Hand Specialist right away. You could lose that finger.”

I called into work and visited the hand specialist a few miles away. “Hmmm,” he told me again. “We need to get after that or you could lose that finger.”

That’s what I kept hearing. They prescribed antibiotics and that didn’t work. Then came surgery. Sue attended the operation and my hand was wrapped in giant bandages for the ride home. “No riding for a bit,” I chuckled, looking at the cartoonish hand.

I had to flounder around at work to type anything at all, using three fingers rather than all five, pecking away to write each work. I struggled to concentrate too.

The account work kept coming, but the account executive I’d failed on the healthcare client was not happy with my performance. I could sense her dissatisfaction and feel the mood changing toward me at the company. My need for hand bandages wore off, but I needed a port in my arm to do the prescribed home infusion of antibiotics the hand specialist recommended. That required another surgery, and called to mind all the chemotherapies I’d seen my late wife Linda endure.

So I knew how to flush the lines with Heparin and sat for three hours each night letting liquids and drugs leak into my body. Sue would show up sometimes, knock at the door and ask, “Are you still dripping?”

That kept me laughing, but the stress of working all day and infusing for hours was wearing me out mentally. I knew I was doing good work on some fronts, but there were signs that one account exec in particular didn’t like my work. She had the “beautiful yet bitchy” thing going on, and while I was communicative and collaborative with her, in the end I think it was her complaint that did me in at the company.

I’d grown so tired of the infusions by that point, I called Advocate and someone there told me, “Oh, well, we have a solution for that. There’s a syringe we can give you. It only takes ten minutes to do.”

I was furious, but it took care of the last week of infusions. The medicines showed up daily, delivered by a kindly man who asked how it was going each time. Finally he took the medical equipment away and I was free. Or so I thought. “You’ll need hand therapy,” the hand specialist told me.

Once or twice a week I went to an occupational therapy clinic to squeeze pink goo and strengthen my fingers. But first, they immersed my entire hand in a melted wax machine to loosen up the joints. That was my peace every week. I’d sit there with my hand in the warm liquid letting problems fade away. The therapists were sweet ladies who wanted to know all about me. Other patients came and went, some with profound injuries from other occupations. We all talked kindly with each other.

That was such a contrast to the growing dissatisfaction of my place at work. We inherited a job through an associate with the same last name of the client. He’d worked there before, and their website was hundreds if not thousands of pages deep. Our job was to revise content one product at a time. That meant learning what each product did and how it worked, a bed of information our associate already knew, but didn’t want to do the content himself. He’d sold his agency to our company and was a vested partner because of that, so he only did what he wanted to do.

That left me holding the ball along with three other copywriters struggling to learn technical information as fast as we could. That was our daily job. Pretending that we knew as much or more about a client’s products or services was our mission on every website we did. There was no exploratory method in place, although I did propose and try to implement that. As a company owned by venture capitalists, such endeavors were viewed as a “waste of time” and not in keeping with turning a profit as quickly as possible. That meant I was swimming upstream against the tide of internal economics.

We picked up a client that made precast concrete. I visited their manufacturing site with a designer who took photos for the website. Strangely, we were advised the day we arrived that one of their workers had just died in an industrial accident inside the factory. We kept our eyes open during the tour.

The proposed website design from our creative department came out looking industrial and gruff. I warned the design team that their design was too hard, but was told, “that’s not the copywriter’s job.” Never mind that I’d done decades of design work with high-level creative teams before landing at Straight North.

We arrived a week later for the design pitch to meet with the the client’s VP of Marketing. He was a delightfully profane emigrant Englishmen who upon seeing the designs turned to us and said, “What the fuck is this? We’re selling product, not showing them how it’s fucking made!”

And so it went. One odd moment after another.

A supremely strange thing happened to me in late August. I’d pulled into our company parking lot after lunch parked my car well up the hill. While inside working on a writing project, I heard someone say pop into our office space and say, “Does anyone drive a gold Subaru? It just got hit.”

I thought, “What?” Outside I saw a police car and several people gathered around my sure. It turned out that a woman driving down Highland Avenue had a medical incident, passed out behind the wheel and wound up riding in her car partway up the driveway, into our parking lot and smacked into the front end of my car. There was a six-inch dent in the hard plastic bumper. I thought “Damn, a new car too.” But later, when I went out to drive home, the dent was gone. It had popped back out.

Maybe that was an omen of some sort. I’d taken so many hits in life up to that point, I should have known that it’s always possible to be blindsided at any moment.

And in fact, I arrived at work one day and the head of the department called me in and “let me go.” I’d tried but never connected with him as a person. He kept his distance and even when he was out walking at lunch, always alone, would not acknowledge a “hello” if I extended him one. He was a prick, in other words. Just like the prick of the sliver in my finger, he’d turned out to be toxic to my system and everything I tried to do there. While the prick on the finger cost me time and money, that prick at work cost me my job. Surely a few less tragic events in my personal life while working there might have helped me succeed a bit more. I’d seen the death of my wife. The bike crash with my new love. The prick of the finger, and surgery, and infusion, and hand therapy. I’d made it through all of that. If that all had not happened, would things have gone better there? Perhaps not. I still had ADHD.

I had one spectacular moment during that months-long tenure. It happened while giving a talk about content development during one of the company’s Lunch and Learn sessions. I revel in public speaking and when it was over, the head of the VP of Creative, which was sort of an “agency within the agency” whom I served, but did not work for directly, told me, “You’re amazing at this. You should do that for a living.”

And I do. Now. I teach and am working to build a speaking and teaching life. Some lessons take a long time to sink in.