It was 11 a.m., and I was sitting at my client’s office shaking. I had already taken four Advils, but my shoulders, arms, and hands were still screaming in pain. I was trying to finish a PowerPoint deck with one of my senior clients sitting just two seats away when I suddenly started crying. I couldn’t stop.
I was 31 years old and had been at Hewlett-Packard for about 12 weeks as part of a small consulting team. We were on an accelerated schedule: six weeks to redesign the entire global marketing organization, followed by another six weeks to implement it. For those three months, I had been working six days a week. At least four days a week, I drove from San Francisco to Cupertino, about an hour and fifteen minutes each way. Most days were around 14 hours long. We had meetings all day, and then I would use lunch, the few minutes between meetings, and the hours afterward to turn my notes into slides.
At the time, this felt almost normal to me. I was ambitious, doing well at my consulting firm, and I was up for promotion to manager. I wanted to prove I was ready, and I wanted to be known as someone who could handle anything. I took pride in producing great work quickly.
I knew I was pushing myself too hard. I just assumed I could recover once the project was over. That assumption cost me a lot more than I expected.
The Bill Came Due
The pain had been building for a while, but I kept working through it. That morning at HP was different. My body basically said, enough.
Soon afterward, I went out on workers’ compensation and took four months completely off work. At my worst, I couldn’t pick up a glass of water with two hands or pull a seatbelt across my body. Sitting in front of a computer triggered pain almost immediately. At night, I would lie flat on my back with my arms spread out, sometimes on ice packs, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt.
Over the next few years, I saw specialists, physical therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists and other practitioners trying to figure out what had happened and how to help me recover. What scared me most wasn’t even the pain. It was hearing that the nerves throughout my upper body were severely inflamed. One doctor told me I should not even think about getting pregnant until I recovered.
I didn’t even have a boyfriend at the time, so having children wasn’t an immediate plan. But I knew I wanted them someday, and hearing that scared the crap out of me. Until then, I thought the downside of working too hard was being exhausted, stressed, or maybe burned out for a while. I never imagined I could hurt my body enough that a doctor would be talking to me about whether I could safely have children someday.
Recovery Became My Most Important Project
Workers’ comp lasted about three years, and that process was its own kind of grind. There were treatments, evaluations, restrictions and endless paperwork. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to truly recover, I had to take charge of it myself.
For someone who had always been known as a high performer, admitting my limitations was incredibly uncomfortable. I was used to saying, “Yes, I can do that.” Now I had to tell managers and HR that I could only work on the computer for an hour, that I needed to stop and rest, or that I couldn’t take a project.
For a while, an hour on the computer really was my limit. I learned to dictate instead of type and completely rethought my workspace, hours, posture and way of working. I remember wondering, What am I going to do if I can’t work on a computer? I was only 31. Almost every career I could imagine required one.
Eventually I realized I couldn’t treat healing like something I squeezed in around work. Healing had to become the work. I sought out care beyond what workers’ comp covered, spent my own money, tried different approaches and kept looking for what would actually help.
At 33, I was officially rated 25% permanently disabled. I remember thinking, I’m 33 years old. I am not accepting this as permanent.
My Injury Taught Me How to Lead and Value Myself
One of the strangest things about this whole experience is that it actually made me a better leader. Before my injury, I was fast, efficient and good at getting things done. When people worked for me, I could get impatient because I knew I could do the work myself more quickly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was sometimes competing with the people on my own team instead of really leading them.
My injury took that option away. After four months completely off, I eventually returned in a limited capacity and became a chief of staff for our national marketing practice. I had a team of about 20 volunteers, but I physically couldn’t do most of the heavy lifting anymore. I had to structure problems, set direction and trust other people to execute.
People worked differently than I did. They had different speeds and different strengths. But suddenly I appreciated every one of them because each person could do something I physically could not do at that moment. My injury forced me to learn how to delegate.
It also taught me something deeper about where my value actually came from. During my recovery, a senior partner asked me to help with a project. I knew I couldn’t do what he was asking in the way I would have before my injury. It took me two days of agonizing before I finally called him back and said no because I was terrified he would think I was no longer useful.
Instead, he said something I have never forgotten: “I’d rather have 10% of your time thinking than 100% of someone else’s.”
I was stunned. For years, I had been proving my value through effort. I worked longer, made the slides better, produced things faster and pushed myself harder. But my greatest value had never been my ability to create a perfect PowerPoint deck. It was my ability to think, to break complicated problems apart, see patterns and figure out a path forward.
Once I understood that, I could contribute differently. I could brainstorm, frame the problem and set direction while a team executed. I could still make an impact without doing everything myself. That changed the way I worked for the rest of my career.
Health Debt
We talk a lot about financial debt. We borrow now and pay later, often with interest. I think we do the same thing with our bodies.
We borrow from sleep because we need to finish something. We sit for 14 hours because the project feels important. We stop exercising because there isn’t enough time. We ignore pain, exhaustion or stress because we tell ourselves it’s temporary. We tell ourselves we’ll rest after the deadline, take care of ourselves after the project, or recover once we get the promotion.
That was exactly what I was doing. The problem with health debt is that we don’t know the interest rate, and we don’t know when the bill will come due. Mine came early, and in a strange way, that made me lucky. My body gave me a warning I couldn’t ignore while I still had time to change how I lived and worked.
Not everyone gets such a clear warning. I’ve known people who worked relentlessly for decades, putting off exercise, rest, travel and time with people they loved because they assumed they would enjoy those things later. Then later came, and their health didn’t cooperate.
I don’t say that to be morbid. I say it because I think a lot of us know when we’re overdoing it, but we keep telling ourselves we’ll deal with the consequences later.
Two Decades Later, I’m Still Paying a Little Interest
It has now been about two decades since that HP project, and I recovered far beyond what anyone predicted. Despite that 25% permanent disability rating, I eventually became fully functional again. I got married and had two healthy children. I built another long chapter of my career. I could work full days at a computer again, travel, exercise and live a normal life.
For the most part, I consider myself recovered. But every once in a while, my body reminds me. Right now, I am going through one of the more significant flare-ups I’ve had in years. It has lasted about four weeks. I’m not completely sure what caused it. Maybe it is a combination of stress, hormonal changes, travel, life transitions and a sudden death in our family that required more travel and emotional energy.
Whatever the cause, the discomfort is familiar. It reminds me that perhaps I never completely erased the debt I accumulated at 31. I am still incredibly grateful. Overall, I am healthy, and I have been able to do everything that mattered most to me. My injury did not take away the life I wanted. But occasionally, there is still a little interest due.
The Work Was Temporary. My Body Wasn’t.
Looking back, I don’t wish the injury had never happened. That may sound strange given how painful those years were, physically and emotionally, but I was heading down a path that was not sustainable. I’m not sure anything else would have stopped me. The pain did.
It taught me to delegate, to say no and to understand that my value was not measured by how many hours I worked. It taught me that my judgment and thinking were often more valuable than my ability to personally execute every detail.
Most importantly, it taught me that no one else could care about my health as much as I needed to. My company, my boss, HR, workers’ comp and my doctors could all play a role, but ultimately I had to decide that protecting my body mattered more than proving something at work.
There is one final irony I think about now. At the time, that Hewlett-Packard project felt incredibly important. We were reorganizing the global marketing department of one of the biggest technology companies in the world. I was up for promotion. We had aggressive deadlines, enormous expectations and endless PowerPoint decks to prove we were getting it right.
I pushed myself as though the work could not wait. Within a couple of years, HP reorganized the department again, and much of what we had worked so hard to build changed. The slides I was destroying my body to perfect disappeared a long time ago. My body is still with me.
So if you know deep down that you are overdoing it right now, maybe ask yourself the question I wish I had asked at 31: Will what I’m doing today matter in 10 months or 10 years? And will what I’m doing to myself matter?
We get one body. Over a lifetime, we will have many jobs, projects, deadlines, presentations and promotions. Those things are far more replaceable than they feel in the moment.
Our health isn’t.