August 28th, 2007
Cancer 2.0: Intent on winning!
This post is not about failed IT projects; it’s an inspiring story from someone absolutely determined to win his battle against cancer. Jeffrey Walker, CEO of Atlassian Software and fellow Enterprise Irregular, has written an eloquent, powerful, and highly personal account of his fight against a rare form of this killer disease.
Jeffrey’s going to win this, and his post explains why:
Soon I’ll be going in for surgery for a re-occurrence of my cancer. I have a 2 centimeter tumor where my left kidney used to be.
I’m a cancer survivor. The year before I joined Atlassian I battled cancer for a year. It started with surgery to remove my left kidney, when they discovered a nasty tumor attached to various important things. They removed part of it. My initial stunning prognosis was 3-5 years to live.
My cancer was eventually diagnosed as an unknown cancer: sarcomatoid carcinoma. Which means it looks and acts like sarcoma [very rare bone, tissue cancer] but it may be a rare carcinoma [organ based], which means, “we have no idea.” This was exhilarating news: no statistics meant I was a data set of one, and any prognosis was bullshit.
Cancer never broke my positive attitude.
In preparation for this upcoming surgery, I’ll be working out every single day. I’ll be leaving work at a reasonable hour. I need to point my Type-A personality at Atlassian at something more important right now.
I am Cancer Dude and I am going to kick it’s ass. Here’s my secret cancer-fighting outfit…
I urge you to read his post, as the brief excerpt doesn’t do it justice. Jeffrey, thanks for putting this out there.
Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. Click here to discuss this post with him on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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