Sweet-sweet

I've seen plenty of articles on how to find a great job - titles like: three steps, five tips, culture match, growth check... but I haven't seen many on how to quit a great job, and when, and how. And most importantly, why. Here is my farewell to my Dexcom family.

My Dexcom friends and colleagues -    I joked many times since March 2016, when I started in this role, that my LinkedIn tag-line should read: “The last stop before the beach”, meaning, no need to look further: the empathetic pharmacist in me, has met her calling in promoting Dexcom. It’s a story I will never get tired of telling, because it’s what happens when your most honourable competitor of a decade prior (Ms Robin Dales) gets you to leave a safe yet stale career in order to break new grounds, tap into golden relationships with Endocrinologists and Educators, reignite the power of the T1D community and do meaningful work, together. Helping Dexcom Canada start and grow has been the privilege of my professional life.    But the time has come for that beach to be more than just a proverbial reference. Over the month of July, I will be saying goodbye to my customers and all of you, easing into the role of the Chief Inspiration Officer for the Hasson family. It has been a long dream of ours to gift ourselves a year-long travel sabbatical, with the base camp in Israel, right on the Mediterranean coast. Our kids are fluent in Hebrew so while they’re in school, I will be on the lookout for the best hummus recipe, doing Zumba at 10 AM and finishing my memoir. If loss of my mom and the worldwide pandemic taught me anything, it’s to ask that cliché question: “If not now, when?” and actually mean it. So, it’s now.    As I pack the famed ‘office-box’ after 6+ years at Dexcom, you may wonder what’s in it? Simple. Just 3 things:

  1. Cards. Letters. Text messages from patients who still feel compelled to report their latest A1c to me. Thank you notes from parents that feel I gave their son his childhood back and their daughter to be invited on a sleepover for the first time. An email from a hard-to-see endocrinologist who recognized that allowing me into his practice made him a better clinician. It hasn’t been just me, it’s been Dexcom & me that made this professional fulfillment possible.  2. Photos of both fun and profound times I spent playing in this sandbox. Who’s in those pictures? It’s Robin and Richard and Paul, and Gillian, Anthony, Kirstie, and Sandy, Frank and the order will get messy, but it’s Eileen and Rachelle, JennM and Julie, and Ben East and Ben West… (in the Oscars, this is when the orchestra starts playing, so I will miss someone for sure)… Zach and William and my many IS partners, and my brand new and talented Ontario West crew and my collaborator extraordinaire of the past 2+ years: Alberto.  3. Isn’t there always a plant in one of those office-boxes? This seed germinated for a long time, well before I knew there was Dexcom technology in the making. In my 23 years in Canada, an army of incredible colleagues, mentors and managers added their wisdom, encouragement, light and warmth so when the conditions were ready, the rapid growth started: the stalk grew tall, branched out and blossomed. There had been calamities, oh yes, storms and bug attacks, but that’s how this spine got to be so strong and resilient. Storms are welcome—alas, what else would carry the seeds far and wide? My plant, it turns out, is the sunflower—always looking only where the good can be found.

  The best compliment I ever received was from someone who, aware of my #Serbian #immigrant #single #mother from a #war-torn-country past, said: “I like how you life. It feels light.” So with this next chapter, we at home refer to as two-summers-and-a-year-in-between, we hope to broaden the light and show (not tell) our three sons how to shred that bitter-sweet ‘work hard - play hard’ stereotype, and playfully blaze our own trail, enjoying (p)retirement while still in early 50’s. And after that? No NEXT-ing allowed. The only plan is to have no plan, but ride on intuition and good energy we’ve been generating as we go, as we grow. If this email had a soundtrack, it would’ve been: Living in the Moment by Jason Mraz   I will be around until the end of July and after that at the same number, just through WhatsApp. I learned something from each and every one of you. Merci. Thank you. Хвала. Todah.