Something is missing!

My officemate, let's call her Kay, is a petite tiny young lady; Mother of two young sons.  She dresses up nicely every day.  She is good at her job and leads the software development efforts.  She goes to gym; She brings in her homemade healthy lunch, often including a nice looking big salad with nuts and fruits.  She picks up her kids from school, has activities and makes cup-cakes in the weekends.  She even throws baby showers or weddings or what not for her siblings and relatives.  She has it all, and does it all well: organized and disciplined.

She might also be a perfectionist.  Once she brought some of her delicious cup cakes to the office, nicely put in a box with great icing, better looking that those in pastry shops. She told me how she stayed up till 2-3 am just to get that recipe right!  I asked her if her kids liked cup-cake that much! To my surprise she replied: they do not even like sweets, I like cup-cakes! She was making it for herself and relatives and she could not tolerate the ones that would come out wrong; She got it right the third round!

Wednesday was my first day back at work after being away on travel for over a week.  She was looking focused and professional as always, looking at her code with a hot cup of tea in her hand, the usual way she does (Did I say how happy I am to finally have an officemate to share my passion for tea?)  We just exchanged our regular morning greetings; I gathered she must be busy and focused at her work and should not be distracted that she did not ask much about my trip.  We often are away from our offices in labs and for meetings anyways, so it is hard to notice when a person is gone.  I went about my day as usual.

Later in the day, my friend (call her Joy), who is our next-door neighbor asks me: "How is Kay doing?", "Fine", I responded suspiciously.  "You know, last week, when you were gone, there was an ambulance here to pick her up.  Your office door was closed, and I just heard them banging at the door yelling Security!  I wanted to ask her about it but I thought maybe she likes to keep it private, maybe you can ask her".  Really? I could not believe it.  She is so healthy, organized, she exercises and eats well.  More than that, "I know she is a very tough girl.  She would not complain or call ambulance just for caution" I told Joy and she agreed; Something must have gone wrong.  So, once Kay came back to the office, I asked her.

"How are you doing Kay? I heard from Joy there was an incident here last week while I was gone, are you okay?"  She then told me the story that she was having severe stomachache, non-stop, for so long that she was almost passing out.  She was telling her husband on the phone about it that she felt like she could not continue being awake longer.  She told him she was going to hang up the phone and call 911.  That is exactly what she did.  By the time the center's emergency unit arrived at our office, she was hyperventilating.  They took her to hospital, ran all kinds of tests: blood, CT scan, etc.  They failed to find anything!  It is good she did not have a tumor or some other serious illness but troubling for her not to know what caused the pain.  She said: "I have given birth twice without epidural, so I know pain and can tolerate pain.  It was worse than that! When you have contractions it comes and goes, this was constant non-stop pain".  They had kept her under watch for a whole day and then sent her home.  Her husband thinks it was stress, reminding her that your body is shutting down on you.  You need to take it easy.

I did not see her yesterday and today in the office.  Usually she emails me and her boss if she is working from home.  Usually if I do not see her I assume she is in the lab or another building for a meeting.  Now I am so scared; I emailed her to ask how she is, and no response.  I called her supervisor to see if she had heard anything from her: nothing! Worse: her supervisor had no idea about what happened last week! Security and center's health unit did not inform her supervisor.  It was all news to her.  If my next door neighbor had not seen it happening and had not told me, I would not know about it to worry about her and ask about her condition either!  When these things happen, I am deeply saddened.  We all come and go in masses to the same campus, same building, same floor, and we hardly notice each other; I told Joy how when such things happen, and how when Soheil passed away, the governing sense of normalcy and business-as-usual on his floor and in our building bothered me.  I told her how in our culture, it would be hard to miss such news.  Here: someone should tell you or forward you an email!  People's privacy is respected.  Maybe she does not like everyone to know  about her medical issues. To respect Soheil and his family they have to keep everything untouched!  But where is the line drawn between privacy and caring? Privacy and being human? Privacy and indifference?   Well, I know they are not indifferent; They do honor individuals, their rights, and their families' rights.  They do follow some rules and guidelines.  But something just does not feel quite right to me when these things happen here in the U.S. Something is missing.

I sure hope everything be okay with Kay, and she be sitting behind a console in a closed lab coding away ignoring her emails or driving to pick her kids up.  I am worried and could do nothing but typing this.