 Anna Zacher, and I today am talking about chronic disease and the effects it has on your long-term career. I had a professor in high school who told me that if I ever needed to name a paper, I should just name it resisting the tidal wave and it would apply to anything. Use that in your life. That's how the name of this talk came about. Just to start off, I, like many of you I'm sure, am a huge fan of lifehacker porn, is what I call it. It's like the self-help books, the advice books. We see them all the time, especially in the golden age of content that we're in right now. So I just put a couple of quotes up here that spoke to me, but the reason I have them here today is because dream bigger. You are always naked. There's no reason not to follow your heart. These are great inspiring things that we can read every day. But when you get sick, none of this matters. So the quote that I always used for myself personally, when I was growing up, like from when I was a child, I read it somewhere in a book. I wish I could remember where. It was fear is your north star. And that just means that you're always going towards whatever you're afraid of. So if you're afraid of something, go do it. And then you're probably moving in the right direction. But when I got sick, I was scared and that there was nowhere for me to go. I was just there in my sickness, not knowing what to do. So basically, this is me. And mostly I'm just using this as an excuse to show off my adorably cute dog, who has kept me sane the past three years. So I was diagnosed at 22. That's when I first started to show symptoms of psoriasic arthritis. It's the one that, if you've ever seen those obnoxious commercials with the guy who's golfing, and he's like, I'm in so much pain, but I can golf now. That's not how it works. Don't believe that, Ed. So that's the one I was diagnosed with. I'm 25 now. And so I've only been able to sporadically work for the past three years because of the pain I've been having in my hands and feet. And I, important to this talk, at the time when I was diagnosed, had no disability insurance. It was not offered through the job I had at the time, but I want you all just to consider and start thinking in your mind right now, do I have disability insurance? Is it something that my work offers? And I said no to when I first started out. Is it something that I could get? Because that is very, very important to what could happen to you in your career in the long run. So I put this up here because this is what I feel like led to my disability personally. I'm at work, I'm typing all day, I'm programming. I get home and I want to work on an open source project or I want to do a personal project. And so I'm programming. And then I'm playing a video game and so I'm on my computer still. But when I'm sleeping, I'm just having in stress dreams about work thinking about the next day. And it's that cycle of constant pressure and unhealthy habits that we all have, that we all want to get out of, but we don't have the time to work on that can lead to a chronic illness. I have no family history of arthritis, none. And I had it at 22. Like doctors, I go into doctors' offices and literally I've been told that I am a medical miracle, which sounds so awesome, except that it's not have, that we all want to, one doctor was like, you are a medical miracle. And I was like, yeah, I don't really know how to take that. Thanks. Just tell me how I can get better. And he was like, I have no options for you. And I was like, cool, next one. So the thing that I really want to talk to you guys about today, my talk is pretty short and I'm just really here because I want to be able to help anybody that may have what happened, hopefully, of course, hopefully we're hoping this doesn't happen to anybody here or anyone's loved ones or anyone's families, but you never know, you are 10 times more likely to be taken out of the workforce by a disability than by anything else, 10 times. So death, having a child, anything else that would take someone out of the workforce, you are 10 times more likely to be taken out of the workforce by a disability than those factors. When I was working, I had no disability insurance, like I said, but if I had had the ability to get it, if I had opted for own occupation disability insurance, I would have gotten my full salary benefits for the next five years. So think about maybe you work in a job where you make six figures. If you get own occupation disability insurance and many jobs here in the tech industry in Seattle offer it, it's about $40 a month. It really depends, but I'm gonna say $40 because that's the average that I've heard from most people, anecdotally, of course. It means that you are gonna be able to recover most of your salary so that you don't have to worry about money if something does upend your career. There's so many hurdles in tech and any industry for minorities or people who have just spent their entire lives working to get to a certain position. So many hurdles we already have to jump through. A disability is not something that we want to have affect your career. There's another type of insurance that many companies, when you're first going through HR, will try and kind of steer you to because when we all think of insurance, I'm sure there's a community here today. Sorry, I'm not facing a lot of you over there. We think of life insurance. We think of auto insurance. We don't think about disability insurance. So the person in HR likely also doesn't really know that much about disability insurance themselves and they're gonna steer you towards not, towards any occupation in insurance. So it's called any occupation disability insurance. That means that if you do become disabled or something does happen to you while you're working, if you were able to get any job, like a minimum wage job, any job at any level, let's say, so like right now, though I am a developer, work in a showroom for furniture because I don't have to use my hands all day long and it's a great job because there is very little stress but it does not offer the same pay scale that once allowed me to live on Capitol Hill that my old job did. So I just, if there's anything I want you to walk away from this talk thinking about, it's just the next job that you go to, whether it be in tech, whether it be a high figure job, a minimum wage job, even the company, like I know some corporate companies like Williamson, I was really good about this. Anthropology, their corporate, whoever owns them is really good about this. They offer disability insurance to some of their, just part-time employees even. The next time you go for a job, you're filling out that HR paperwork, just think, you never know what happens in life, not to scare anybody again. We don't want anything to happen to you, but you never know. It's easier to get the insurance and to pay it than to take the risk. So own occupation, disability insurance is what you're looking for. And so when I was preparing for this talk actually, I just a couple of days ago, my peer coincidence, a woman came into my store where I work and she was telling me the story of how her husband who has worked at Microsoft his entire career for the past 25 plus years was just diagnosed with a brain tumor. They have four kids in college and he is able to get 66% of his salary back because he signed up for any occupation insurance. That's still a lot more than most will give you, but she was just talking about how if she had only known, they would have signed up and paid that $40 a month instantly, but she just had no idea. No one had ever talked to her about it because it's not something we talk about in the culture. So just a list of resources here. Sorry, I don't know. I did this on Google sheets and I don't know how well it shows up on the screen, but I've spent the past three years of my life just talking to doctors all over the country. And I literally mean all over the country because like I said, I'm a medical marvel. So people want to research me a little bit and figure out what the hell's going on in my body. So if you have any questions about maybe something that you're going through, something that a loved one is going through, if you're just here, you're in Seattle and you don't have a general practitioner, if you have any questions about anything health related, navigating like health insurance bills, something like any questions, I really am personally a great resource for it now only cause that's basically been my full time job for the past three years, is to learn how to help people in a situation like myself. But another great resource I just wanted to point people to is the National Association of Health Underwriters. They have a great guide for consumers on disability insurance. I realized the link is long, but again, if you just Google National Association of Health Underwriters or NAHU and their Disability Insurance Guide, it'll come up. And hopefully that will be a great resource for some of you in case you have any questions or in case you want to learn more about what your company itself offers. So I encourage all of you to just ask your HR departments if you haven't already. And if you don't know the status of your current disability insurance or anything like that, again, HR. I know a lot of you work for great companies that do offer it. Just I'm just here to say check into it and make sure that you're all taking care of yourselves. We hear a lot about meditation these days, eating well, all those sorts of things. But again, I can tell you like, I was athletic, I worked out, I ate fine, still happened to me. So just make sure that you're prepared and I'm wishing you all the best. But if you have any questions, just feel free to come ask me and I'll be around the rest of today. So thank you guys.