Time Will Heal

I lost my husband to COVID in November.

Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry. I didn't know.

It's been very, very challenging, on top of everything that we're doing, we were in the middle of doing the acquisition that we just announced. Those are the things that I think also, as the CEO of a company, you do have to push through, because the things that you're leaving are impacting so many people. So yeah, it was a bad outcome of COVID indeed. And, you know, time will heal. He was my best friend, and often he was called the vice chairman of Veracyte because he retired when I started the company and he was my number one champion, made my lattes every morning and all that sort of thing. But we can't change these things, we just have to learn how to cope.

If I may ask a follow up, how do you think that will change or has changed you as a person and as a leader, I guess, in terms of resilience, how you view the world, how you relate to others?

I mean, I've always been, as I said, a pretty people-oriented person. I tend to have a lot of compassion. We've had a number of employees, for example, in our own business come through cancer diagnosis, horrific treatments, recurrences. And so I'm not the only one faced with these things. At the company, I'm pretty transparent about it. It helps me feel good to just kind of get it out there so people, not so they can feel bad for me, although I just was surrounded by love from everybody, which really does help the healing process. I think that was smart, to not feel that I couldn't put that out there and let people know when I was having a tough day. You know, it's funny, we're all human at the end of the day. No matter what our role is, no matter how much money we make, no matter what the outcome of all of that is, at the end of the day, we're humans dealing with personal crises, dealing with tough family situations, dealing with losses that are enormous. I think you always have to keep that in mind when you're dealing with employees as well, because you never really know what someone is going through.