In late 2022, I had emergency open heart surgery. Not a metaphorical "rough patch" — my heart literally stopped in the hospital. I coded, was resuscitated, and spent the following months trying to put my life and health back together.
A few months later, at a large, well-known tech company where I'd been a senior technical contributor for years, I was put on a formal "performance improvement" plan.
I've never written about it publicly. In early 2024, I took a payout, didn't sue, and tried to move on. But watching the recent waves of layoffs and performance-related exits across big tech, I see a familiar pattern: people quietly wondering if it was "their fault," or if they somehow failed.
This is my story of what it looks like when a serious medical event and performance management intersect — and why I still haven't fully recovered from the experience, even though the surgery went well.
"You'll Be Fine, Just Take It Easy"
Before any of this, I was a tenured senior technical contributor at a big tech company. I'd been there for years. I'd built relationships, taken on extra accounts, and generally been viewed as solid and reliable.
Then, in November 2022, came the emergency.
I suffered an aortic dissection — a tear in the inner wall of the aorta, the main artery that carries blood from your heart to the rest of your body. When that wall tears, blood forces its way between the layers, and the artery can rupture. It is exactly as bad as it sounds. Without emergency surgery, the mortality rate climbs by roughly one to two percent per hour in the first 48 hours, and nearly half of all patients don't survive the first week (NIH - StatPearls, Aortic Dissection). Up to half of people who experience one don't survive long enough to reach a hospital at all.
I made it to a hospital. I had emergency open heart surgery. During the procedure, my heart stopped. I coded, was resuscitated, and spent the following months learning how to exist in a body that had been cut open and put back together.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like
People hear "surgery went well" and assume you're back to normal in a few weeks. It doesn't work like that.
I spent days in the ICU, then over a week in the hospital. Once home, I couldn't drive for weeks. I couldn't lift anything heavier than ten pounds for over a month. My sternum had been sawed open and wired back together — I felt it every time I coughed, sneezed, or tried to get out of a chair.
But the hardest part wasn't the incision. It was the fatigue — a deep, cellular exhaustion that doesn't respond to rest the way normal tiredness does. New medications affected my energy, my cognition, my mood. And underneath all of it, the knowledge that once your aorta has dissected, you're in a higher-risk category for the rest of your life. The follow-up scans and cardiology appointments don't stop.
This is the context in which I returned to work — grateful to be alive, determined to get back to normal, and deeply aware that "normal" might not be available to me anymore.
When I came back to work, I was physically depleted, on new medications for the first time in my life, trying to regain stamina and focus — and acutely aware that I needed my job for health insurance.
The initial message from leadership was: take it easy, take care of yourself, we understand.
That tone did not last.
New Accounts, Old Expectations
When I returned from medical leave, I didn't come back to the same environment I'd left.
My account assignments had changed. Some of my previous work had been reassigned while I was out. I now had to build new relationships with new stakeholders while still recovering physically and mentally.
I understood the business logic: the work had to go somewhere while I was on leave. But the practical result was that I was starting from behind in a field that runs on momentum and relationship capital.
Despite that, there were no early conversations about adjusting expectations to account for the time I'd missed. No check-ins about what realistic ramp-up looked like after major surgery. No honest signaling that things might be heading in a formal direction.
The first clear signal that my performance was considered a problem came all at once.
The "Performance Improvement" Plan
Roughly three and a half months after returning from surgery, I was placed on a formal "performance improvement" plan.
I don't want to relitigate every metric here. What I will say is this: when I looked at the goals I'd been measured against and compared them to the time I'd actually been working, I believed I was largely on track. But that conversation — an honest reckoning with the math, the timeline, the context — never really happened.
In response to the plan, I went into what I can only call survival mode. Over the following weeks I ramped up customer-facing work, built and shared a detailed thought leadership plan, and sent weekly, documented progress updates. This wasn't a token effort. I was trying, in good faith, to show that I could meet the bar — all while still recovering from major surgery.
Good Faith and Moving Goalposts
Here's where things really broke for me.
The message I kept hearing, explicitly or implicitly, was essentially: "Yes, you've made progress. Yes, you've hit a lot of the numbers. But at some point earlier, you were behind. We need to see sustained behavior, and we're not sure yet how long that should be."
I kept asking a simple question: How long do I have to maintain this level of performance before I'm no longer on this plan? The answer was always vague — "typically 30 to 60 days" — but never a firm, written commitment tied to anything concrete.
When I presented my own analysis of where I stood, the response acknowledged I might have a point but never actually engaged with it. There was no "if your data checks out, we'll re-evaluate." There was no "here's why we see it differently." Just a kind of institutional shrug.
And the structure of the plan itself told a story. There were check-ins. There was documentation. There was monitoring. What was largely absent was coaching — concrete introductions to opportunities I could pursue, collaborative planning to close gaps given my workload and health. The kinds of things you'd do if the goal were to help someone succeed rather than build a file.
What it felt like was: hit this ever-shifting bar with no clear finish line, while we write everything down.
The Second Leave and the Trap
My health didn't stop being complicated just because the "performance improvement" plan started. After that intensely stressful period, I went back on medical leave to fully recover.
When I returned again, the company's position was that the plan had been paused while I was out, and would now resume where it left off. Some of the original deliverables were obsolete, so newer expectations were layered in.
From their perspective, this was continuity.
From mine, it was a trap. I believed I had effectively caught up during the time I'd worked. I was now being told I needed to continue under formal scrutiny anyway — with no clear endpoint — based on a period when I'd been recovering from literal open heart surgery.
It's hard to feel like anyone is acting in good faith under those conditions.
The No-Win Choice
In March of 2024, I left the company.
There was a payout on the table. There was a theoretical option to escalate legally. I thought hard about it.
But I also knew: lawsuits follow you, especially in tight industries. "Former employee who sued [well-known tech company]" is not a headline you want attached to your name when you're trying to restart your career. And legal fights are emotionally draining, especially when you're not far removed from a major health crisis.
So I took the payout. I didn't sue. And I've carried it with me since — not just the physical recovery, but a fundamental shift in how I think about work, loyalty, and trust.
There was no way to win. Fight, and risk being labeled litigious. Walk away, and live with the knowledge that there was never any real accountability for what happened.
What I Think About Now
I don't think my experience is unique. If anything, it's a sharper version of something that happens quietly to a lot of people. And the part that stays with me isn't the metrics or the plan — it's the absence of good faith.
Good faith looks like having an honest conversation about what's realistic after someone nearly dies. It looks like engaging with their perspective instead of acknowledging it and moving on. It looks like building a plan that's designed to help someone succeed, not just to document them out the door.
Good faith means that when health and performance collide, the default posture is transparency and humanity — not institutional self-protection dressed up as process.
And it's worth naming something that people in the industry know but rarely say out loud: at some large tech companies, there is a well-understood pattern of cycling out longer-tenured employees. Not because they've stopped performing, but because they've hit a compensation band where it's cheaper to replace them. "Performance improvement" plans become the mechanism — a way to create a paper trail that reframes an economic decision as an individual failure. When that machinery intersects with a medical event, the result isn't just cold. It's something closer to cruelty wearing a process badge.
I'm not writing this to settle a score with a single manager or company. I'm writing it because every time I see another round of layoffs and people quietly blaming themselves, I remember how easily a human story gets flattened into a dashboard metric.
If You're Going Through Something Similar
Document everything. Dates, emails, dashboards, meeting notes. Not to weaponize, but to protect your own clarity and give you a record if you need one.
Separate your worth from the process. A "performance improvement" plan says as much about a company's systems and incentives as it does about you.
Know your rights, but also your limits. Sometimes walking away isn't weakness — it's a choice to protect your future and your health.
You're not crazy for feeling angry years later. When your health, livelihood, and sense of professional identity all intersect, the scars aren't just physical.
If you've been through something similar — especially where medical issues and performance management collided — you're not alone. And it wasn't just you.
