The Sprint Retrospective I Didn't Choose

In software, when a sprint ends, you don't just move on to the next one. You stop. You sit down with the team, and you ask three questions: what went well, what didn't, and what are we going to do differently. It's uncomfortable by design. Nobody enjoys sitting in a room naming what broke. But teams that skip retros don't get better — they just keep shipping the same problems forward, sprint after sprint, wondering why nothing improves.

I'm at the halfway mark of treatment now. Nobody scheduled a retrospective for this. So I'm running my own.

What went well

I said yes to help. This one doesn't sound like it should make the list — it sounds like the bare minimum, not an achievement — but anyone who knows me knows what a rewrite this was. I have spent my whole adult life being the person who brings the meal train, not the person who receives one. Learning to let my mother-in-law take my kids for an afternoon without narrating a full handoff document first, learning to say "actually, yes, that would help" instead of "oh, we're fine" — that took more discipline than the chemo itself some weeks.

I kept coding, in the shape my body allowed. Not for a job — I wasn't working through this — but small, self-assigned projects at home, just to keep the muscle from going soft and to give myself something to think about besides infusion schedules. An hour here, a weekend afternoon there, gave me something that was still, unmistakably, mine — a part of my identity chemo couldn't touch, even on the weeks it touched everything else.

I told the truth to my kids, mostly. Not a clinical truth. An age-appropriate one. But a true one, and I think that's going to matter more than I can currently measure.

What didn't go well

I isolated more than I needed to. There's a specific trap in chronic illness where you tell yourself you're protecting people from your bad days, and really you're just protecting yourself from being seen on them. I did that more than I'm proud of, especially in the first two months, when everything was too new to have language for yet.

I let scanxiety run my whole nervous system for entire weeks at a time, when a smaller, more contained fear would have done the same job with less collateral damage to everyone around me. I know now that fear needs boundaries the same way any other visitor does. I didn't know that in round one. I do now.

I compared my scans, my numbers, my side effects to other people's stories I found online at 2am, and every single time, it made things worse, never better. Nobody's Hodgkin lymphoma runs the same code as mine. I knew that intellectually in July. I'm only now starting to know it the way you know something in your body.

What I'm going to do differently

Fewer 2am forums, more actual sleep. I'm not being cute about this — the data on that trade is not close.

More asking, less guessing, when it comes to what people around me actually need from this. My spouse doesn't need me to manage their feelings about my diagnosis on top of managing my own. My kids don't need a mother performing constant strength. Everyone I love has been quietly absorbing a version of stoicism I decided they needed, without ever actually asking them if that's true. Round two of this retro, I want a different answer than the one I assumed.

Documenting more of the good days, not just surviving the bad ones. I have detailed memories of every rough infusion, every scan I waited on, every night the fear won. I have almost no record of the ordinary Tuesday afternoons that were, against every odd, just fine — good, even. That's a data collection problem, and I'm the only one who can fix my own sampling bias.

Why retros matter even when you didn't choose the sprint

Here's what I've come to believe, sitting at this halfway point: you don't get to choose whether you're in a sprint. Life assigns some of them to you without a planning meeting, without a say in scope, without any of the usual say-so you'd expect over your own calendar. Cancer is exactly that kind of sprint — nobody asked me if I had capacity for this one.

But you always get to choose whether you retro it. Whether you stop, honestly, and ask what worked and what you'd do differently, instead of just gritting your way from one infusion to the next and calling that survival enough. Survival is the floor. I want more than the floor out of this year, even the parts I'd give anything to undo.

Halfway through. Six more rounds, give or take, contingent on scans I'm still waiting on. Next retro's already on the calendar, whether I like it or not.

I like it a little more than I expected to.

💜 Kayla