Hoarding all the details is one of the biggest mistakes an event manager can make. What happens if one of us is suddenly unavailable because, say, they find themselves undergoing emergency surgery in a foreign country? If that sounds oddly specific, it's because I once found myself being wheeled away to the operating room hoping my team had access to all the necessary tools to keep myriad pressing projects moving along.

The company I work for brought me onboard to help lead a global events team it was building from the ground up. The first couple of months were a whirlwind of meeting the colleagues I'd be collaborating with and undertaking the laborious job of creating workflows. That tedious task involved developing a series of templates – what I like to call "single sources of truth" – for every event. Each document includes all the vital info one could possibly need: vendor contact information, deadlines, hotel information, contract status, important links to anything and everything, etc.

These documents are important. If I could put them behind two inches of bulletproof glass guarded by a squad of like-minded event managers, I would. Since that's not in my budget yet, I put them on SharePoint so that our teams can access them whenever they need to know something like when a shipment of branded socks from the States is set to arrive for an event in Finland.

The more exciting task of attending a conference soon arrived when I had the opportunity to work an event in Europe. I offered to travel abroad to hand out swag in our exhibit so I could meet our international team in person and get a better feel for the program by being a part of it. I flew out a day early because I had to take an on-site COVID test, since the country I was going to wasn't particularly impressed with U.S. protocols.

Once I landed in the morning and dropped my bags at the hotel, I grabbed an Uber to the venue to get the test out of the way. Unfortunately, the testing trailer was a distant two-mile trek away, which I decided to walk. Along the way it started raining, and I didn't have rain gear. Ugh! Anyway, I got my test and was about to head back to the hotel when our group chat lit up with a question about how to get into the exhibit hall to make sure our booth was squared away before the conference opened the next day. Since I was in the rough vicinity, I volunteered to head to the convention center to get answers.

As luck would have it, I spotted an electric rental scooter nearby and decided it would be a lot faster to hop on and zip to the venue. I've buzzed around these things before and am practically Tony Hawk on a scooter. So I jumped on and took off. Part of the way back, I hopped off a curb, but alas, I did not stick the landing. My front wheel hit some high-visibility paint that, because of the rain, was akin to an oil slick. The scooter went one direction, and I went the other.

I smacked the ground, and the wind was knocked right out of me. A good Samaritan rushed over to see if I was OK. My mortification was worse than the pain, although there was a fair bit of that was well. Once I'd thanked her for her concern and made sure the scooter was still in operating order, I hopped back on. I soon found an install crew in front of the venue, learned how to access the exhibit hall, fired a quick message off to the team, and found my way back to the hotel.

Later that evening, my colleagues began departing the hotel for the opening reception, but I told them to go ahead without me because I had to finish up some work and was still waiting on my COVID results. I said I'd just meet them later at the team dinner. The truth is I was still short of breath from my crash, but I didn't tell a soul because of – you know – pride. Instead, I covertly went to the hospital to get checked out. The staff ran a few tests, and I was awaiting the results when a doctor came in and told me in remarkably good English that they need to prep me for emergency surgery because I was bleeding internally. Not exactly what I wanted to hear since I had places to be and work to do.

My knee-jerk response was, "Well, I have to be in the booth tomorrow to hand out swag." The very patient surgeon assured me that would not be the case. It dawned on me that I couldn't keep this to myself any longer. I called the head of our team on the ground (who was still at the company dinner) and brought her up to speed on my condition. I'm still not sure how she did it, but she arrived at the ER while I was being prepped for surgery, which was exactly what I didn't know I needed at that moment.

Soon I was wheeled into the OR, and the next thing I remember was waking up the following day in recovery and having a mild panic attack until I realized where I was. The surgeon popped in and let me know everything went smoothly. And while I won't bother you with the unpleasant details, they'd found the problem and patched me up. I was going to be just fine. My team lead rematerialized by my side again and brought me my phone, which I felt was the best thing in the world because it meant I could get back to tackling tasks while I was recovering. But my boss stateside had other ideas. She called me up and let me know in no uncertain terms that I would not, in fact, be working beyond letting her know what projects needed to be attended to. (I love being part of an amazing organization!)

Remember all that unsexy work of making my single sources of truth? This is where they proved their worth. I gave my boss a laundry list of projects that needed to be taken care of, such as coordinating with legal to get a contract signed for an upcoming event, finishing up a deal with an American vendor to get some swag shipped to an international show, putting in place the final details for an order of power banks, etc. I then explained that it was all detailed in the SharePoint documents, and soon everything was smoothly delegated to people who hadn't just undergone emergency surgery.

Then I laid in a hotel room for five days (with my mom who'd arrived) until I was cleared to fly home and continue the recovery. Luckily, once I got home, I could power up my laptop and get back to work. While I was out of commission, not a single item slipped through the cracks because the team had access to all the information they needed to keep projects moving along. And while I would have liked to see the workflow I'd spent so long putting together be tested in a way that hurt a lot less, I was pleased to see it passed the stress test. I just wonder if I'm allowed to ride scooters for work anymore.