My horrible day…
I went to work this morning, unsure of why I pushed myself out of bed. There was very little pain, so I went with it. The entire 37-mile drive to work was uncomfortable however - I still have the water-balloon sloshy feeling inside.
I was able to work from 8am - 1pm before calling it quits due to heavy bleeding, clots, extreme fatigue, dizziness and intermittent cramping. I mean, if I’m going to have to clean up my blood from the FLOOR every time I try to use the bathroom, that’s a health hazard to others and I shouldn’t be at work. All I’d do was take down my pants to sit on the pot, or rise from the pot after, and spillage was inevitable. The dizziness of course was from the heavy bleeding.
I got home and on a whim checked my work email. There was an email from my boss showing a thread that occurred after I left. The “officer of the day” - a manager who is appointed to monitor who is logged into the phone queues, and who also logs remotely into peoples’ machines to look at what they’re working on to make sure no one is slacking off - he got my chat message that I needed to go home sick, and immediately wrote to the HR department about it….like a kid tattling or something. I’d notified him AND my boss AND all the other managers on the floor - why did he have to report it to HR?
Because they’re still trying to fire me for having a health condition.
So my boss wrote back to him and to the HR department, stating that she’ll have me get a doctor’s note so being off work yesterday and part of today counts as “one incident”.
This pissed me off to no end. I was shaking with anger. I phoned up my doctor’s office and explained the situation - they were kind and wrote me a doctor’s note. I’m to pick it up this weekend because I’m at work through the week before the doctor’s office opens, and I don’t get home til after they’ve closed.
My boss also noted that this is now my “second incident”. I was absent two days last month for the Endo, too. Last month was the start of the new Paid Time Off policy, so I got a semi-clean slate. Up til that point, I had one more day I could take off work before being fired - regardless of having a documented health condition.
Next month will be my “third incident” and one can have no more than four total incidents of missed work within a 90-day period without being fired, regardless of the reason. The workplace can also opt to fire me after the third incident, expecting there will be a fourth.
Additionally, if I run out of Paid Time Off days before I run out of “incidents”, I can STILL be fired, because under no circumstances do they allow people to take UNpaid time off work.
Everyone I’ve spoken to says this is illegal. So if they do fire me for this, I’m reporting them to the labor board.
When I got home, I ate some lunch and took a nap because I was still so wiped out. At one point I turned over and fell asleep face down on the bed. Not a good plan. I couldn’t breathe very well and the bed is dusty - we have yet to get a dust mite cover for the bed.
So I had a nightmare.
I was at my dad’s old house back in Michigan. A red pickup truck and another car were parked in his circle driveway, but the owners of the car belonged to the residence next door, which was converted into a multi-dwelling home so the neighbor could make money renting to several people.
It was dark and I went out the front door and took a left, walked down the porch and around the side of the house which borders on a wetlands valley. As I walked through the path leading to the backyard, my left hand touched something soft in the bushes - it felt like a female child’s long silky hair on a soft head…but what was a child doing in the bushes? I kept walking, pretending not to be alarmed. When I got into the backyard, I ascended the stairs to the deck attached to the back of the house. As I was looking around in the silvery-lit darkness (there must have been a moon present to make the night look silvery), I saw it….
An old friend of mine appeared - she used to have long silky blonde hair in high school. Her head was down but her eyes glared up at me as she walked slowly towards me. Before my eyes, she turned into a blonde wolf and ran at me. We wrestled and fought. She bit deep into me and clawed deep gashes into me. There was blood everywhere. I tried to hurt her back to no avail - she was much stronger than me. I kicked and fought and did enough damage eventually to get the wolf to break free of me. I scrambled into the back door of the house and stared at her through the screen door as she perched under part of the deck, growling at me. Then her eyes softened -she looked hurt and afraid. I glared and said NO.
I knew she was waiting for me to die. I knew that I would die.
I woke heart pounding and gasping for air to the sound of the phone ringing.
I staggered to the phone - it was the doctor’s office leaving a message saying my note was ready. I then staggered to the bathroom, where I bled profusely and shed several large clots. I had to clean up my legs afterwards, it was so bad.
The nausea set in at the sight of all the blood and clots. I always thought I could handle gore but I guess I can’t. This isn’t the first time I’ve made myself nauseated from all the blood - or…hmm perhaps it’s the blood loss itself that makes me nauseous, not the sight of it…because I can watch viles of blood be drawn from my arm for tests no problem. And I can watch a bag of blood fill up when I donate - I like to poke at the warm bag after I’m done filling it.
Anyway…
I got back into bed and that’s when the pain set in. So now I’m on Tylenol 3 again and using the laptop as a heating pad in bed. I’m waiting for my man to come home from work to make me some dinner.
I hate being an invalid. I hate my job for harrassing me. I’ve been looking for a new job. This is the first job in all my 20 years of working that has ever mistreated me for having Endometriosis. They will not get away without, at the very least, a slap.