zeptember

The trip to Portland was awesome and I had a wonderful time - I will journal about that as soon as I have time.

However, today sucked. I had customers yelling at me, and my numbers have been suffering (I’m now at tenth place or further back with number of calls I take per day), and then when I got home, I had another message from my dad, wondering why I haven’t called and where I’ve been.

So I called my dad and told him about my weekend. He was not amused. I got a lecture about how I need to be saving money, not spending it. Then he went on like he does EVERY FUCKING TIME I call him about how he talks to my brother EVERY DAY now and he’s SO PROUD of his son again.

His son, my brother, the bad seed.

Then my dad says to me, “unlike my daughter, who seems to have abandoned me.”

I’ve been near tears for the rest of the evening as a result.

The reason is because there’s a history of course. As a kid struggling in junior high school, especially failing math and science, my dad always held up my A-Student brother on a pedestal and wished I could be more of an achiever like him. He got rewards all the time for achieving. I would try and try, and my dad would promise that if I went up a letter grade, he’d reward me too, but he never did. I’d be so proud of my accomplishment and then he’d turn around and tell me I should be doing even better.

I graduated high school with a shitty 2.5 Grade Point Average (GPA) and proceded on to college to please my father. My brother at this time became the bad seed by doing drugs and thusly doing very poorly in high school. I went to live with my father during college and while I worked on my bachelor’s degree, he worked on his master’s degree. We’d both study in his living room looking out over the forest that he’d played in as a child, and then my brother and I also played in as children.
I was esteemed, finally.

Then I had my car accident. My personality changed due to closed head injury. I kept trying though, for dad. I couldn’t not graduate college - I’d disappoint my father and never be held in his esteem again. So I graduated college with a 3.2 GPA on the Dean’s List.
A year later, my dad kicked my good-for-nothing ass out of the house because I wasn’t working for a corporation, yet. Which is odd - I was looking for better work and was hired into a corporation only two months after getting kicked out. Those were very angry, bitter times. It didn’t matter that I found the fucking corporate job which would make dad happy because of retirement plans and medical benefits and pay above minimum wage. None of it mattered.

But I stuck with that ass job for a year.

Then my boyfriend at that time was hired over the phone to come work in California. He invited me. I left the state. My dad was so proud of me for going off to better myself that he gave me his entire bedroom set, living room set, silverware and a lot of his glassware as a housewarming present to take to furnish our new home. This was stuff that I had been around since I was born, and I adored (and still adore) the furniture and glassware.

I was esteemed again, for years, even, because I was earning dotcom wages out in dreamy California. It didn’t matter that I’d come to have over a dozen jobs in the next ten years, dad was proud of me.

My brother on the other hand consistently disappointed my dad. He’d had to take out a second mortgage to bail my brother out of a looming prison sentence. He’d then tried to straighten my brother out by getting him hired into Ford Motor Company to follow in his footsteps (dad worked there for 35 years before retiring). But my brother decided he hated the hell out of the auto industry and corporate bastards and 18 hour days, so he quit to go start up a skateboard shop. Dad disowned him and wrote him out of the will.
My brother’s business had stable times and hard times over the next ten years, and my brother continuously went from pyramid scheme to pyramid scheme on the side while constantly renewing the mortgage on our mom’s house to get extra cash, while raising her rent.

Then, last year, I fell on hard times and for the first time in my entire life, called upon my dad for financial assistance.

Ever since that time, I’ve had constant lectures like I’m 15 years old again, and ironically in the same time period, my brother’s business started to blossom again. My brother asked our dad to join him as a business partner. Dad carefully eyeballed the situation and decided to go for it, and it’s been working out well. So he gushes about how proud he is of his son every time he’s on the phone with me. It makes me ill.
I’m proud that my brother was able to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. I’m just tired of hearing the same line from my father every frickin time he calls, because as is abundantly obvious, I get an emotional trigger from it.

So here I am, freshly back from a lovely weekend in Portland, and have yet to even get enough time to crop all the pictures we took, let alone sit down and write about five days worth of fun, and I’m already depressed as hell and feeling the sting of guilt because of my father. I’m a grown woman for fuck’s sake. I’m entitled to do what I please. I will pay back the goddamned money I borrowed. He had said he didn’t want it until I had ALL of it to pay it back, so I am going to do that when I go home to visit in October.

But no.

I’m a slacker.

Then there’s the whole issue of losing my job next week when I have to take more time off due to pain. Every month could be my last month according to that fucking workplace, and I have my father in my ear telling me to go in even if I have to drag myself in because the job pays the rent.

If I don’t, I’m a failure.

One of these years, I’m going to learn to heal.

There is liberation in a generation dying, painful as it will be to go through.

I am not my father’s generation. I will learn to relish what my generation views as right and important and okay. The guilt will be overcome in time.

So .. the muscle relaxer whack helped along with going to bed with a heating pad on the back of my neck, and my neck/shoulder was all better the next day.     *whew*

Now, on to fun things! I got my hair dyed because I am VAIN and want my red hair to be REDDER.
Truth be told, my red hair is darkening as I get older. Same thing happened to my dad - when he was a kid, he had bright shiny copper hair. By the time he was in his fifties, the hair on his head was dark brown, but the hair on his arms and legs was still copper!

I will dye my hair to get the look back that I had as a kid. However, this time it came out more like a copper penny rather than a piece of copper nugget. Or am I using the term ‘copper’ incorrectly?

Here’s what my hair looked like as a kid:

And here’s what my hair looked like last month (the top of my head is the natural hair growth) - these pix also double as showing off my new dress!

And here’s me with my freshly dyed hair last weekend:

T-minus six days before Convergence!

Came home from work last night and cried again.

I’m at the point now where I want to cry just thinking about having to go back to work the next day.

The good news is that I’ve hired a health counselor to assist me in eating properly, getting the right exercise, and dealing with my stress.

Speaking of exercise, I started exercising again - been lifting 5lb hand weights and doing situps before bed for the past couple of nights on my own - without the health counselor’s advice.

Today at work, my neck locked up *while just sitting there* talking on the phone to a customer. The warm pain dripped down my left shoulder, down my arm, and pooled in my elbow to make it tingle. I popped 600mg Ibuprofen on the spot and began slowly working my posture to try to “pop” the pinched nerve out of its crimp (it’s worked before).

Now I’m on muscle relaxers. Go me!

I’ll uh, be speaking to the health counselor to figure out WTF do do instead of situps and hand weights, since those seem to irritate my bulging disks in my neck. I know she’s not a gym trainer but any advice is a start. My man recommended that instead of situps, I try leg lifts, for example.

I missed work on Wednesday, and my boss was not happy that I was taking another paid day off.

I went in to work on Thursday, due to my father’s voice in my head, “go to work even if you have to crawl in” - because I am afraid of losing my job because I do not have enough money in savings to live off of for even one month should I become unemployed.

At 1:42pm on Thursday, I messaged my boss:

(13:42:12) Me: despite having taken medication twice today, the pain is ramping up again. do you know if [the ticket tracking system] *can* work with a Mac and then i could work on mails from home? otherwise, i don’t know what to tell you if i can’t finish out the day.
(there was mandatory overtime going on on both Thursday and Friday again)

(13:43:50) My boss: I tried using the Mac downstairs and it doesn’t work with it.. lemme talk to [the director of support] and see what we can do

(13:44:24) Me: thx

(13:44:51) My boss: You said you have a dr appt tomorrow?

(13:45:23) Me: yeah unless they give me my test results over the phone today. but so far no call from them. i can reschedule if i have to.

(13:45:50) Me: it’s not related to the current pain issue. it’s ongoing for my back issue (which is preventative, hasn’t been an issue)

(13:47:13) My boss: ahhh.. ok.. that’s fine.. so about the pain issue, is there anything that can be done to prevent it or something that can help?

(13:50:33 - notice the time lapse because i was too stunned to reply) My boss: I just worry because you only have 1/2 day PTO left for this quarter, and you have a big vacation in october that you want to take. It would suck if you used up all of your PTO because you aren’t feeling well.

(13:55:17) Me: there is nothing that can be done to prevent the pain. it’s an incurable disease of the uterine tissue. surgery didn’t help it. hormonal treatment made me psycho and i almost didn’t make it. what’s left is pain management, which means pills and yoga and whatever i can do to ease the pain. the pain is with me. it’s part of my disease.

(13:55:32) Me: the PTO i am not worried about. i will take unpaid time after the PTO expires.

(13:55:45) Me: the only problem lies with whether [the company] wants that.

(13:56:01) Me: [the company] knew i had a health issue that i was going in to surgery for. i was open about it.

(13:56:06) Me: they chose to hire me.
(13:56:13) Me: *shrug*

(14:00:51) My boss: I see. Well, I’ll talk to [the director of support] about the OT situation. Let me know if you need to leave before you can complete your tickets. As for the pain, I’ll talk to [the director of support] about it again, since we don’t want it to effect your job here and we want to accomodate as much as we can. Thanks.

On Friday, the team meetings and one-on-one meetings with the management were re-instituted, and I wondered if I would be fired for having a health issue, just like the book scanning job was going to do with me before I found out about their plan and quit rather than be humiliated.

When I went in to have the one-on-one meeting, my boss said she’d talked my health issues over with the director of support, and she offered that I could use the family leave option to take a month off of work, and i quote, “to heal yourself”.

My jaw dropped. Has this dolt not been listening to me? Did she not plainly see my chat comments on Thursday, in which I wrote very clearly, “it’s an incurable disease”???

I composed myself and told her again. I described the treatments I’ve had to date. I went into detail for the first time about the hormone treatment and how I came this close to being committed involuntarily to a mental institution because of the hormones, and that this is the second time in my life that I’d tried hormone treatment and had the same mental health reaction.
I told my boss that my only options are more surgery and pain management, and I spelled out what pain management means, and told her again that the pain cannot for the most part be prevented.

She told me she’ll have to talk to the director of support again, and she hoped I understood their predicament in this. I replied with, “yes, I know, you have a department to run and absences are intolerable.” She nodded.

Still, she let me know that I’m one of the top three performers in the department, and she told me that they will at least try to accomodate my issue, but told me I must understand if it does not work out. I told her I understood.

So that’s where it’s at, folks. I have no idea, this being an at-will company in an at-will state, if there’d be a lawsuit I could pursue for discrimination. That’s their lovely out.
Besides, filing a lawsuit would mean I WANT to be retained at that fucked company. And trust me, I don’t want to be retained.

My boss told me in so many words that visiting my family in October for two weeks is now out of the question because I’ve used up all my paid time off. I wasn’t troubled by it - I won’t BE at that company come October.

I came home and had a serious talk with my man. We’ll be combing our finances and creating a budget to see if he could support me with a part-time job or no job at all, because I’m tired of going through this HR issue with every company I work for.

Thank the gods for my man - I love him SO much.

George showed up yesterday afternoon, a full week late. This was the first time in many, many years that I wasn’t worried about being pregnant. I knew george was late due to having come off The Pill.

My first word was, “Finally!!”

But then the pain started to set in within the hour.

I let my boss know that I might not be able to finish out the workday. I was wrong - I got through the rest of the workday. I even stayed 45 minutes overtime, in order to empty my inbox and get through all of my escalations, in case I had to miss work the following day due to the pain. I sent an email to the support managers group to let them know I might be out sick the following day.

Soon after sending the mail, the director of Support came by and said, “You can’t afford to be out sick.” He had a slight smile when he said it, so I know at the very least he was half joking. He is known for his joking and teasing. But the timing of his comment was bad, and the comment itself was uncalled for. I wanted to reply with, “Can’t afford meaning financially or meaning job-security-wise?” But alas, he is the director of Support, and my reply would be out of line and I’d be further red-flagged due to attitude problems.

Instead, I replied with comments that the only option left for me is more surgery for my condition. I told the director that it’s very difficult for people around me to accept that I’m sick, because they see me sitting at my desk without a visual sign of malady, talking on the phone in pleasant manner with customers.

The director understood, because he replied with, “But inside, you’re dying.” I nodded. I know he understands all too well - his wife has the same disease as me.

But that doesn’t mean he’ll keep me on as his employee just because he understands my disease. He has a department to run, after all, and I feel like I’m fucking up his numbers by missing work several days per month due to my pain issues and doctor appointments. It’s an at-will company. They can let me go at any time for any reason, “no hard feelings”.

Earlier in the day, out of the blue, my immediate supervisor asked me if I still planned on taking a trip to Portland at the end of this month. I was stunned. I said ‘yes’.
She must have known I was thinking WTF? Of COURSE I still plan to go to Portland! I’ve had this trip planned for months!, because she elaborated on why she asked her question. Apparently, I’m running out of Paid Time Off (PTO) days due to all the time I’ve taken off for pain and doctor appointments.
I told her, “well, if it turns out I have to take time off for pain or other reasons, I’ll take it unpaid if I run out of PTO days.”

She wasn’t happy to hear that, but that’s too bad for her. They act like if I run out of PTO days, I won’t be allowed to take a day off - like I’d be committing some sort of felony. Well fuck them. I have not one but two vacations planned this year that I told them about BEFORE getting hired. If I have to take the time off unpaid, I will. Screw their bullshit. They KNEW I was scheduled for surgery before hiring me. They KNEW about my disease before hiring me.
NOW suddenly it’s a problem for them. Fuck them. I don’t plan to be there, either by their own doing or mine, by the time my second vacation rolls around in October.

When I finally left work for the day, I took an Ibuprofen 600mg pill. I wanted the Tylenol 3 but that would make me too high to drive home.
When I got home, I took a Tylenol 3 for the pain. When my man got home, I vented to him and cried about the insensitivity of management at my job. We talked again about me taking a lower paying job or a part time job closer to home.
Our next step is to go through both of our budgets to see if this really can be worked out for me.

This morning I was awakened at 5am with searing pain and flooding bleeding. Of course I took the day off work. When I called my boss to let her know, she told me she’s going to have to go through my PTO and she may have to dig into my “mental health” days to approve the time off. I told her to do what she needed to do.
Again, WTF. I will take the goddamned day off no matter how you mark it, lady. I’m not well. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I can’t even sit upright in a chair.
I’m typing this journal entry from bed on a laptop, high as a kite on Tylenol 3.

GAH. I’M SO PISSED OFF.

I’m not just pissed at work. I’m pissed at george.
I know that the aim of surgery was to provide me with a diagnosis, not a temporary cure. But I also know I’d hoped for temporary relief as a result of surgery. That little bit of hope crept in and allowed for me to be let down. I feel so let down.

Since surgery though, I’ve felt the need to seek out other people like me. I never bothered to do this before surgery, because I felt like I couldn’t say for sure I have Endo. Now I have the license as it were. The official diagnosis.
I’ve been reading life stories of people on various Endometriosis forums. I’ve cried at the similarities. I’ve become angry for women I don’t even know, who are going through worse injustices with family, partners and workplaces than I’d ever experienced.
I am very lucky to have a man who truly sympathises with me and who is there to care for me when I’m ill. Some women don’t even have that.

I want to create yet another forum. I want to create an entire non-profit organisation built around legal advice, medical articles, the disinformation surrounding hormones, pain meds and old wives tales (”get pregnant, that will cure the Endo!” is STILL being used by doctors today!!!). I’ve been searching the web and so far all I see are support groups, which in and of itself is a good thing. But I don’t see an information center yet. Maybe it’s there and someone else has realised the dream I have. If not, I’m going to have to invest the time and energy into creating this.

I saw my masseuse last Saturday. She said I’m still in a place where I’m letting the disease define me. She is right. She says she doesn’t want me to manage the pain. She wants me to overcome it. She is right.
She suffered for years with bad Endometriosis. She had a hysterectomy, though. I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to take Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). I view that as playing into the male medical establishment - taking their dangerous medications, which cause worse things to happen - like cancer, strokes, blood clots in the legs, and mental health issues. If I can’t even handle the birth control pill without becoming suicidal and homicidal, what makes you think I can handle taking HRT?!?!?

I’m glad she’s able to have recovered. I don’t think I can go the same route she went. Therefore, I’m letting the disease define me.

This makes me very angry. I’m tired of proving to people that things they suggest won’t work for me. I’m tired of being told, “oh just try it” and then my life becomes a worse hell because I’ve “just tried it” to appease non-believers.

I want to say everyone just leave me alone.

I have an incurable disease. I have the right to bitch about it. I have the right to a pity party. I have the right to be sad and mad. I have the right to choose what pain management road I will go down. I have the right to refuse advice. I have the right to do what’s best for me.