zeptember

I went to work this morning with a bad gut feeling. There was very little pain again, so I went with it. There was also very little bleeding this morning. The 37-mile drive to work was uncomfortable again - I still have the water-balloon sloshy feeling inside.

I was able to work from 8am - 12pm this time before calling it quits due to the return of heavy bleeding, clots, extreme fatigue, dizziness and severe cramping.

Again I had to clean up my blood from the FLOOR every time I used the bathroom. All I’d do was take down my pants to sit on the pot, or rise from the pot after, and spillage was inevitable. Again I felt nauseous from all the bleeding.

On the way out of work, my boss told me to get that doctor’s note for the HR department. I felt like telling her to fuck off, but I know she’s only the messenger. It’s that other manager who started shit yesterday that I want to tell off.

When I got into my car, I sneezed, and filled a pad just like that. I began to cry as a result. How the hell was I going to make it home? But what choice did I have? I certainly didn’t want to stay at work where everyone would be staring at me. Management doesn’t care about me - I feel like they think I’m a big drama queen, causing a scene.

I wept in my car for a few minutes, pulled myself together, and drove home. I felt every bump in the road and today it wasn’t sloshy balloon feeling - it was sharp pains that made me gasp. And I had the return of the anal pain, too. I cried out in pain several times on the way home. I got home and went directly to bed.

Did I mention that I threw out my shoulder again last night while turning over in my sleep?

Yeah, so my right shoulder is hosed. I did this several months ago too, also when stressed out from missing work due to the endo. So now I’m on muscle relaxers on top of the ibuprofen and tylenol 3.

I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow, even though I know that this will all be over by tomorrow. I missed a full day of work due to pain on Monday, a half day yesterday and a half day today. Tomorrow is the fourth day, which most of the time means I’ll be better.

But I’ve just had it with the workplace. I’m so depressed over this. I want to be taken care of right now but there’s no one with money to take me on as a dependent. I just feel like giving up, anyway, and not caring that the bills and rent would pile up immediately.

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.

I’m a 35 year old caucasian female, born to an Appalachian woman and a Polish/Scots/Canadian man.

I was raised in and around Detroit, Michigan within sight/walking distance of factories, auto plants and chemical processing plants.

I grew up in a family where most, if not all of the adults smoked heavily. My mother was a pack-a-day user inside the house. My father was probably half that but tried to keep it outside of his house (my parents divorced when I was four).

I grew up in poverty, so we ate a lot of cheap red meat, government cheese, and refined sugars and breads.

I got my period for the first time when I was fourteen. My ma never prepared me for what to expect, but thankfully my friends and my schooling did, otherwise it might have been a scene right out of Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’. It was bad enough that my ma is Christian Fundamentalist and that the kids in school made fun of me and called me ‘Carrie’ anyway because of my long straight red hair.

The pain associated with my period began within the first year. I used to vomit from the pain and had to miss school because of it.

I asked my ma if she ever had that kind of pain. She said no, but her three sisters and her ma did. My ma told me she used to make fun of her sisters because she didn’t understand what they went through and thought they were faking it. …She never knew that there could be a real problem occurring until I started having the same symptoms.

I began drinking alcohol when I was sixteen. My ma kept Johnny Walker Red in her dresser drawer and I’d swipe a sip every now and then. My friend introduced me to cheap vodka and orange juice and we drank screwdrivers whenever we could get ahold of some.

When I turned nineteen, my friends and I began to go to Canada to get drunk every weekend. I developed a fondness for rum and coke. Rum is made from sugar. Coke is made from corn syrup. Sticky sweet toxicity.

When I was twenty-five in 1996, I saw a gynecologist about the severe monthly pain. He told me I hit every symptom in the book for Endometriosis, and told me I should have a laparoscopy to get an official diagnosis. At the time, I was too afraid of surgery, so I put it off for awhile. When I did decide I was ready, I was told I could get the procedure done in Spring of 1997.

That’s when my boyfriend at the time got hired to work in California, and asked me to go with him. I’d have six weeks downtime I was told post-op. That ran into the packing and moving, so I again rescheduled.

Due to having shitty jobs that provided shitty HMO health coverage in California, it took ten more years before I’d finally get the surgery to diagnose me.

In that time, I’ve been a social alcoholic since about my late sophomore year in college, ironically after I was accused of being alcoholic by the doctor who treated me for pancreatitis in 1993. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that. I still love rum best and drink it straight or mixed in fresh fruity stuff a la tiki bar.

I became “ovo-lacto-pesco vegetarian” in 1999 but continued to eat sweets. The pain never stopped. I found out I have gluten intolerance in 2006 so I went back to eating meat to give myself more food options.

In 2002, I interviewed my maternal grandmother and two of my aunts about their painful periods. I was given very similar stories to what I go through. Grandma used to be bedridden for a week at a time!! My grandma had nine kids and the pain never let up. She unfortunately couldn’t recall what menopause was like. My aunts had anywhere from two to four kids and their pain never went away, either. They had trouble with menopause but told me they thought it was normal, so I don’t know for sure. They’re Appalachian - they don’t like to give too much personal detail about stuff like that.

This is my background environment - all of the above contributes to my illness. Even though it’s largely hereditary in my case, other factors exacerbated over time and continue to do so.

Where do I go from here? Will I ever see relief?

I fluctuate between accepting my fate, being bitter at my ma for not knowing better and continuing the genetic line, and being diligent at trying to find a workaround to the pain.

I had an offer to go up to Lake Tahoe last weekend with a friend and some of her other friends. I turned her down because I feared george would show up and I’d be bedridden in a sleeping bag on a hard floor with all these people I’ve never met before. How embarrassing that would have been.

Turns out, george was a day late. Instead of arriving Sunday, he arrived on Monday. Now, I did have symptoms and aggravating back and neck pain all weekend preceding george, and I required a massage by Sunday night (hooray for my man!) to help loosen the back. George showed up seven hours later.

It’s just another instance of george denying me any fun.

Today I probably could have gotten through half the workday, but I didn’t feel like chancing it. The guilt always sets in when I do that, even though it turns out for the best. I’m about to be on round two of pain meds (which is good, considering I tend to do three to four rounds on a bad day), but I’ve been staving it off to see how much more of this I can take. I’ve come to fear and loathe pain pills. They too have messed up my body.

I had an entire day to work with, but all I could do was sleep for most of it. I bitch about this often - there’s nothing I can do about the fact that I will have downtime, but it never stops me from hating it.

Blah. Just took more meds.

I called in sick before the pain really sets in.

George showed up this morning. I woke around 5am with some pain and bleeding.

I’ve been VERY tired and have gone around the entire morning (5:30 - 7:30) with my eyes half closed, staggering about the house trying to wake up. Usually I’m not this tired - I know it’s just george.

I did my usual routine - made my breakfast and lunch for the day, did my hair, got dressed. But I just kept falling back to sleep. Sleep walking, I swear.
But through all this, the pain didn’t really set in. I kept thinking, “Wait For It….” but the pain never ramped up. This is good!!!

However, I was eating my breakfast when the clock turned 7am. I’m supposed to leave BY 7am at the latest. Otherwise, I’m late to work. I already have two strikes against me for tardiness. Strike three puts me in the red and they make a decision on whether or not to fire me.

Then again, this week is chopping block week, anywa….OH! I didn’t tell you!!!

On Friday during the one-on-one meeting with my boss, she let slip that re-organisation is in the air. She tried to be vague but I said, “come on, I sit right outside the Director’s office, and he and the other head cheeses have been having pow-wows in there all week. I already know a re-org is coming.” My boss sighed, then perked up and said, “did you hear anything?”
I laughed and said no. She slumped and said “darn”.
Too funny!

She *thinks* our team won’t be affected and she is *pretty sure* I won’t personally be affected by the coming changes. Then she went over my weekly stats - I was number six out of twenty-five reps last week - in the top ten, taking most of the calls and answering more emails than many others…again.

BWAHAHAHAHA! I’M NUMBER SIX!!! BE SEEING YOU!

*ahem*

Couldn’t resist.

I’m feeling somewhat guilty for calling in when I’m not in dying pain, but at the same time, I have a gut feeling that the worst is to arrive just around the next couple of hours, and I do NOT want to be at work when this happens.

Plus, I just don’t want to be at work. :p

8:44am Edit: Well here we are. The pain has set in, as well as the freezing chills to add to the misery. Time for heating pad and drugs.