Link to previous post in series - Part 3
So we left off last time around late summer 2021. One of my supportive bosses had just turned in her notice, and my symptoms were getting worse by the day. I had just found a doctor to see me about the long-haul, and had made an appointment, but I had to wait til mid-September for that first appointment. As such, I had decided to start talking to HR about my condition. This proved to be a wise move, because very few of you know what really happened after that, but now I am ready to fill you in.
I had begun to realize at this point that it was becoming impossible to live on my own and take care of myself. I couldn’t keep up with anything. When my fish died, it took me about two weeks to even pitch it and the water. My cat’s litter was getting scooped maybe every 3 weeks. Grocery shopping was only possible via delivery. I couldn’t cook anything, so I was microwaving or ordering out almost every meal. Cleaning my apartment was out of the question and it was a nightmare.
Laundry…listen I had been spoiling myself with laundry prior to all of this and was sending it out to a laundry service. (Cause I didn’t have an in-unit washer and dryer and hated the laundry room.) But I had always carried all my laundry down to the lobby when they picked it up, and carried it back up when they dropped it off. Now, I relied solely on the doormen at my building to carry it for me (thank God for my doormen during this time. They brought everything up and down for me and brought it right to my door every time.)
I was putting every single ounce of energy I had into work. And at this point that wasn’t saying much. I was struggling A LOT and relying on a lot of help from co-workers that I wouldn’t have before. The two days a week I was supposed to go into the office were agony, and some weeks I only did one. I knew my work was slipping so much, and that I would not be able to keep up at this pace for much longer.
I began thinking that if I could get some help with home life tasks, then maybe I could just focus solely on work and that might make things a bit easier. I was considering the idea of temporarily moving home with my parents (5 hours away), and trying to work remotely. I thought, “If I can move home for 6-8 months and get help with everything, and only have to put energy into work, and do it completely remotely and save some energy with not going into the office, then maybe I can recover from this and go back and be good as new!”
However, my company was being ridiculous about remote work. They supposedly weren’t allowing anyone to do it. Except they were allowing some people to do it. There was some unspoken, unstructured system in place for them to decide who was allowed to work remotely and who wasn’t. Some people would ask and be told “no”. Others would ask and be told “yes”. And there didn’t seem to be any distinguishing reasons that one could and one couldn’t. There was no formal policy, and it was the wild wild west. Someone that held my position in another department was allowed to, but that didn’t mean I would be allowed to.
As such, I went in prepared to ask for that as a possibility, but also knowing I could easily be denied. Therefore, I also went in ready to discuss the idea of taking FMLA (which is the Family and Medical Leave Act). This would be in the case of not being able to move home and work remotely, I would stay in Chicago but take some time off to see specialists and rest and try to get better. I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. I figured, “I have taken on a lot of extra unpaid work to cover a handful of maternity leaves in my 6 years here, maybe there is a good FMLA policy that can help me in my time of need.”
HR informed me that our FMLA policy was unpaid, and that I could take up to a certain number of unpaid weeks off for medical necessity, and still have my job when I came back. I can’t remember how many weeks it was, but it was measly, and I would have no income during those few weeks. This is pretty standard for large companies, but it shouldn’t be. I am fully in favor of, and applaud, the wonderful paid maternity leave packages we had. And I have done my fair share of covering them. Now that I had a medically necessary reason to take a leave, I would get a few weeks and no money. As a single woman in Chicago living on my own, I couldn’t afford any unpaid weeks. As such, my only option became moving home with my parents, and hopefully working remotely for a while.
HR gave me no definitive answers for whether or not I could move home and work remotely temporarily. And they didn’t have any clear answers on why some people could do it and others couldn’t. However, I figured I had a better reason than most, so hopefully I had a shot. So, they formally documented this request and the issues I was having. They required medical documentation, so I set about getting it. I would be seeing the new doctor soon, and would start collecting the documents needed to make my case for this.
Then, it was time for my new boss to start. Whenever you are admin and have a new starter on your team, you have to do a SHIT TON of work to get your new starter in the system and set up with everything they will need when they start. And that goes double if the new starter is a VP, which mine was. I was still covering my other boss’ maternity leave in full force, and was trying to make all of the necessary accommodations for this other new boss, AND I WAS GETTING SICKER BY THE DAY.
I somehow managed it, and then in walked my new boss….. He would give Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada a run for her money. Day one he came in “diva guns” blazing and proceeded to make my life an absolute living hell. I’ve met few people in my life more narcissistic and difficult. He was NOT understanding about my health condition and limitations. He sent me outrageous demands all day long, and sometimes in the evenings too. He would get upset if I was in a meeting and couldn’t respond to his demands within seconds. He was insisting on me fulfilling personal tasks for him. He flat out lied about me on 3 occasions to people, one of them being our company’s president. (He claimed I cancelled his flight when I didn’t touch it. I called the travel company to find out what happened, and they had phone records of him calling and cancelling the flight himself. Then he sent aggressive and accusatory emails to me and his boss about me cancelling his flight for no reason. Then I responded with the travel agent’s call log saying he did it, and he never responded or brought it up again).
I don’t want to spend this whole article going in to all the ways this man made my life a living hell, but I hope from the above you can at least recognize that I was dealing with someone who, under normal circumstances, I would not be able to live up to. Under my current health condition, there was just no way to do this. I don’t know why he had it out for me from the get-go. I worked for that company for over 6 years with nothing but incredibly positive working relationships with 8 different bosses and always received satisfactory reviews. He came in the door ready to boot me out and hire someone he already knew for the position.
At this point, I decided, ok, I am definitely going to move home. I am going to try to convince the company to let me work remotely and then after I move home I will just start looking for another job and quit this one as soon as I can. I knew I needed to leave this now toxic job, but I was too sick to try to do everything I needed to do to get moved back home AND look for a new job in the meantime. So, I figured one thing at a time. Get home, then look for a new job. I can deal with a few more months of this guy…
He started near the end of August I believe, and my first doctor appointment was mid-September. It was just a telehealth video visit. I explained to the doctor my whole story, and she confirmed that it was highly likely that it had been Covid in Feb 2020. And she confirmed that this sounded exactly like long-haul Covid.
Then she told me that almost nothing was known about long-haul Covid, and truly nothing was known about how to treat it. As such, she was going to treat each symptom separately as its own thing. She began giving me a list of tests I needed to go have done. Here was the kicker: their long-haul clinic was full and backed up for months. Every test she wanted me to have, I wouldn’t be able to get at her establishment for months, so she told me to find my own places to have each one done. She wasn’t even going to help me find other places to be referred to. I was on my own. And she would see me for an in-person follow-up in a month.
With the below zero energy I had, I set about trying to find places to do all these things. The other kicker was that a lot of these tests weren’t to help with the long-haul, but they were to rule out other things. Getting my eye-sight tested to rule out that being the cause of migraines. Getting tested for ADD to rule out my brain fog. Getting my blood pressure tested to rule out my dizziness being attributed to that.
And it was not as easy as you think to get all of that stuff tested. In a post-Covid world, no pharmacies had blood pressure machines anymore. And I was warned against buying an at-home one because those always had inaccurate readings. I tried to go to walk-in clinics just to have my BP taken and no one would do it unless I needed the appointment for another reason. I literally could not get anyone anywhere to take my BP until I had my one month follow-up with her. Just the effort and time and energy I put into trying to get my BP taken had worn me out completely.
Eye sight - I went to the Lens Crafters down the block and they did an eye test with the eye doctor there - vision was 20/20. As I thought it was. Great use of my time and $40 copay to rule out bad eyesight for migraines (even though I already knew I had great eyesight).
The neuro work up she wanted done that would test my memory and attention and whatnot was really tricky. She told me that most psychiatrists give this test. I thought, “oh, this should be easy, I already have a psychiatrist.” I called her office, and they didn’t do this kind of test. They referred me to someone else who did. I reached out to them and I would be able to get in for that testing in mid-November - so 2 months out.
In the meantime, on a Friday morning, I received a last minute Friday afternoon meeting scheduled with my new boss and HR. I knew what this meant. Or, at least I thought I did. I couldn’t figure out what I could have possibly done that was grounds for being fired, but that was all this call could mean.
I get on the call and am given a very scripted speech about how they are changing my role. As you know, I had been covering a mat leave for one of my bosses in one department, and he was my other boss in another department. I had always split my time between departments my whole time there. However, for the past year, the other department was a role I actually really liked and wanted to move my career towards. They had let me create a corporate mental health program from scratch, and begun training me in an area that I was interested in and would try to work my way over to fully as time went on. My old boss was very supportive of this, and shared me with the other dept. very well. My new boss had a different agenda.
I was told that my role was changing into one that could no longer work for this other department at all. I was no longer allowed to run my mental health program. I was no longer able to work on any of the projects with that department. And now that my other boss was back from maternity leave, and I had already covered it (therefore allowing the company to not have to hire anyone to cover that role and instead give me and other team members a lot of extra work), there was no need for me on that team any longer. The way it was explained to me, was as if now that the maternity leave had been covered, there was no use for me. (My good boss assured me that her and the team had never thought or felt that way, and that they were very upset HR had phrased it that way to me.)
But, basically, I had been used up. I had killed myself for the last 6 months covering this leave while I was insanely sick, and trying to prove myself so that we could start to transition my career this direction, only for a new boss who had been there less than a month to take it all away from me.
I was then told that in addition to being his assistant, I would also have to assist 2 other VPs too. So, now I would be assisting 3 people. This was an impossible ask because he wasn’t allowing me time to do anything for anyone else, so even in tip top shape I wouldn’t have been able to accommodate 3 VPs when he already demanded every second of my time. Then I was given a laundry list of new tasks that would be added to my job description, on top of a job that was already insanely busy.
After being given this speech, they said, “You can either accept this new role, or you can decline and we will give you a severance package.” My first question was had they taken my health issues into consideration and did they understand that I wasn’t currently capable of meeting those requirements? I asked them how this factored in to my pending medical leave request to work remotely. HR immediately, curtly, told me that these were separate issues and one had nothing to do with the other. I was given the weekend to think it over, and they wanted an answer on Monday.
The silver lining of their offer was that if I did chose to leave and accept severance, that I didn’t have to leave right away. I could work for awhile longer. This was ideal for me, because I couldn’t afford to live in Chicago and not be working. It was going to take me some time to get out of my apartment and moved 5 hours away. I wasn’t exactly able to get this whole apartment all packed up and taken care of by myself in a matter of a couple weeks. Also, there was the matter of this little pesky thing called a “lease”….
After I got off the phone with them, I called my dad just sobbing and explained the situation. Obviously my decision was a no brainer. I wanted to leave this job anyways. I needed to move home. I needed money. And I needed not to be able to work for awhile so I could get better. While what they did was insanely shitty, and they handled it even shittier, I couldn’t deny that I had just been given what I really needed. A paid way out.
But after having given so much of myself to this company over the past 6+ years, being such a loyal employee, and going so above and beyond on so many occasions, I sure did feel used up and spat out. A place that had once been such a positive experience for me, was now a place I despised with my entire being. That wasn’t the note I wanted to leave on.
Monday morning, I met with my boss and HR and said “I do not accept this new role. I would like to accept the severance package. Can I please have two months to finish up here so that I have adequate time to get my apartment packed up and moved back home at the end of November?” They agreed to this. And I ended the call.
You will never convince me that this wasn’t my new boss’ way of getting rid of me. I had already started my medical leave process with HR, and there were no grounds to fire me. They knew they would have been in trouble if they let me go because I was struggling to keep up with the job under my health conditions. So they created this insane job description that they knew I couldn’t keep up with. Even if I hadn’t been sick, I couldn’t have. They knew I wouldn’t accept it, or that if I did I wouldn’t pass muster and that could be grounds for letting me go. My new boss didn’t want to deal with my health issues. My company didn’t want to deal with my health issues. I could cover all the leaves in the world, but they wouldn’t cover one for me.
Fine. I got paid to leave. Now the severance package was by no means great. It was 3 months pay (very heavily taxed though) and 6 months COBRA (insurance). I had been there almost 6.5 years, so that was not a great package considering how big and rich this company was. But, I figured since I would be living at home with minimal bills that I could stretch 3 months pay to 6 months. And I would have COBRA for 6 months. And I was absolutely convinced that after 6 months of not working, that I would be completely healed and better. So, now that finances and time off was all set, it was time to break my lease.
The lease was the next hurdle, and boy oh boy was it a nightmare…
Ugh, im sorry about all this shity shitty shittiness!