The Story of Us

Get a snack, this one is long....

I guess that this story really goes back as long as I was with the former company (They Who Didn't Work Out (TWDWO). Conveniently that nearly exactly corresponds with how long I've been with my psychiatrist (actually I think it is exactly the same), and she says it started at the beginning.

I was honest about my diagnosis from the day I started. I felt that it was best not to make a big deal about it and so I didn't. I never formally requested accomodations or anything. And for 2 years it was mainly ok. I had the episode of being discriminated against (hmm, don't seem to have ever mentioned that. I'm a contract therapist, meaning nursing homes contract with the companies I work for to place therapists in their buildings for financial reasons. I've never been employed by the place I work, which means that I have less ADA protection. A few years ago a very nasty company I would happily name if it wouldn't locate me kicked me out due to my diagnosis), but TWDWO was actually very supportive with that. The biggest thing that they did was that they were very willing to use guilt trips to get me to do more than I could, or to make me feel I should push myself to behave as though nothing were wrong. Generally though things were easily controlled by threats of written statements from the doctor. They knew written limitations had to be followed and so they would back off.

Eventually I ran into a supervisor who wasn't very nice. She would say I was doing things out of bipolarishness when I truly wasn't. She would disagree with something I was doing or would have done it differently herself (despite being an assistant in a different kind of therapy than I do and therefore not really qualified to judge) and report it to my superiors. This was reflected on my annual review. However, even though my review wasn't very good I was given a large raise, which was basically a buy-off for not suing during the discrimination.

Somewhere in there my company was purchased by a larger, much more money oriented company. The personal touches suddenly weren't there. And suddenly I was being assigned extra work because I wasn't making money at the rate they wanted. This was regardless of the fact that much of my work time that was not making money I did free, on overtime, because I knew it was related to my difficulties with thinking and paperwork. Suddenly I was fighting with supervisors and demanding to know if I needed neuropsychological testing to prove what anyone in our profession should know, that bipolar causes cognitive impairment and therefore I would always work more slowly, but that this didn't mean I couldn't do a fine job. Again, no documentation was needed, I was reassured.

Big mistake.

I was doing fairly well, I thought, so that's when I got into the whole sequence of events of last winter and spring that can be read in the archives. That all started with my agreeing to do a little overtime, which I wasn't really allowed to do but I was doing so well it seemed ok for a few weeks. And then people just kept not listening to me saying I couldn't continue working like that.

When my last assistant left in March I told my supervisor very specifically that I would fill in until I started to feel sick, but the minute I felt sick I had to stop. When I told her that time had come she lied to me and promised me help in a few days. When that didn't happen and I said I couldn't do it she kept ignoring me. And so I felt like if I didn't keep forcing myself to work that my patients would suffer, that Medicare rules would be broken, and that all sorts of things would be my fault. The guilt was tremendous. And my powers of logic just weren't there. There had been one day I had insisted I needed to have off: my friend's wedding. I desperately wanted to go to that wedding. Instead I worked until 11:00 that night. My lying supervisor was at the wedding and never even asked about where I was, despite my empty place at the table she sat at.

During the summer I spoke to her every few weeks per policy. She never expressed any sympathy or caring. I made some arrangements to go back to a very limited workload (paperwork only) and was allowed to go back sooner than I would have been otherwise. She really wanted me to cut to 32 hours but couldn't force me to because that's illegal upon a return from disability. It made me feel pretty worthless though.

Once I went back I found out it was all lies. That part I covered some. What I didn't cover were the huge number of other problems. The assistant issues were horrendous. She refused to help with that and lied about what she was doing. But I had no help to deal with anything. I had a 4 inch stack of paperwork I had been told in the spring to just not do until I had help. Now I had assistants but was still being given no time to do the paperwork. Many other issues came up, and I honestly don't even remember them now, except for her starting to push for me to make more money very soon after I returned, when I was only supposed to do a limited amount of billable stuff anyway.

I knew when I went back that I didn't have a great chance of success with this company. I was commuting 2 1/2 hours/day and that alone was a big factor. The psychiatric environment, while something I love, is very loud and stressful (and loud!) and therefore maybe not the best for me. I knew I was going to have to decide whether this was a healthy job, no matter how much I loved it. I had planned to decide in about a month. It took exactly one month.

After I had decided the company reacted to 3 of us quitting at the same time and ultimately removed the bad manager. I was offered my old job back several times but nobody could take care of the things that were most problematic. Things have gotten better in some ways with the new manager, but as you can tell from my last posts, things have been horrible with the assistant. The stress has been incredible. The time at work has been ridiculous and without any regard for my limits.

So the separation is official and the divorce decree has been issued.

Now to see what the future holds...