Part II

Preface: I realized I need to make a few additional descriptions. There was EM, the Evil Manager, but truly she didn't always seem evil. I was warned about her a lot at the start, but never felt she was against me until the last few months. Then there was the manager, who I'm totally confused about. She made comments as if she were on my side and believed everything EM said was crap, but she never made any effort to call me or anything since all this happened. And I have some suspicion she knew I was going to be fired days before it happened.

After July nothing else was ever said about anything I was doing wrong. We arranged for the OT who saw me through vocational rehab last year to come and talk about what she could suggest. She was away for much of the summer, so this was scheduled for late September.

In mid-September I was off on Tuesday because I was going to a conference on Thursday when I had a call from EM. They had discovered orders missing on some of my patients. I don't know why she called; I think it was just to threaten me some because there certainly wasn't anything I could do over the phone. I went to work on Wednesday knowing I was in trouble. I had no clue how much.

As usual when I got to work I went through the immediate needs, sorts through papers and dealt with them. A paper popped up that should have been shredded weeks ago. Basically my assistant had written an inappropriate note and the manager had told me to shred it. I know now that this is wrong; at the time I thought things that weren't co-signed were not "real". The manager was sitting beside me while I was sorting and when I got up to shred it so did she. I thought nothing of this.

Soon after she called me into the administrator's office and questioned me about why I had done this. I told her the manager had said it was ok, that it was inappropriate, etc. (It should also be noted that this company refused to put many notes of extenuating circumstances into charts, despite that being general medical practice. I know of at least one note of mine that I'm pretty certain was shredded by EM). At that point I was suspended pending investigation. I was told they would call Friday. I would not be able to attend a training I had looked forward to for months and spent a considerable amount of time preparing for.

By Thursday afternoon I had been called and told to report for work on Friday, that things were ok.

On Friday I met with EM and her boss for a long time. I received a "final warning" but things were handled in a way I thought was fairly sympathetic. I left not feeling that bad, all things considered. I was fighting depression from the moment things started and that didn't change, but I thought I had made a mistake.

Things seemed ok again, except that I was sleeping late quite a bit because of the depression and increase in meds. Not terribly late, but late. And I missed day one of meeting with my assistants weekly, but was told "that's ok, start next week". It took about 3 days of the next week to adjust the meds. And then I was back to me.

On Wednesday of the 2nd week the OT from voc. rehab came to talk to us (EM, manager, and me) about what works for me. She talked extensively about adjusting times to meet my needs (again, foreshadowing), and letting me use my own organization. Nobody had issues they brought up about anything and I opened it up for that.

It seemed things would be ok. That was a nice belief for an hour.....