Last week the LA Times published an article. It was about me, but more importantly it was about a program that LAUSD has called the Catastrophic Illness Donations program. It allows people who are sick, and run through their sick time, to request donations from coworkers. My neighbor, a Times reporter, found out about the article, and put me in touch with the person writing it. It seems that the article morphed more into being about me than about the program. That was okay, the bottom line message was still the same: there are some great people out there in the world.
The article prompted three local news stations to contact me for interviews. I don't like to be in the spotlight, and I wanted to decline. But, I wanted the story about the generosity of my coworkers to be known, and I guess I wanted there to be a positive piece about teachers for a change. So I agreed to the interviews.
I'm a writer, or maybe I should say author. I know better than to read reviews, especially reviews from John Q Public. If I do read them, I absolutely know that you can never, NEVER, engage people in discussions about what they said. It's just not done. Knowing that, I broke down and read some of the comments on the article that appeared on the Good Morning America site. Wow. Most of them made me chuckle at people's insensitivity, some of the things they said. Unfortunately, a lot of them made me want to sling back with the truth. Stronger minds prevailed, and I eventually stopped reading them.
But, I still want a rebuttal, so here it is.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May of 2013. I'm not the only person who has ever gone through it. Sure, mine was a bit of a rocky road as the diagnosis went from "pre cancerous cells" to "not cancer at all" to "the rarest form of breast cancer" to "common ductal carcinoma in situ" all in the space of a few months. A mastectomy gave the final outcome which was not the rarest of the rare, but rare none-the-less. DCIS with micro-invasive cells that reached my lymph nodes, classified as stage two.
I used some of my bank of sick days. For what it's worth, I had about 80 sick days banked up. Unfortunately, when the news stations asked how many I started with I didn't know and threw out the figure 120. I should have known that was too high. In any case, I don't take sick days ordinarily, mainly because I hate writing lesson plans for subs, and I really hate being out of the classroom. That's not fabrication, it's the truth, I enjoy being with my students. I wasn't saving the days to inflate my salary when I retire. Recovering from surgery is no laughing matter, so I was off from the middle of August with a projected return date of mid September.
Chemo started in early September. At first everything was great, but by the day before I was due to return I experienced a severe reaction, uncommon for the type of chemo I received. I had a neutropenic fever, with chills and a temperature as high as 105. My boss, my husband, and I decided I should take an extended leave of absence as clearly chemo was taking a big toll on my body. My bank of sick days covered me until Winter break.
I returned to work in January, but still had to finish my chemo, so I worked four day weeks, and received half pay on Fridays until the end of February. I finished the six month course of chemo, and was elated! Until the following week when I began to suffer from something that had dogged me all through the last three months of chemo.
This is the part I wanted to keep private, the horrendous things I went through between the end of March and the end of July. This also is the part that was glossed over in the news interviews, or misrepresented for the sake of sensationalism. Many of the interviews made it sound like I was in a nursing home because of the chemo, but that wasn't the case.
Without going into a lot of details, what I thought was constipation turned out to be a bowel obstruction complicated by other abdominal issues that had been growing inside me for years. This lead to a two week hospital stay, and a major surgery. Almost immediately after I got home from that hospital stay a complication with the surgical incision sent me back for another three day stay. I needed treatment from a trained nurse twice a day, and my insurance would only cover a visiting nurse once a day, so into a nursing home I went. Another side product of the surgery went south very quickly in the nursing home at the hands of untrained staff. I ended up wasting away (down to 105 pounds from 159 in January of 2013) in the nursing home for five weeks.
When I returned home from that, more complications kept piling on until we went to the emergency room at midnight on the Saturday before Memorial Day. By then I was a nervous wreck, and would cry at the drop of a hat. Yet another complication, unrelated to any of the others, surfaced. This was a four day stay while we addressed all three of my complications, well four if you include the anxiety I was suffering.
Clearly, I never returned to work that school year. At some point I stopped getting paid all together, but was never in danger of losing my job. And then, because I wasn't getting paid and thus could not contribute toward my health insurance, I lost that. Fortunately, I was transferred to my husband's before I ran out completely. Good thing, since that happened while I was still in the nursing home. This was when we decided to invoke the catastrophic illness donation program, we were out of options.
To say I was overwhelmed by the number of days donated would be an understatement. I truly expected 20 from my husband (the max one person can donate) and then maybe another 20 to 25 from the staff at my school. But to get 154 was simply astounding!
This is the part where I address some of the wacky comments I saw posted to my story. I wasn't banking sick days to inflate my salary. As I said above, I really don't like being out of my classroom. I was also hoping those days would make up for the shortfall of my first year of teaching, where I started with my emergency credential two months after the start of the year. What kind of repercussions should I have faced for being hospitalized for 21 days plus five weeks in a nursing home? I wasn't lying around my house idly eating bon bons. As for the Union stepping in, what were they supposed to do? I was out of sick time. The Union couldn't support me for two and a half months while I wasn't getting paid. And as much as I'd hope that an employer would be sympathetic to the plight of a critically ill employee, I don't fault the school district for any of the actions they took. LAUSD did what they had to do. I feel fortunate I had as many sick days banked as I did, and I am glad they let me roll them over year after year. Teachers only get ten per year, and most normal people go through the bulk of them between their own illnesses, we do work with children after all, and caring for their own young children. I didn't need to take time for my child, he's a grown man.
I wouldn't wish what I went through on my worst enemy. I experienced things I will never be able to unexperience. Kindness and generosity on the part of my coworkers went a long way in helping me through it. Loving support from my husband was truly what kept me going. I would never respond personally to the comments I saw posted to my story, but if any of those people find their way over here, this is the true story of what happened, with all the TMI parts left unspoken.
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