Stuff, Stuff, Everywhere Stuff

Apologies to whoever wrote and/or sang "Signs."

Well, first of all, I'm honestly, sincerely not well. I have this cyst thing that popped up on my back, and is now approximately the size of a plum. I've also had a fever and chills for the past three days. Fun. Especially since I have no health insurance, no paid time off, and no money. An office visit to my doctor would cost the same as my electric bill, and the metering company won't accept late payments or make payment arrangements. My friend Amy (thanks Amy!) offered to pay my electric bill, but I just can't accept that (Sorry). Call it pride, call it whatever you want, but I've always been a fairly self-reliant person, mostly because I've had to be. Yeah, that's probably my fault, but it is who I am and I don't think I can change.

I don't like the fact that I can't seem to accept help from people. I guess I've just been rebuffed so much when I have asked for help that I've somehow taught myself to turn down help even when it is offered. It is my major weakness, I suppose, but I don't know how to fix it.

Well, if I still don't feel good tomorrow, I guess I'll go to the emergency room. Web MD said that's what I should do anyhow when I checked my symptoms. They are obliged to treat everyone, even without insurance. I just hate the idea of horribly expensive ER bills for what is probably an in-office procedure. The way things are going right now, it'll take me forever to pay them off.



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Things at work are...weird. I think I'll share the whole story with you.

L, one of the women I work with (she is...or was...the manager of telephone nurse consultants), decided to have breast augmentation surgery. Now I know, from her very loud phone call, that she was already a D cup. I'm not accustomed to looking at other women't chests, but she seemed pretty...ample... to me. But she decided she wanted to go larger and have 750 cc implants put in. Her previous implants (did I mention that this was her second enlargement?) were 375 cc's, so these were twice as big. Yeah. She had a week of vacation time, so she took that to have the surgery.

Well, she had complications. The surgeon had to stretch her skin so tight to accomodate the implant that she had trouble closing the incision. One of her incisions keeps opening. She's been out additional days on bedrest twice, and is most likely going out again starting today.

Well G, the big boss isn't happy about that at all. She wasn't happy she took time off to have the surgery, and she isn't happy about all this time she's had to take subsequently. L is out of PTO, and since this was a cosmetic procedure, it isn't covered under short term disability, even though these are complications.

Well (I seem to have a thing for starting sentences like that tonight - forgive me. It's hard to be creative when you are shaking), G called L into her office on Tuesday. She stripped her of her title, and L now reports to one of the people she previously managed. L asked me that day if G had said anything to me about hiring me as a regular employee. I told her know, then she went and talked with K, my immediate supervisor (sorta) in whispers for a while. I didn't know about the whole title thing then, so I started to get paranoid.

L is really upset, and thinks that if she has to go on bed rest again, she won't have a job to come back to, which is probably true. I feel really bad for her, but it's really hard for me to have sympathy when, to an extent, she brought this on herself and I'm sitting there shivering and hurting. I'm trying, though.

This whole thing has made me really paranoid, though. If that can happen to her, I'm actually afraid to miss work since I'm just a temp. It's what kept me from going to the ER last night when my temp hit 103 and I couldn't stop shaking.

I'll write more about that manager another time, and the rest of the stuff I wanted to write about. I need to lay down now. My temp is back up to 101.