Lord its been so long! I had not realized until I pulled this site up that my last post was about Scruffy. I read it through and cried all over again.
I remembered now that my intent was to get through that post then continue with what had been happening over the summer, which is part of what has lead me to where I am now, facing the next summer.
So last year, in May, as my previous posts reflect, I was sent to the Kennesaw office at The LPA Group, my current (for now at least) job, to fill in for Trisha Rushing, the Admin at that office, while she was to be married and go on her honeymoon.
The post I did on May 13th was my first day in the office, this office where I still am, because she never came back.
I wish I could say they got married and she decided to quit work, have babies and lived happily ever after, but I cant.
I'm here for one reason only, and thats because Trisha died in September.
Its a really long story, and really better told by the reporter that happened to pick it up for the AJC, but the summary is that on the day of her wedding, feeling very sick and with a terrible migraine, Trisha finally managed to make it down the isle to marry Jim Duguay. They sat in chairs at the end of the isle because she was too weak to stand, and shortly after the ceremony she was rushed tot he hospital where she stopped breathing. They revived her, and stabilized her, then based on her symptoms gave her an MRI which revealed a tumor on the base of her brain stem.
Jim and Trisha spent the next week in the hospital on their "honeymoon", waiting for her to be well enough to have surgery to remove it, knowing the risks and discussing the decisions that would need to be made should the worst happen and she not wake up, or be left in a vegetative state.
As it turned out, the worst did happen. She never woke up, and it was determined that even if she did she would be a vegetable. In July they pulled her feeding tube. She survived an excruciating 45 (or more) days without food, and finally passed away.
Needless to say the whole company was so very sad for her, Jim and their families. It was a truly horrible and shocking thing. One so young and beautiful to die so suddenly of a creeping monster that apparently had been hiding in her head since childhood.
In any case, and not to move on too soon from this without noting the pure sadness of it, thats how I came to be permanently up in the Kennesaw office.
I was truthfully very hard at first to be happy about my "lucky" break, seeing that someone had to die for it to happen, but I couldn't help it. I loved it up there. It was my saving grace in a job that was never going to be a money maker, or a real career like others have.
I thought, well, at least I'm happy with coming to work every day. Thats something.
The economy failing more and more, jobs getting more and more scarce, yeah, I felt lucky.
Just when I really began to settle in to my new situation I had a slap of reality. James, the one man in this office that apparently doesn't like me, (and according to the others in the office didn't care much for Trisha either), apparently has been out to cut off my head ever since I walked through the door, and it was made known that I would be here even semi-permanently.
He even told a girl that works here, Kelly, that he wanted me to get fired so he could replace me with a "hot college girl".
All of this information came out after I had called in sick in November, for the first time since the previous April (when I had my long bout with depression and just didn't care about coming to work anymore).
It was a Tuesday, and I had a headache. I called in. No problem I thought. Half way through the day though James called me, leaving me a message saying they had not heard from me and wanted to see if I was OK.
I called him back right away and said, no, I had left him a message that morning. He said he had gotten a message but it was garbled and he couldn't understand it. Hmmmm....and someone was missing but it didn't occur to him that it might have been ME?
Anyway, I think, OK, well its cleared up.
So I come in to work the next day. Allen, Kelly and Shawn are here, (who I all like very much, and who apparently like me as well), and Shawn asks, "what happened to you yesterday?", I say, "didn't James tell you?", Shawn replies, "no, he said you had never called in!".
So then I explain to them what happened, and Kelly pipes in, "oh, yes, I heard him on the phone, HE CALLED "HR" AND TALKED TO NIKKI HEWETT!!"
I freeze. Nikki Hewett is the bitch that lied to Mike Reiter last year when I had my trouble in April, and on the phone told me a totally different policy than existed, only to have me call her out on it in June of last year and end up in a conference call with her and Mike, in which I ended up looking like an idiot!
So then I get nervous, and ask, "Why would James want to rat me out to HR especially when this was a legit absence?". Kelly pipes up, "Oh hes been trying to get rid of you since June."
She proceeds to explain the things she has either overheard or been told by him directly and I freak out.
My bubble is popped and I realize I'm not safe after all.
After further discussion with all the guys in the office, Kelly and I decide to talk to Harold. Harold is the big boss, and actually used to be Trishas' boss, which explains why James could never get rid of her either.
So I make arrangements to talk to Harold that day. We meet, I tell him straight up whats been going on, and he tells me, "well, why don't you come work for me". and I feel safe again. He gets the changes made right away and James is up my butt being nice to me again.
Time goes by, nothing bad, nothing great. A LOT less work to do most of the time though, and I do notice that the admin work I could be doing is being done a lot of times by engineers or James himself. To keep from giving me billable hours I assume, but it doesn't occur to me that this will actually have an effect on me now that I'm under Harolds management.
Turns out my head has been on the block all along.
The new company, Baker, that bought out LPA, is doing restructuring. Cutting the fat as it were. So 2 weeks ago Harold calls me in the conference room...WITH James. I know something is terribly wrong. I can feel it.
I didn't get fired, but I did get my hours cut. I'm down to 4 days a week. This is directly due to HR seeing that I have so few billable hours, which is totally the fault of James, and the other engineers in the Norcross office the year before that kept telling me to change my hours to ADMIN time even when it was billable to a job.
I still wonder if this has been a long term plan to let me go, although I guess if they really wanted to they would have in April of 2010 when I had missed so much work.
I was crazy upset at first, but I'm trying to look at it in a positive way. An opportunity to do something else. Maybe take a class. Something to further my career, or even change it.
My parents are supporting me, of course, and I feel bad about that too, but to be honest, I like having a 4 day work week. And so far, well, its only been 2 weeks, but I haven't made a move to do anything else. I will though. Actually my first real day was last Friday, and I had stuff to do all day so it was not wasted.
Also, I have a change coming, which might be using that day for other things, and thats what Im trying to get to in catching all this up.
Ive made the decision to get bypass surgery.
Yesterday I went to my GP, getting my height and weight recorded and faxed to Emory Bariatric center, which is the first step I had to take to get the process rolling. Today I will call them to follow up and hopefully make my first appointment there with the nutritionist and surgeon. My insurance company requires me to be under the supervision of a nutritionist and Dr for 6 months in order to approve the surgery, so if everything goes well, and if I'm still employed (which honestly is a huge fear), I hope to have the surgery in January right after New Years.
I still don't know which version of it I will end up with because I feel like I need to talk directly to the surgeons about it more, and maybe some people who have had it too, and I don't want to go through all this to have a minimal surgery thats not going to be effective in the end. That being said, I think I'm going to go for the full montey, and get the bypass, not the banding.
I haven't told a lot of people yet. I'm embarrassed about it and want to keep it as quiet as possible. I told my sister Elise at the pool Saturday, and shes very supportive. I haven't told Beth yet because although I know she will SAY shes supportive, shes not.
I told Sam over chat a week ago that I was starting the process, and hes also really supportive.
I think my biggest shock so far was yesterday when I went to my regular DR to get the process started and when I told her what my plans were she said GOOD! She said it so fast I was shocked. I thought she would tell me the risks or something, but no, she went into how my life would change for the better, and was all for it.
So here I go. I feel like its the final frontier. I mean I'm turning 41 in about 6 weeks and my life is spinning out of control in so many ways. I just think if I'm ever going to do this, now is the time. I really have nothing to lose at this point.
So my goal is to get back into the blog and keep track of everything that goes on.
My journey so to speak.
Here we go!
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