What Happens If They Don’t Do The Right Thing?

Last week, I wrote about some things a former employer did – or rather, didn’t do – that violated Reasonable Accommodation laws that protect people with medical conditions. Repercussions from such misbehavior can be far-reaching and harmful.

Upon starting a truly horrible project with a hostile work environment in a dangerous location, the first thing to go was my exercise regimen. I held on for about a month, losing sleep to exercise since I no longer had time with my 1.5 hour commute each way. I didn’t feel it much at first, but my blood sugars started to rise.

The next thing to go was my meal plan. I no longer had time to carefully plan meals and calculate nutritional information. At first, I used frozen and prepared meals to stay on track, but that became expensive and a nutritional challenge. There is no way to track what’s in prepared food  any more than there is to track what’s in restaurant food.

Those two things together slowly eroded my blood sugar control, but I was too tired to keep up with monitoring more and increasing my doses of insulin. After about six months, I began to gain weight. With the weight gain came increased insulin resistance, which called for greater and greater doses of insulin.

I no longer understood my body’s relationship with my conditions.

Once I crossed that particular line, it became a game of tag. I chased after high blood sugars with high insulin doses, confused why I was so high. Or not since I wasn’t controlling my food intake. Every once in a while I would catch myself -- exercise a few times in a week, bring my blood sugars down for a few days – and gain 10 pounds in the process (which happens when an out-of-control diabetic brings themselves under control).

Twenty months of this rollercoaster can be damaging physically and mentally, but the impacts might not show up immediately. Here’s what has manifested in that short time: Since I have caught myself three or four times in my endless game of tag, I have gained 35 pounds, which means my damaged systems have to work much harder for basic functionality. The insulin I need every day has increased by over 100%. I have little spells of vertigo and nausea often enough to notice. I have had to quadruple my blood pressure medication. I have lost 25% of what kidney function I had. I hope that the lab results are temporary, maybe due to dehydration, but I don’t know.

As I struggle to gain the advantage over my own body, I reach for tools that might help: the latest technological advances in diabetes care, meditation, and journaling how I feel during the day. But these are external tools. I have to figure out how to fix the inside with inside tools.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t been this out-of-control for 20 years. It’s scary and depressing. But I keep coming back to the simple fact that this likely wouldn’t have happened if my former employer had followed the law.

But perhaps I can help you avoid my mistakes.

Take Action to Protect Yourself:

• Speak up. Know that you are allowed to ask for what you need, and that your employer can’t share your medical information without your express permission.
• Know your rights. Employers with more than 15 employees must comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which is where Reasonable Accommodations (RA) laws come from.
• Call for help. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the government agency that oversees RA violations. If you have made reasonable accommodations requests to an employer that refuses to act, you can call their hotline.
• Consult an attorney. If you’re not sure whether you are have a case, call an employment attorney. Some offer a free initial consultation, but many will charge an hourly fee (No retainer should be required unless you hire the attorney to pursue a lawsuit.)

Do The Right Thing

Last week, I introduced Reasonable Accommodation and outlined a little about how I was affected when how my former employer – let’s call them Stumble, Bumble, and Fall Consulting, or SBF -- failed to follow the law. Now I will go into more detail about what happened and what SBF could have done to be a responsible, accommodating employer.

First, let me give you the details of the situation. I am a contractor for the Federal government. For the first time in a decade with SBF, I went more than a week or so without doing client work. It’s a difficult situation, but a company as big as SBF has reserves to handle situations like mine. Finally, a project came along where SBF was a subcontractor to a smaller contracting company. I had no experience in the kind of work they needed, but it was client work and I wasn’t given a choice on whether to accept it.

I knew right away that it was going to be a bad situation. First, it was in one of the worst neighborhoods in Washington. There was no safe place to park, and in the four months I was on the project, there were four shootings in and around the premises where I parked, including the shooting of a pregnant teenager the weekend before I started. It was high stress even getting to the office, and that kind of stress affects blood sugar.

Additionally, I was commuting for a minimum of three hours/day with no flextime and no telework, which meant I no longer had time to exercise and plan meals as required for optimum care of diabetes.

Last, and worst, SBF was aware that the project I was walking into – as a task lead! – was a longstanding hostile work environment. The prime contractor had let people go for being pregnant and for being male, both illegal. The only people on that contract from SBF were there because, like me, they hadn’t had a project for a while. SBF knew they should have broken the contract long before I got there, but they didn’t. In the end, the prime contractor bullied me, and I was told I had to sit there and take it, without defending myself my team, or expressing concerns about how I could effectively do my job with the restrictions the prime contractor placed on us. This added to my stress level and contributed to the loss of control of my condition I am still struggling with.

From bad to worse

Most of us as chronic and autoimmune patients are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. As such, we are entitled to certain accommodations for our conditions. If our conditions get in the way of us performing our duties or, in my case, if our duties negatively impact our conditions, our employers must take measures (within reason) to adjust the situation so we can do our jobs and effectively look after our conditions. See below for a description of actions I took, actions SBF took, and actions SBF should have taken under the law.

I told my bosses at SBF before I started that the project was unsustainable, and that the HR department should look for another project as if I still didn’t have one.

• What SBF did: Nothing.
• What SBF should have done: Not made me take the project.

I repeatedly called and emailed my SBF bosses to keep them appraised of the situation and letting them know how the project was affecting my conditions. I begged them to take me off that project.

• What SBF did: Nothing, including not keeping me on HR’s radar for a new project.
• What SBF should have done: Arranged flextime or telework options, taken me off the project, or found me other work.

After three weeks, I found a promising new project that solved stress, commuting, and lack of experience issues.

• What SBF did: Barred me from taking the project because it was short-term (with the potential of becoming permanent), even though I clearly accepted the risk of being laid off if the project didn’t become permanent.
• What SBF should have done: Allowed me to take the project or found me another one.

In the end, the project and prime contractor wreaked such havoc with my diabetes regimen, my doctor had to write a note setting an end date to my participation on the project. SBF asked me multiple times to stay on since they couldn’t find anyone to fill such an awful position, but that letter at least protected me when the team I had worked with for a decade wouldn’t. Two weeks after I left the bad project, I started at the project I had found for myself, as it had turned into a permanent position.

This situation was so bad, I consulted an employment attorney, who, after an initial evaluation, thought I might have a legal case against SBF. I thought about pursuing it, but honestly, I don’t have the time, energy, or money to fund a lawsuit, at least right now. But I also haven’t completely abandoned the possibility, although I don’t know what the statute of limitations is.

Since then, I did really well on the project I found, and managed to stay with them when I left SBF. But I continue to struggle medically and haven’t really started to recover from the immense toll that unfortunate project took on my health. Next week, I will detail the medical fallout and why it is so dangerous for us when employers ignore their legal obligations to us.

Are You Seeing The Forest or The Tree?

I’ve wanted to talk about reasonable accommodation for a long time, but I had to leave my former employer before I felt comfortable doing that. It turns out not every employer takes the definition of “reasonable accommodation” to heart.

Reasonable accommodation says that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, employers can’t discriminate against you because of a qualified medical condition. The definition of disability is opaque. Suffice it to say most, if not all of us in the chronic and autoimmune community are covered.

But what does being covered by reasonable accommodation actually mean?

The ADA says that if our conditions get in the way of us performing our duties, employers must make “reasonable accommodations” for us. This can include special office furniture, flexible schedules/telework, or even altering duties. For over a decade I had informal accommodation, mostly in the form of telework to make up for doctors’ appointments that would have eaten through all my vacation time. I am a contractor, so I made arrangements with my client and company staff on the project. No one seemed to care as long as I got my work done, which I did.

That changed in the summer of 2016. The details of the situation are for the next posts, but this situation turned out to be so detrimental to my health that my doctor wrote a note saying I could no longer be on that project. Nineteen months later, I still haven’t recovered.

My former employer’s failure to comply with reasonable accommodation laws caused more damage than I thought, and not just physically. One of the people responsible for the decision to keep me in the bad situation was someone I’d worked with closely for nearly a decade. I trusted him, which is not something I do easily or often.

When this colleague blocked my escape from the situation, it felt like betrayal, and man did that hurt. But instead of allowing myself to be sad and hurt, I did what they told me to and let righteous indignation sweep in to fill the vacuum where the hurt and sadness should have been. I built a bubble to protect myself from feeling what I didn’t want to. I was afraid that if I felt that, I would fall down a rabbit hole and not be able to climb out.

So, I built my bubble, and in doing so, I kept out all the good stuff, too: the excitement of a new job and good, impactful work; the satisfaction of maintaining this blog and connecting with some amazing people; and the support and plain old happiness I get from simply spending time in the company of people I love and trust. The mental effort it takes to maintain a protective bubble like that is massive. That’s the vicious circle I should have been looking at.

I have maintained my bubble since I started that awful project, and when my colleague, who was also my boss, couldn’t even be bothered to say, “Sorry to hear you’re leaving. Good luck in your new job,” a couple of months ago, it made it worse. After a decade there was not even an attempt at common decency, so I withdrew even more. Without the good to balance the bad, I felt more and more exhausted, making me less and less inclined to attend to my own health needs.

Now that I know what to look for, it will be easier to let go of my bubble, especially now that I don’t work for that company anymore. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. I will have to allow myself to feel things I don’t want to feel and just be ok with it – my version of “leaning in.” That might take a while.

While I am not in a good place right now, I am not in a state of mind meriting a formal diagnosis, but obviously, my mental health has had a major effect on me physically, and it has derailed me for now. I believe it was actually dangerous for a while, with my diabetes out of control, and the resulting weight gain, which makes everything worse physically and metabolically. The one thing I did right, even during the worst of it, was go back to my therapist. I had been doing so well before that, I hadn’t needed treatment. But I needed it then. It felt like a lifeline.

Everyone has issues, sometimes more serious than other times. This is why it’s so important to have someone who can help -- a good therapist, access to a hotline (link to hotline listing), or someone who is trained to help you out of the more serious issues. I may have gone years trying to hold up my bubble, fighting with myself over what got my limited energy. Now it’s time to make improving my mental health a priority, and with it will come the energy I need to put myself back together physically. Or at least it will be a big step in the right direction.