The beginning

I do have a video for everyone! I made it yesterday, but I want to edit it first. I'll try to put it up over the weekend. Right now I'm pretty wiped out. See, we're moving in a couple of months, and so I have to go through the garage, which had many things that hadn't been touched since we moved four years ago. It'll all be worth it,though, because we're getting our first house :). But let's move onto the story.

In spring 2003, I was working at a call center at the corporate office for a local auto glass repair and replacement chain. I had been working there since May of 2002. Earlier in the year I had gotten bronchitis, and I remembered my boss not really believing it till I brought in the doctor note. I had taken some time off over the course of the past year, of course, and mostly that time was used for sick days or personal days that came up unexpectedly, but I never used up all of my p.t.o. I think it was sort of a case of "what, another thing?" because the previous fall I had ovarian cysts, and I recently had taken off a day when I had to rush my rabbit to the vet, who did, unfortunately, pass away later that day. Still, I was a hard worker, and I was usually a top performer, even being name a top CSR for the month of March.

Things were a little rough at that time. Because the company was facing financial hardship, they started laying off people. One of my coworkers had been fired. My roommate was just deployed to Iraq, so I had to replace furniture and pay for everything at the apartment myself for a short time before my boyfriend (now husband) could move in and help me out.

April 3, 2003. I put this down as the start date in my LiveJournal, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. I had remembered that I was quite happy that my voice went out over the weekend so I could rest and get better by the next week.

April 5, 2003. This date sticks out very well in my head. It was a Saturday, just like it was this year. I was just starting a four day weekend that extended into Tuesday, as that was my 22nd birthday. One morning, my boyfriend and I woke up, and we were talking, and my voice...just kind of stopped working. It was fine at first, but then it started to crack a little bit, and I started to speak in a whisper. I thought that was kind of strange, but I thought maybe resting my voice would help. I think it was that Sunday when I had my birthday party. I have a thing for pirates, and that was the theme of the party, which was before (albeit just slightly) the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. We had Long John Silver's on pirate-themed plates and we watched pirate-themed movies.

At the party, I had to explain to my family and friends about my voice and how I didn't really want to talk at the time. As I said before, my friend Shane recommended lemon tea, which he still does to this day. But this felt different. My throat didn't hurt like it did when I had a sore throat from a virus in the past. It didn't even hurt like it does like when you scream a lot at a concert. There was some pain after trying to force myself to talk in a whisper, but the problem itself was not painful.

I went back to work, and it took very little time for me to progress from talking normally on the phone to talking in a whisper. A visit to urgent care, or at the very least, an urgent clinic visit, was done, and it was determined that had just overused my voice. I thought this was strange, as it wasn't slowly going away over the course of time, and I really had no problems speaking just a few days prior. I just woke up and it was gone.

As time went on, though, it was soon realized that I did not have something that could be cured by resting alone. I had various tests done by several physicians, and I went to a Dean Care speech therapist, who started me on some exercises. He assured me that these exercises would help and that I could get over this condition. I saw him just two or three times total during this time period.

Work was getting very nasty. Coworkers of mine were saying I was making up the voice thing to get out of work. Why they thought this, I have no idea, because why would I want to work less when I have to pay double for things? Eventually, my hours were cut down to about half in the call center, and then I worked in the mailroom for a while along with some odd jobs, mostly data entry work. The mailroom was nice because I didn't really have to talk to anybody, and it was relatively low stress. I remember having a meeting with my boss and crying, saying I didn't understand why people were saying these things about me. She said that they've never had anyone experience that before, so it was hard for them to understand what was going on. She was basically making excuses for their catty behavior.

Even though I was just filling in with the mailroom, I wanted to work there. Of course, the day I was going to see if I could just switch there was the same day that they hired a temp.

Things proceeded to get even worse with my coworkers. I could hear them saying things about me while I was on the phone. I had to constantly bring in doctor's notes on my status, and I was seeing doctors at least weekly for the aforementioned tests and speech therapy. At one point, my boss's boss pulled a huge fit about not being able to have some things faxed to her. This was the beginning of HIPAA officially being in effect, and so they couldn't send health documents to open printers or faxes.

My coworkers were horrible, my hours were cut back. I finally quit at the end of May 2003 after my boss said that she could not give me five minutes to rest my voice and do exercises every hour. I remember that one day I had been cleaning up the stuff around my cubicle, but I was not officially gone yet. The next day when I came in I found the rest of my stuff in the trash.


That's it for now. Look for part 2 to focus more on my personal feelings about this situation. I'll see about getting some media up, too.