I Finally Had “The Talk” With My Boss
Nobody wants to hire a chronically ill person.
Roughly 176 million women in the world have the same fear: they might get fired for having endometriosis.
Since my early teens, I’ve lived with the fact that there would always be several days per month during which I simply wouldn’t be able to function. With the bloodbath that was my menstruation always came a high fever, severe cramping, nausea, vomiting, and extreme fatigue. My parents took me to every gynecologist in town and they all eventually said that there was nothing wrong with me. According to them, the cyclical hell I was going through was “simply the way things were”. I had no choice but to learn to accept it. I would be taken out of school once the flare ups started each month, put in bed and stuffed with painkillers until the storm in my body settled. When I was younger, this meant that there would be parties I’d miss, trips I wouldn’t go to, exams I would have to re-sit. In my twenties, this posed a new layer of problems — I would have to miss shifts at work.
How do I explain this, the question plagued me starting with my very first part-time job. Nobody wants to hire a person that will go AWOL every month, I thought to myself. Most of all, I feared that no one would believe the fact that my period left me bedridden. I had no explanation — no diagnosis, no medical proof. My problem was invisible to the world and an embarrassing thing to talk about. My only solution was to pray that my period wouldn’t coincide with my shifts. I anxiously calculated everything around my unstable cycle and kept my secret from each and every employer.
In my mid-20s I discovered, after over a decade of being dismissed by various medical professionals, that I have endometriosis — a chronic inflammatory illness. I also discovered that I’m not alone in my struggle — every 10th human female on this planet is estimated to suffer from this mysterious illness. I call it ‘mysterious’ because science hasn’t been able to (or interested in) discovering its exact origins or a cure for it yet. Science says: here’s a bunch of painkillers, here’s a diet and exercise plan, here are your surgical option which are statistically unlikely to cure you but might ease your symptoms. As for the rest of it — well, you’re a big girl, you’ll just have to suck it up.
Giving my illness a name didn’t cure me, but it did help me in one way: I discovered that there were millions of women out there having the same fears and the same struggles as I did. In fact, research shows that women with endometriosis are a high risk group for developing anxiety and clinical depression. The reason behind this is the highly stressful uncertainty that comes with having endometriosis: there’s not only very little information about the condition made available to patients, but your everyday life entirely revolves around it.
Living with chronic pain and not knowing exactly when it’s going to reach its unbearable peak and render you useless is a huge stressor. International research has shown that a high degree of stress, especially stress over how the condition affects work productivity and personal relationships, is one of the top symptoms patients consider to be lowering their quality of life. In fact, it turns out that women are more stressed out about missing work than they are about the constant, nagging pelvic pain!
Learning all of this made me feel a sense of comradery with a community of women that label themselves endo warriors (metaphorically, but also through participation in actual support groups!). But this didn’t erase my problem. My problem, in fact, only got bigger once I graduated and entered the workforce full time. Eventually, people would notice. Eventually, I would have to explain myself. This thought kept eating away at me.
The New Girl Can’t Be the Sick Girl
I’ve been at my new workplace for seven months, and so far I love it. I’ve also managed to hide my endometriosis for the full seven months. I got lucky — my period seemed to hit the weekends and my days off. I had an agonizing flare that caused me to call in sick only once. Seeing as the pandemic was at its prime, nobody questioned my decision not to come in. A couple of months later it hit again at a really bad time — there was an event at work, I had a role to play, but my uterus said No. I had to call in sick at the last moment.
No one made a big deal about it — other than myself. I had this horrible feeling that people would gossip about me bailing on the event because I didn’t feel like coming outside of office hours, or that the colleagues I liked would start to think of me as irresponsible and unprofessional. Most of all, I feared that my boss would think that I was abusing their leniency, flexibility and trust. I decided it was time we had The Talk.
I paced around my room the night before, convincing myself that I was in the right. I had medical records to prove I wasn’t making anything up. I had an excellent gynecologist following my case who could back me up any time in case I needed to take official sick leave. I had told the female colleague I share the office with during one of our bonding chats — she could confirm it, prove I didn’t just come up with it. Even though I rationally knew that I was in the right and that it wasn’t my fault I had a debilitating illness, I felt guilty at the same time. Nobody wants to hire a chronically ill person. Nobody wants to deal with a woman who can’t handle her period. And even though I had nothing but good experiences with my boss, it wouldn’t be a shocker if they decided that having “just a bad period” was no excuse to miss work.
I arrived at our scheduled meeting nervous.
I sat down and tried to speak as calmly as I could. I asked if they had heard about endometriosis. Just like most people who don’t suffer from it (and a lot that do!), they hadn’t. I explained it as briefly as I could, stressing the fact that it’s simply something that I cannot control. I explained that this was the reason why I had suddenly been a no-show at the event, and emphasized how important it was to me that they knew that my reasons are a medical condition that I have no issue with proving with official paperwork. I was lucky — luckier than most. It turned out I had no reason to be stressed or worried. My boss reassured me that they completely understood. As is usually the case, there followed a personal story about family members who have similar issues. I was encouraged to take care of myself and put my health first.
I left the meeting feeling a ton lighter. My secret was out. And it was ok. I no longer have to calculate, lie or dread the day I get fired for not showing up.
But the thing is — I still do. Despite all my knowledge, activism, support, and approval on both a personal and professional front, I still feel guilty. Somehow, it feels like not being able to “handle my period” is my fault. It’s a message that has been drilled into me since the age of 13, when I first went to seek help. It’s the message incompetent doctor after doctor kept reinforcing when they discarded me as exaggerating and making my symptoms up. This is the idea that was installed in me, imprinted into my consciousness deeper and deeper each time a doctor would send me home telling me there was nothing wrong with me while I was crumbling under the weight of fatigue and gut-wrenching spasms. It’s an idea that’s very difficult to unlearn.
My story is not new or unique in any way. In fact, my story is such a cliché that it’s frightening. In dialogue with several thousands of people affected by endometriosis as part of the Citizen Endo project, researchers have found that each and every story started the same: doctors didn’t believe in the pain their patients were complaining about. Each and every one of the stories I read about the long and humiliating path to diagnosis was eerily similar to my own.
My story had a happy ending. I can sit at my laptop now and type about how courageous I was to “come forward” to my boss and fight for my right to keep a job even though I’m chronically ill. The problem is, though, that this part of my story is the part that’s rare.
