Promises, Promises and the Blood Clot
I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. Sitting on the side of the bed I noticed my left hand was numb. Not the numb from having slept with your hand under the pillow all night; that numb you can fix by getting the blood flowing with a few pumps of your fingers. This was a heavy and persistent numb. I shook out my hand, opened and closed my fist. Dead limb numb. Blinding headache. Thoughts blurred.
I had to get up and go to work, my job was in jeopardy.
Time was like a stretched-out elastic; it wouldn’t snap into place. I had a shower. Hand still numb. Pulling my underwear on took a life time. Hooking up my bra was a herculean task. Somehow, I managed to get dressed.
I struggled to open my purse. I pulled a bus ticket from my wallet and it was gone. Where was it? I didn’t have the time to figure it out. Had to get to work. I pulled out several more bus tickets and they too disappeared. Finally, I managed to hold on to one and I walked the two blocks to the bus stop. The sun blazed down and my head pounded. I kept going. I was used to coping.
I fixed my gaze, up the street, to the top of the hill, willing the bus to appear. I broke down the tasks in my head. Wait for the bus. Get on the bus. Sit down. I could sit for the whole ride. Get off the bus. It stopped right outside my office. Go up in the elevator. All of it would work if the bus just arrived. So tired. Left hand numb. Brain foggy.
Proving myself meant showing up.
It was my bureaucratic dream job – higher level and no staff. My new boss made a promise he didn’t have the authority to keep. I asked him to put it in writing; he wouldn’t. Hollow commitments dribbled from his managerial lips, he promised, promised, promised that he would make me permanent. Maybe he saw it as a carrot, but it was all stick.
I’d slogged down a yellow brick road of toxicity for this job. Things had been so tense at my old nightmare job, that it was either the disgruntled and angry ‘Been There Done That’ guy who was going out the third-floor window or it was me. I’d invented the morning walking hello which consisted of ambling through the office to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and saying hello to each staff member. It was friendly but keep walking because if you stop you’ll hear all their never-ending grievances.
Employees needed to know why they kept working for the federal public service and needed to find their own motivation (and ultimately the will to live). We talked a lot on the management team about how to motivate staff. I wanted to address the difficulties of motivating staff who hated their jobs, didn’t want to be there, and were stuck in a box like a mime pushing the walls. How hard it was to motivate employees who’d been in the system for decades and how the rah-rah motivational approach not only didn’t work, but was mocked. Employees who had so much anger from being passed over for jobs, shunned, and harassed that their baggage was not carry-on to be placed neatly in the overhead bin, it needed to be stowed, out of sight in cargo, along with all the other oversized crates of crap that no one wanted to deal with. Every day was a slippery slope of keeping an even keel in the workplace between daily bureaucratic frustrations and historic organizational rubbish employees clung to like it was their identity and were pinging off of each other like monkeys in cages throwing feces. I tamped down the simmering anger so that someone didn’t go postal.
That’s not what the higher-ups wanted to hear.
They wanted to hear pizza lunch Fridays. Colour coordinated Wednesdays. Doughnuts at staff meetings. And once a quarter, crazy pants days.
By the time I got to work, I didn’t feel better, and I couldn’t function. I tried to email my boss, who was in another city, to tell him I was going home sick. My fingers didn’t work; they smashed the keyboard. I typed in his last name, repeatedly. I got it wrong, repeatedly. I tried a couple of different ways to have his name pop up in the To: box. None of them worked. The admin woman sent the email.
Back at home I saw the evidence: I had only opened the right side of the curtains and bus tickets were strewn across the floor. That’s where they all went. Fatigue trumped worry; I collapsed into bed and slept for three hours.
A few days ago, my new manager had called to say that he could staff the position permanently and offered it to me. They wanted to keep me and I wanted to stay. He’d kept his promise and my faith in bureaucracy was restored. Within hours he’d reneged on his promise. Human Resources staff said he couldn’t offer me the job without another competition. The original competition consisted of a test, presentation to the hiring board, an interview and extensive reference checks. It took months to complete. But because it was characterized as a two-year assignment instead of a permanent position, he had to do another process.
It wasn’t fair to that one imaginary potential employee who didn’t apply because they may have been interested in a permanent position rather than an assignment. It was a high-level job so the competition had to be international; any Canadian anywhere in the world (including the space station) could apply.
Promise made, promise kept for five minutes and promise broken. I was pissed off. Fighting HR to hire me was, in his words, “Not a hill I want to die on” which, I soon found out, was an oft-used expression in this department. What would happen to my two-year assignment if I didn’t win the competition? They would send me back. My old job had been filled even though the director promised me, and put that promise in writing, that he’d hold it open. Where would that leave me if I didn’t win the second competition and didn’t have my old job to go back to? I’d been happy for a total of two months before all the promises fell down upon my head.
I had to re-compete for the position I had won.
My dream job was slipping away. I’d met the challenge and sherpa’d a lot of files up the bureaucratic Mount Everest. I was back to my keener self, going a hundred miles an hour while the rest of the staff explained why it couldn’t be done. I won a cutesy ‘hitting the ground running’ award at a morale building meeting where I didn’t yet understand why everyone was so sour. I felt alive. I sloughed off my overcoat of pent-up organizational anger and was a sliver of my old self: open, funny, and supportive. I brought plants into the office for the first time in a decade.
When I woke up I felt much better but thought, wow, weird symptoms. I’ve never had that before. I called the nurse in my cardiologist’s office and she told me I likely had a TIA – threw a blood clot. Mini stroke. She told me to go straight to Emergency.
I had a bowl of soup first and then went. I figured it was going to be a long day.
Later that night, I tried to call work from the phone on the wall of the hospital. I couldn’t remember the number.
“Do you remember your name?” asked the nurse.
I didn’t remember the number because I had only recently started working there. Would I be sent back to my old job because of illness? I called a colleague from another department and told her I’d thrown a blood clot.
“Does that mean you’ve had a stroke?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“That happened to my dad,” she said.
Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Blue hospital gown. Eyes tired beyond my age.
The symptoms were gone by now. Wheeled in and out of Emergency for tests. Telling my story to one doctor after another. Sister and best friend waiting with me, lots of down time, sister suggests to best friend, who’s a stay-at-home mom, that she should sell sex toys from her living room. Best friend, who wouldn’t say the word vagina if a ten-pound baby was passing though hers, looked visibly uncomfortable. Me, saying it’s okay for them to leave. Middle of the night the nurse woke me to see the expert stroke doctor.
New patient brought into Emergency and put in the bed directly across from me. He got his paycheque Friday night and went to the liquor store to buy enough booze to kill himself because he “didn’t have a fucking reason to live.” Now it was 2:00 a.m. Wednesday. He’d drunk dialed his sister to say good-bye and the neighbours broke down the door. He was powerfully thirsty. Fighting with the nurses and orderlies to get out of bed, he wanted to go home … he wasn’t going anywhere.
I stayed overnight for more tests. Was in a ward with old people – stroke victims. My elderly hospital roommate wanted to die. Doctors, psychiatrist, social worker, and a priest lined up to talk to her. She snapped at the priest, “This is your line of work – make it happen – I want to die.” My other elderly roommate was dying. A meeting with his family took place next to me with only a thin cotton curtain for privacy.
I wanted to live. To thrive. To continue in my new job. To escape a nightmare job that was, quite literally, killing me.
Was my mini stroke because of stress? Dehydration? My complex heart defect that includes arrhythmia? Who knows? Let’s just say wading in the toxic sludge of the public service didn’t help.
Back at the dream job my openness shut. Kindness was truncated to the camaraderie necessary to build rapport and learn what I needed to win the job (again).
I focused my fear of all things medical on what I could control. I juggled multiple medical issues – blood thinners, bruising, new regime of blood tests every few days, every week, every two weeks, diagnostic tests – was this my life now? I worked during the day and studied at night for the new competition. I had to secure my permanent exit from my old workplace. The competition took six months to complete and did include several international candidates and a current employee who thought the job should be hers.
I won one of the two new positions.
I watched several people hired with promises of promotion. Each and every promise was broken. Each and every one of those employees left the department, more bitter than when they’d arrived. Unkept promises, broken trust, and inept management was the slow-moving blood to the dead limb of bureaucracy.
“Promises, Promises and the Blood Clot” is an excerpt from Jan’s unpublished memoir, Too Jaded to be Bitter: The Memoir of a Burnt-Out Bureaucrat
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About the Author
Jan Markley is the author of two novels for young readers as well as several Creative Nonfiction pieces. Jan is a manuscript Sensitivity Reader for The Alexandra Writers Centre Society (AWCS) to provide a disability lens through lived experience. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Calgary. “Promises, Promises and the Blood Clot” is an excerpt from Jan’s unpublished memoir, Too Jaded to be Bitter: The Memoir of a Burnt-Out Bureaucrat. Jan lives in Calgary, Alberta in the shadow of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.