Should I Be Calling a Lawyer?

25 with osteoarthritis isn't very normal. And well, very often I get treated like a 25 year old who doesn't have the analgous hip of a 65 year old. Nor am I often give the patience needed for someone who's constantly having hip spasms, muscle aches and sharp pains. This was proven to me 3 days after my 25th birthday. I was fired from my first job.

Everything started about 6 months in when I was told that i'd passed the probitionary period and would be given my promised benefits. What the small company didn't foresee was that my 30+ surgical record and unclassifyable disability didn't work the same way with health insurance than their spotless records did. They gave me a 90 dollar raise and told me to go buy my own insurance instead. I in turn, was sent rejection letters from some companies or offers of 500+ monthly premiums for basic hmo plans.

I trudge along without insurance, do my best to stay healthy and in shape (and did, lost 60 pounds though simple diet and basic exercise - like taking longer walking routes to and from work) and attempt to stay mentally able to do my job as a both a creative graphic designer, organized project manager, customer service rep AND front-end web developer. At times i would juggle up to 10 projects in a single day.

Well, near the end of June ... i started to feel extremely fatigued. I was having difficulty keeping my eyes open, i had no appetite, my sides hurt when I walked and the general body aches were sometimes unbearable. My sister, a resident surgeon, told me it sounded a lot like mono. This was later proven to me when a few of my friends alerted me to their diagnosed cases of mono. I couldn't go to a doctor to prove mine. I could barely afford to make ends meet to begin with and it would also cost me time at work and not help my current situation of being absolutely swamped.

I worked through it. It was hard. My bosses often laughed at my claims of having mono - showing no concern for that fact that their employee with a Graphic Design degree at their Graphic Design company was struggling to keep things together. One day, i could barely keep my head up and my boss found me with tears crawling down my face.

I was written up the next day and warned that if i didn't pull things together. I'd be let go.

Well, that was at the height of my mono... it persisted. I continued to work through it - never once being offered a day off (despite hearing my boss offer them to the other coworkers when they'd as much as sneeze). My workload continued to increase. More and more projects, more and more responsibilites far beyond what was listed in my job description.

I finally decided that I needed to take a day off - and took two days off for my birthday weekend. My first days off in months. And well, two days after I returned... I was comfronted in the morning. Given my things and told to leave. Same Day. No time to transition my projects to the other designers, say farewell to my co-workers, collect or back up my e-mails from the computer. I was told to leave. I was told that I was being fired for my poor organizational skills and failure to come up with enough ideas for them. I was told I was being fired with cause and that I would not be able to collect unemployement.