Changes, changes....

I am not good at dealing with changes. My strategy is to hide under the covers and wait until it is over.

So what is this post about? Restructuring. Per wikipedia,  "the act of reorganizing the legal, ownership, operational, or other structures of a company for the purpose of making it more profitable, or better organized for its present needs." In practice, it means jobs are lost.

I angrily wave my fist at the fates for letting me accept a job that was bound to be restructured less than a year after I started. I'm still standing, albeit I am now a part-timer. And the Sword of Damocles is still hanging above my head.

It is not a problem from an economic standpoint, but very frustrating career wise. What is my thing? I am not a mother, I am not a career woman. What else is there? On my days off, I scrub and mop and walk the dog and run errands and take the car to service. I go to the gym, I take German classes. I play the piano. I knit. I read. I watch documentaries. I put up with suggestions about going to grad school, volunteering, getting a second job, finding a better one, learning a new hobbie, fostering, adopting, rescuing another dog.

I don't want suggestions. I just want to be able to answer, when I get asked what I do, that I actually do something significant.

The non-mom at the workplace

A new job means signing  up for new benefits. I will not be enjoying many of them, like discount tickets to kiddie stuff, discounts for daycare, the possibility of adding children to my medical insurance, money towards IVF, money towards adoption... wait, that one is still a possibility, right?

It's OK. Nothing is being taken away from me. Reading about it brings me some sadness, but that's nobody's fault.

What I can't stand, though, is the assumption that I can take just any shift or work overtime on a short notice. They can't really ask if I have kids or not, but they have probably guessed by now that I don't. I had to hear how X, Y and Z have flexible schedules in spite of them being parents of young kids... Well good for them. It still does not mean that I have to be as flexible as they are. Why does that make me feel selfish?

I've been there before, putting up with students who never left the lab on time because they had not finished their work. I had to stay late and deal with their rudeness and clean up after them, while my co-worker left on time because she had to pick up her kid from daycare. Nobody cared if I had tickets to the opera or plans for dinner. And I was never paid for overtime.

Anyway. My schedule is weird but I'll survive. And if the need arises, I hope they don't pressure me too much into volunteering for extra work. At least here I am guaranteed overtime pay.

More gratuitous Schadenfreude

This time around I don't feel so bad, because the object of my Schadenfreude is  a total stranger. I had coffee recently with a friend, one of my former co-workers from the job I quit two years ago. I never regretted that decision, but it must be said that by the time I left, my supervisor had decided to cut my load. The person who was hired in my stead had it sooooo much easier... until now, that is. Another worker was fired, things have been rearranged and the load on that position is almost as bad as when I left. So as much as I pity the person who has to perform miracles in just 40 hours per week, I feel quite smug about having left.

Meanwhile, I am leaving my current job. It's been almost a year and a half and I was still under contract, feeling much like a horse with a carrot tied to its head. So I'm happy I'm leaving, even if it makes me look like a person who keeps changing jobs. I just wanted a job with benefits,  like paid vacation, a 401 K and health insurance. By the way, the new job's insurance covers IVF. So nice of them, but no thanks!

For the first time in almost 10 years I am starting a new job without any pregnancy worries. You know what I'm talking about: When you're just married (and you don't know you're infertile) you worry you'll get pregnant right after you start working, even if you're not trying to, and look like an idiot. And later, when you are doing ART but you don't want people to know at work, its hard to explain all those doctor visits, and deal with all the side effects while staying functional.

This topic still causes a little tension with the spouse, but otherwise the fact that we are not trying to get pregnant anymore gives me a sense of peace and freedom... the freedom to commit to a schedule and not have to worry about cycling, checking my ovaries, mood swings, bloating, swollen legs... And more importantly, no more heartbreaking.

Poop post II

It turns out that poop girl was an expensive hire, who boasts several letters after her name. She also hails from a faraway land where, I understand, toilets look like this:

Regardless, she has been in the US for quite some time, and she should know how to use a sitting toilet by now.

Someone must have spoken to her. Or maybe she took pity on the cleaning lady, because she is now using toilet seat covers and more or less wiping the dirty surfaces. She still does a lousy job, especially given her poor aim. I hesitated about posting this, but I felt the need to share this horrible picture. You should not click on it if you're queasy.

I decided not to raise the issue with human resources because a) I am shy and lazy, and b) we are moving and, and since she is not in my team, I will not have to worry about her anymore.

I remember how stressed out  I was in July about having to move to a different cubicle. I guess I was very depressed back then and every stupid thing made me freak out.

Now we are moving everything in the lab to an entirely different building, and I could not be happier.

Poop post

I warned you. If you don't like reading about poop, stop reading now.

Still here? OK, here we go. I work in a mostly male environment. The amount of women using the lady's room can be counted with the fingers of one hand. The cleaning lady used to tell me ours was the cleanest bathroom in the whole building.

Not anymore. The new arrival seems a normal person, but clearly she has some problems using 21st century plumbing. She apparently tries to eliminate her body waste while avoiding any contact with the toilet seat. If said body waste reaches its final destination, or ends up decorating the toilet seat or the floor, does not seem to concern her. As a result, we've been downgraded to the most disgusting bathroom in the building.

There are three stalls, and by the end of the day all three have been embellished with either solid or liquid waste. The cleaning lady sorrowfully tells me that she's complained to her supervisor and the response was that well, tough luck. Bathrooms get dirty. If she does not like it she can go find another job.

All I told her is that cleaning has more merit than dirtying. I don't think I made her feel any better.

Meanwhile, I've no idea what to do (other than going to the bathroom in the lobby). The other women using the toilet must be as disgusted and shocked as I am, especially since until recently we had a pristine, immaculate bathroom, and now we have a pigsty. Still, we're ignoring the elephant in the bathroom.

Any ideas?

My convoluted career path in the US

More than five years ago, I moved to California from North Carolina. I was happy for the spouse, who had received a really good job offer, but I did not want to leave. I had a wonderful job that I loved, surrounded by nice co-workers that I could actually call friends. Not only that, but under the new conditions, my employment authorization was going to be voided: Students' spouses can work, but workers' spouses cannot. My employer in North Carolina would have undoubtedly kept me under my own work visa. I had been with them for a year and they were very happy to have me... but I was moving to another state.

Moving to California meant starting from zero, in a very competitive job market, where employers preferred hiring someone with a green card rather than wait for an applicant that needed to get a work visa after an offer was made.

Unbelievably, it happened. Not immediately, but eventually someone in California wanted to hire me. Of course, the union protested that the employer could not make a job offer if I was not authorized to work in the US. In turn, without a job offer, I could not request a work visa. The argument went back and forth for about five months... By then I had let go. I had been engaging in all sorts of cultural, recreational and educational activities, and, more importantly, going through my first serious steps in ART.

I had resigned myself to be a homemaker when the offer letter came in. I was able to get my work visa and finally begin working in California.

I had wanted for so long to be able to work again, especially in my area of expertise, that I tolerated too many things that were out of whack from the very beginning, and then got much worse. The job was far from ideal, but it took me more than two years to admit it. Still, without that job experience, I probably would not have been hired in my current job. Also, it is during those two years that I finally got a green card.

So what's the best job I've ever had in the US? My last job in North Carolina comes to mind. In addition to working with really nice people, I also used my lab skills and my language skills, and I was helping save people's lives, which always made me feel good even after really crappy days. I actually cried when I left.

But after infertility, I am glad I am not working there anymore. Not only was I surrounded by pregnant women,  I was actually present during more than a hundred vaginal deliveries and C-sections. I shudder to think of myself doing that again.

And you know what? I am very happy to be in Northern California, where immigrants and mixed marriages are quite common, where all sorts of languages are spoken in public places, and where the weather is never too hot or too cold. There's the earthquake risk and the housing prices, but those are the only two disadvantages that come to my mind right now.

I have to admit that, in spite of all the shitty stuff in my life, it does seem that someone out there is looking after me.

Let my ovaries decide

Last week I was approached by two different recruiters. One position is in the ideal company I should be working for, given my training. Still, the commute would be horrible because it's 30 miles away from where I live. It's also a terrible company to work for. There is a lot of job insecurity, and employees are always disgruntled and complain about long hours.

The other position is also related to my background, though not so much. It would be closer to home, about 6.5 miles away. I don't know much about how happy their employees are, but I do know that there were horrible layoffs recently.

Finally, there is the company I am working for under contract, and which might hire me permanently after three months. It's seven miles away. It's a Fortune 500 company, they're doing pretty well and everybody I know would love to work for them. The thing is, what I am doing is only partly related to my training and experience. Let's say that 50% of my work requires my knowledge and experience, but the other 50% of the time I do lab monkey work. As in, "¡Monkey, press the button! ¡Blow the whistle!". So I cannot say I get a warm feeling of professional accomplishment everyday. There is a huge part of my expertise that has no application whatsoever in this place.

I do get to knit at work, between pressing buttons and blowing whistles. I am about to finish my third pair of socks. In contrast, in my last job I was busy all the time and could hardly afford bathroom breaks. Maybe that's why I ended up with kidney stones. So this is an improvement, professional accomplishments be damned.

The thing is, if I were them, I would split my position in half. I would keep the biochemist part-time, and hire another part-time assistant to do the monkey work. I've been here for a month, and nobody has mentioned anything on whether they will keep me or not.

So of course I sent my resume to the two recruiters, and am already planning to come up with excuses at work if someone decides to interview me. I want to keep all my options open.

But I do not know what it is that I really want. There is no good wind if you don't know where you want to sail to.

Precisely at the end of my contract I will get another ultrasound scan to confirm that the ovarian cysts have been reabsorbed. If so, I will have to decide whether or not I want to do another IUI with FSH or go directly to IVF. The amount of money involved is mind-boggling.

Money aside, how do I keep working, or start a new job, knowing how stressful and inconvenient any of those treatments will be? Knowing that I will have to miss work to go to unpredictable doctor's appointments, and that I will have to interrupt work to go shoot myself hormones in the toilet?

The idea of not working at all seems tempting. The spouse and I are thrifty, he makes good money, I am on his insurance... But if we do IVF, we will need all the money we can make. If it works, we will probably want to buy a house. And the area where we live is still horribly expensive. Of course, if I were to work 30 miles away...

I keep jumping from one possibility to the next without coming any closer to knowing what it is that I really want.

But, who cares? Maybe the birth control pills are not working, and by the end of my contract my ovaries will still be full of cysts. So I try to convince myself that I don't have to determine what I really want, until I know for sure how my ovaries are doing.

Tired

For some reason I thought I was well enough to go to work. And really, I hardly had any pain or discomfort. I only popped a vicodin around 1 pm when I felt a little pain.

What I did not expect was the exhaustion. Which is bad, when I'm tired I am unhappy, impatient and snappy. I tried to keep myself in check for the sake of the spouse, who deserves better.

I really could have stayed home today, my presence was not absolutely necessary at work. Yet, the fact that I am a contractor and I don't get any sick leave probably influenced my decision. Who cares? My health is more important than any money I'm making. It's just that I already feel like the laziest employee on the floor because I work exactly 40 hours per week. It's what my contract states, but you see people here that easily put in 50 or more hours per week. Just today I was dealing with data that my boss produced yesterday.

For heavens sake, if they ever hire me permanently, is that what they will expect of me?

Why I left my previous job

I'm very happy about the new job but I will not be talking about it. Let me talk instead about my previous job. Every six months I had to sit through what must be the equivalent of the farmer rounding up all animals and telling them that the farm was running out of resources and could not sustain so many animals. Particularly chickens. Did we really need five of them? If you were a chicken, you would feel singled out and very uncomfortable. I know, because I was one of those chickens.

But the first to go were not us chickens. It was the poor part-timers who helped the chickens and some of the other animals. These were "assistants" that were earning little above minimum wage and doing the dirty work nobody wanted. My own assistant's hours were reduced from 15 to 5 hours per week. She quit and got a job as a waitress. I scurried around until I found someone else to work those five hours per week, but it was not enough. Luckily, I had volunteers. The economy was in recession and people were sending their resumes to any email address they could find on the internet. I could not hire anyone, but managed to convince two of these desperate people to try out their luck as volunteers so as not to have a gap on their resume. One of my volunteers was a woman with a master's degree and the type of experience that would have made her overqualified for my own job, and yet I made her do all the boring, time consuming and repetitive tasks. I felt very guilty about it.

Then came the budget cuts: We did not have enough money for supplies but we had to keep things going. As an analogy, imagine that you need cheeseburgers and you always get them from McDonalds, but now you have to fire up the grill and cook them yourself. It really was not cost effective, considering the time I was wasting. I was quickly running behind my schedule and I started leaving important stuff on the back burner and concentrating only on the urgent things.

Finally, rumors started circulating that the chicken with less seniority was going to be fired.  I'm not saying any other chickens deserved to be fired instead of her, but I am sure that when a farmer decides to cull his flock he does not simply get rid of the last chicken he bought. He probably considers other factors such as the productivity of each chicken. In any case, the union fought back, because they did not want to lose one single vote. The chicken was not fired but, wisely, she started sending out her resume to every corner on this planet. Two months later she got a good job offer and left.

I was happy for her, but obviously nobody was hired to replace her and that left us, the other four chickens, severely understaffed an overworked. And that's when the union negotiated the furloughs: we were to work only 35 hours per week. Believe me, I did not mind the pay cut, it's just that it was impossible to keep up with all that work with only 40 hours per week. How were we supposed to keep things running working only 35 hours?

Sometime while all this was happening I did two IUIs with clomid. That I was able to squeeze that into my crazy schedule was a miracle in itself, but the real miracle was that I actually got pregnant. I was ecstatic, but obviously under too  much stress. And I was puking all over the place. I was not eating well because I was too tired to cook when I got home. I had been very good about bringing my own lunch to work but not anymore. Just when I needed homemade nutritious meals I was buying junk food in the cafeteria. And then I would throw it all up and convince myself that it was for the best.

I should have quit. But I thought that, since we were going to have a baby, we were going to need the money more than ever, and I reasoned that I would not be able to find another job that was so secure. If the union had proved one thing it was that nobody could fire us, no matter what.

Then came the miscarriage. It did not happen all of a sudden, I had some close calls that kept me from work while pending tasks piled up to the ceiling, until finally I lost the baby. Nobody sent me a card. All I got were desperate phone calls from the lonely part-time assistant who was put in charge during my absence and could not juggle the mess I had been in. I kept sending emails with updates on my health and letters from my doctor but barely got any replies. My supervisor did send an email wishing me a quick recovery, but Human Resources never emailed or called, not even to explain that I had run out of sick leave and my paycheck was being butchered. This caused many misunderstandings and bad blood later on. After a month of bedrest, one of my colleagues called to see how I was doing. Three days later I received a get-well card that she must have convinced everyone else to sign.

I was still feeling like shit when my doctor said I could go back to work. I could now walk with the help of a cane but I couldn't stand for more than a couple of minutes. I could have convinced my doctor to write another letter putting off my return to work, or asking that I return part-time until fully recovered. Instead, I finally came to my senses and decided that having a job you could have forever was not necessarily a good thing. It had been all right in the beginning, but now it was a miserable mess and I wanted out. So I quit.

Boy, was that liberating. Now we only had one income, but who cared? It was enough for the two of us, now that no baby was coming, and I was already on my husband's insurance. My former insurance was still good for two months, which ended up being convenient, given that during those two months I kept bleeding non-stop. I had been severely anemic upon arrival to the ER, was given blood transfusions, but I still was not fully recovered even after all that time. I had to have a bunch of tests and scans and bloodwork done. It was scary for a while, when nobody knew what was going on. But finally I had surgery, the problem was fixed and six days later I stopped bleeding. And I did not have to pay a single cent, given that I had primary and secondary insurance. See, that left me with enough money in the flex plan to buy those sunglasses later on.

It's been almost seven months since that surgery and my health has been improving. Emotionally I am a wreck, hence the therapy and the antidepressants. But physically, I have no complaints. I felt good enough to try those clomid cycles (after stopping the antidepressants) but once more my ovaries betrayed me. Then came this job opportunity, which frankly was too good to pass. And so here I am, enjoying the present and trying not to think too much about the future. As for the past, its pointless to dwell too much on it, though writing this very long post was a positive exercise. It made me appreciate the new job even more.

Taking a break... by working?

After last Monday's follicle scan, my doctor suggested moving onto FSH. Frankly, I don't think my ovaries can take any stimulation after these past three months of increasing doses of clomid. The scan showed multiple cysts on both ovaries, in the typical "string of pearls" pattern.

So I asked for birth control pills. Over the years, that has been the only way for me to get rid of the cysts, the discomfort, and the uncertainty about my crazy periods. I know, boy DO I KNOW that at 41 I should not waste more time. But I need a break from this infertility craziness. I want to focus on the present and be thankful for the blessings I already have and I normally take for granted.

One blessing is the new job I am starting soon. I don't want to start a new job and deal with the stress of spurious doctor appointments, FSH injections in public bathrooms, and the cover stories for missed hours of work. And I am not even thinking about the possibilities of a pregnancy.

I need this job. And not because of the money, although if we keep going down the infertility path we are going to need lots of that too. But what I really need now is a purpose in life. Even my dog died less than a month after the miscarriage. I honestly cannot be happy simply being someone's spouse. Oh, I love the spouse, and he loves me, and all this shit has made us stronger, just like the saying goes. But I want to put my knowledge to good use and use my brain in a productive way, and I want to be happy about this new opportunity instead of moping about what I do not have.