Tampa Tribune, Fla., Tom Jackson column [Tampa Tribune, Fla.]

Dec. 09--LAND O' LAKES -- The idea that "no good deed goes unpunished" may have originated with a cynic, but there is nothing cynical about Mary Arment and she has begun to embrace its essential truth.

Once you know her story, you may embrace it, too.

Arment is a registered nurse who worked a good long time for the Pasco County School District, right up to the point that she finally decided her training, experience and professionalism were out of balance with her take-home pay. She left at the end of 18 years to join health insurance giant Humana as a "telephonic nurse educator" -- that is, a case-managing nurse who kept in touch, by telephone, with a list of the insurer's high-risk clients.

Humana outfitted her with a specialized computer and telephone in her Willow Bend home, and liked her work well enough to give her a raise at the end of her first year, in June 2012, when almost nobody in America was getting raises.

Arment liked the job, liked the paycheck, liked the idea of working from home, and liked her patients, especially the ones living in Wisconsin. "What a nice state," Arment says. "I never met a nasty person from Wisconsin."

What she didn't like was her immediate supervisor. "She was a micromanager," Arment says, adding, "Nurses who need that much supervision probably shouldn't be nurses. But at my age (62), and my bad feet, I can't do floor work anymore; I can't do 12-hour shifts. Getting to work from home, I decided to put up with it."

Near the end of July, a month after her anniversary, her glowing review, and her paycheck bump, the plot twisted. Arment's daughter, 21-year-old Mandi Arment, an off-and-on college student, got a surprise contact from Georgetown University Hospital.

Nearly three years earlier, Mandi submitted a blood sample for the National Bone Marrow Registry's "Be the Match" visit to Saint Leo University. Now here was a telephone call saying she matched a 62-year-old New York woman suffering with leukemia.

If she was still interested in donation, she had three weeks to submit the results of a physical exam, an EKG and a full-spectrum blood analysis. Mandi did as requested, and near the end of August the hospital called back.

They needed her in a week, on the Wednesday after Labor Day, they said, and she'd need a traveling companion, preferably someone with medical training, because the preparation -- injections of filgrastim, a drug that boosts disease-gobbling neutrophils, or white blood cells -- makes donors quite sick.

"It makes you feel like you have the flu," Mandi says. "And there's major bone pain" associated with marrow laboratories cranking out fresh neutrophils. "It wasn't pleasant." One exceedingly rare, but noteworthy, side effect: Filgrastim was associated with brain bleeds.

Says Mary, "You think I'm going to let her go without me? God forbid something does wrong and I'm sitting at home."

Donations to leukemia patients no longer involve boring into the donor's hips to extract healthy marrow. Instead, doctors harvest beefed-up blood and pass it through a processor to extract neutrophil-rich plasma. Fill up a few bags and you're done. Once the blood draw begins, it takes about four hours.

If that was all that happened, we'd be writing about Mandi's improbable heroics (odds for finding matches are 1 in 20,000, according to the National Bone Marrow Registry) and her lovable mom as doting sidekick. Perhaps we would throw in a bed pan joke or two.

But that's not all that happened. What happened, besides Mandi enduring substantial inconvenience, discomfort and alarming risk to give a stranger a new shot at life, is Mary lost her job.

"We should have been put in the company newsletter," Mandi huffs, "not fired."

To make the trip, Mary needed four days off: Two travel days, a day for the procedure, and, at the hospital's urging, a day for Mandi to recover. Alas, Mary had banked only enough PTO -- paid time off -- to be out two days and part of a third.

Mary alerted her boss and quickly threw together a plan: She notified her patients (roughly 120) about her unscheduled time away, and arranged to have a colleague monitor her voice mail, paying particular attention to emergencies. She'd catch up with everybody the following week.

As for Humana, she reasoned, surely provided unpaid leave in the pursuit of one of the Corporate Social Responsibility goals expressed in the employee handbook: "making business decisions that reflect our commitment to improving the health and well-being of our members, our associates, the community we serve and our planet."

Buoyed by the notion that giving life was essential to "improving health and well-being" of some small but important sliver of "our planet," and having put her fail-safe strategy into place, Mary went, feeling hopeful. She came home, instead, to a terse letter of termination citing "behavior in violation of the company standards for workplace conduct and employment practices."

They called it "willful abandonment of duty." Nonsense, Arment says. "Willful abandonment of duty is when you walk off the floor in the middle of your shift," she says. "Willful abandonment is a terrible charge against a registered nurse. You could lose your license."

Nonetheless, the charge was upheld on appeal by a Humana higher-up who, acknowledging none of the company's official stance on global benevolence, called the decision "fair, appropriate and warrants no further consideration."

Citing privacy concerns, Humana declined to respond specifically to Arment's firing. In an email, a spokesman affirmed that Arment was employed by Humana, while also providing a broad outline about the accumulation and use of PTO (if not unpaid leave).

"In general," says the policy book, "Humana leaders work with our associates on their requests for PTO, striving to balance the needs of the business with the associate's family and personal needs.... Humana strives to foster and maintain a business environment that recognizes the need for work-life balance, and provides a variety of resources and programs to help associates balance their professional and personal lives."

Well.

Given the rare opportunity to extend another's life, Mandi Arment did what she had to do, which prompted Mary Arment to do what she had to do. Then Humana, which extols, officially, certain ennobling virtues, allowed its agents to do what they did.

Whether they did what they had to do is an open question. Whether what they did was the proper reward for an exceedingly good deed clearly is not.

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