Tampa Tribune, Fla., Tom Jackson column [Tampa Tribune, Fla.]
By Tom Jackson, Tampa Tribune, Fla. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
Once you know her story, you may embrace it, too.
Arment is a registered nurse who worked a good long time for the
Arment liked the job, liked the paycheck, liked the idea of working from home, and liked her patients, especially the ones living in
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
Nearly three years earlier, Mandi submitted a blood sample for the National Bone Marrow Registry's "Be the Match" visit to
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
"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
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
Citing privacy concerns,
"In general," says the policy book, "
Well.
Given the rare opportunity to extend another's life,
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.
___
(c)2012 the Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Fla.)
Visit the Tampa Tribune (Tampa, Fla.) at www.tampatrib.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services
Wordcount: | 1104 |
Advisor News
Annuity News
Health/Employee Benefits News
Life Insurance News