So following on from my previous blog about how poorly I was treated at work last week I thought I would take this opportunity to write another little piece about my workplace.
So now (Thursday 14th March) I have to do my ‘back to work interview’ only 9 days after I actually went back to work.
This is already a bit of an issue as I didn’t have a chance to tell them how I was feeling before I was confronted by all the people I have to work with everyday.
I’m a bit uptight about it before I go into the office in which it is being held. A bit nervous about what kind of stupid questions I’m going to have to answer.
As I walk in and before I’ve even had the chance to sit down the inevitable question falls easily from her mouth.
“Hi Nathan, how are you doing?” I manage to restrain myself slightly and rather than saying “I’d be great if my daughter wasn’t dead and I didn’t have to do this stupid f***ing meeting” I felt those empty lies coming out of my mouth.
“I’m fine, ” I felt myself cringe slightly as those words fell out of my mouth, I’ve said them so much lately that it is just a bit of a habit now. “That’s good” is the response I received.
All the time I wanted to scream at her, ‘if you believe that then you are more stupid than you look’.
Awkward silence after awkward silence came and went as she rattled off a load of questions that I can’t remember.
I just wanted to get out of there.
They weren’t going to offer me any kind of support so what was the bloody point of these meetings.
2 text messages is all I received from my employers during my 2 months away from work, and those were only in response to texts that I had sent to them.
Then the clincher! The very reason I felt I needed to write this blog.
She sat forward in her chair and said “It has been bought to our attention that whilst you have been off you gave an interview to the press and that you have been in the newspapers. Do you think this was a wise idea?”
Now I have a life rule, men don’t hit women, EVER!
It makes me a bit uneasy to say it but she tested my rule almost to breaking point with those sentences. How dare she question me about this? About whether my daughter mattered enough to be spoken about to the media.
After I had gathered myself I calmly said to her “yes, and if everyone else disagrees with that then it says more about them than it does me”.
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. This woman who has had nothing to do with our family, our pain, our grief up until this point is questioning me about whether I felt it was right to share our story as far and wide as possible just because I was off work.
A medical professional with years of training had determined that I wasn’t able to fulfil my role at work due to the amount of stress and anxiety I had been (and still am) suffering as a result of losing our beautiful daughter.
What made her think she had the right to question how we dealt with our grief?
She tried to save herself a little bit by saying “personally I haven’t seen it but people have been questioning whether you should have done that given the circumstances.”
Now I’m not sure what ‘circumstances’ she is referring to. I don’t like to read between the lines but I think the general jist of it was ‘your baby is dead, was it a good idea to talk about it with the media.’
At this point she tried to shut the interview down.
I thought this was probably the best time to make her feel as uneasy as possible about what she had just said to me.
So I questioned what she would have done in my situation. Would she have not said anything? Would she have just brushed it under the carpet and said nothing? Or would she have been trying to push for changes? Would she have tried to make as much noise as she could about babyloss and the devastating effects that it has on families who have suffered losses?
This seemed to be a bit of a turning point for the interview.
We sat for I don’t know how long talking about the fact that her mother had experienced a miscarriage at around 15 weeks during the 1960s and that she didn’t know what had happened to her baby. She gave birth to the baby and then it was taken away. She didn’t get to even hold her baby even for a minute.
We spoke about Nayely, about the options we were presented with at the hospital. I talked about that one precious night we got to spend with her at the hospital. How amazing all the staff at Musgrove Park Hospital were with us, not just with Emileen but with all of us. We talked about Nayelys funeral, the fact that we had her cremated and that she was now at home with us in a beautiful urn that was so kindly donated for our baby girl by a local funeral director, the fact that the hospital had provided us with a certificate with her date of birth on it and little prints of her tiny, delicate hands and feet.
All those little things that make us realise that our baby girl is recognised as a human being by more people than just ourselves even though she didn’t make it to the legal threshold of viability.
The interview drew to a natural conclusion, more so than the question and answer session it had started out as.
Although she said that as a company they couldn’t offer me anything more by way of support I do feel that my words made an impact with her which I hope in turn will be echoed around the company as a whole.
Nayely Adelpha Foundation 