I've destroyed my career

[Broken]

My life growing up was less than perfect but I think most people can probably say the same. My father was very emotionally abusive, my parents had me at 19 and 21 years old (far too young in my opinion), and neither parent did anything more than keep me from getting hit by passing cars and beat my butt for pissing them off, and teach me how to do housework and cooking. They were very strict and I wasn't allowed to date or go out with friends at all until I was almost 17. They weren't very social people, and they hated having company over. I'm not here to beat up my parents. I think they suffered from the same issues that cause me problems. If the cycle isn't broken, those issues are just passed along through the family until someone realizes them and decides to make a change. I don't fully understand the insecurities and anxiety that I picked up along the way. I don't know what caused them or how to change them.

I've been a radiologic technologist (xray tech) for 13 years. I was hired straight from school... actually started as a student tech during my 2nd year in school at my first xray job. I was a great tech and received *almost* nothing but praise. I got good evaluations and always impressed my peers with the technical quality of my work. Somehow, even straight from school, I was the tech others called on if they needed help with a difficult xray view. However, I had some issues getting along with my coworkers, due to immaturity on my part I'm sure. We did like eachother as far as personality, but I was the "fireball" that completely about 350 exams a month and always surpassed the 2nd highest by about 100, while the lowest numbers fell around 30-50 exams in a month. I had an attitude about that because it was unfair and on top of it, I was diagnosed with arthritis shortly after graduating, so I did all this running around on a foot that was so swollen and inflammed that it hardly fit in my shoe. I was in a lot of pain everyday for years.

I was at that job 5 years, and worked under 3 different directors in that time. The first one absolutely loved me and never reprimanded me for a thing. Perhaps I never actually did anything wrong during that time? I don't know. The 2nd appreciated my skill and told me on several occassions he wished he could just clone 5 more of me, but during his time as director things started falling apart in my home life, and as a result, my attitude grew worse at work. Having known me for years and even worked along side me as a tech before he was promoted, he let a lot slide and he went to bat for me much more than I appreciated at the time. I owe him.

At home, I'd moved back in with my parents after college until I got on my feet financially. I had a lot of debt from school, both in student loans and credit card debt (and yes it was ALL for necessities for school, gas, books, etc). My mother during this time was anorexic... 5'6" and 62lbs at her worst. My parents slept in seperate rooms, my dad was a truckdriver on the road for about 16hrs a day, and we all hated when we heard him drive up at night. My dad finally moved out and my parents got a legal seperation. Along with being anorexic, my mom was an alcoholic, depressed, and on several occassions tried to overdose and ended up spending a week each time in a mental hospital.

My siblings were 11 and 13 at the time. When my mom overdosed, I'd call an ambulance to come get her, and for the next week it was up to me to take care of the kids, deal with my father's harrassment, spend sleepless nights ignoring his calls while the kids cried and and stayed awake all night too. The emotional stress was too much for me. I was 23 years old, but I had no idea how to fix things nor how to handle the stress coming from every angle and the heartache of seeing my mom so sad and miserable that she was doing these things to herself. She also laid cigarettes on her arms and let them burn down so she has horrible scars on the insides of her forearms.

Back at work, I was on the brink of tears everyday from sleep deprivation and stress from home. I started running into problems at work with people complaining about my attitude.... coworkers, doctors, and sometimes patients. Usually, I *was* technically right in most cases, but had I known then what I know now, I would have handled things differently. Instead of displaying an attitude and defending myself, I should have just taken the issue to my supervisor everytime and been the one making a formal complaint rather than the one being complained about in every case. But I was immature and the only attitude I knew for those situations was the "nobody is going to talk to me that way" attitude. I said and did things back then that humiliate me to think back on now.

The 3rd supervisor came along, and within months of his hire, I was fired. I was not entirely innocent, but I made the mistake of calling him out for lying to me, and from that point on he took every single issue to an administrative level until he got the green light to get rid of me... and there were a few of those write ups that were complete BS, such as one patient complaint I was written up for and later found out I wasn't even the tech who had that patient.

I loved that job, and despite everything that happened and the wrong things I did, I know that is where I belonged. Being fired destroyed my confidence and esteem. At the time I was fired, my mom had lost the kids, and I'd gotten an appartment close to my job where my mom lived with me until she got a settlement from the divorce. Everyday when I'd come home, she'd be sitting there crying, or she'd be drunk on the phone fighting with some boyfriend, or she'd be overdosing... all of the same was still going on. One morning, she woke me up to ask me how to make herself vomit because she'd taken a bottle of welbutrin and regretted it. I jumped up and as I was grabbing clothes and shoes to take her to the ER, she had a siezure and fell head first onto my bedroom floor. So I called an ambulance again.

As far as work, I'd also been working prn at a second job on the weekends all along. I switched to working fulltime weekends at my 2nd job, so I never had much of a financial problem after being fired from my first job. The problem was all emotional. It was 2002 when I switched to fulltime weekends. I did 16 hrs every Sat-Sun and then worked an 8hr shift one day during the week.

My first primary xray job was at a level 4 trauma center. My 2nd job where I switched to weekends was at a small town hospital which was a dump. I hated it from day 1 when I started as prn. They called it "The Pinebox" which couldn't be more accurate. Horrible unethical things went on there. I'd say that place is where all the rejects end up after being fired from real hospitals, and now I was one of them. My boss had just lost his son in a car accident... well shortly after I switched to fulltime. Terrible, but as a boss he was already useless, and this only amplified his uselessness. His favorite thing to tell new employees was "I don't care what you do. You keep people out of my office and I'll stay out of yours." In other words, all he cared about is not having anyone make work for him. This was his attitude, but if anything happened, he'd throw us under the bus and didn't care what happened to us as long as he scathed by. He is such a liar with no moral compass, and I despised him.

But I stayed there. After losing my first job, every bit of the confidence I had in school and at my first job was destroyed. I was scared of dealing with surgeons, scared of going to the OR, and scared of being written up or fired everytime I went to work, but I felt too worthless and afraid to seek another "good" job, so I stayed at the dump, put on 80 lbs, remained weak and depressed, and let that jerk walk all over me while under paying me for all he expected of me. Despite everything, I was still "the bomb" technically, just with a messed up head.

I've witnessed a lot of things there that if administration or JCAHO and DHEC knew about would easily have my boss fired and cost the facility tons in fines.. maybe even lost accreditation. It never crossed my mind to use any of those things to stand up to my boss until November of 2009. I'd been there 12 years. Finally, I had enough of everyone on my shift being treated unfairly, and somehow he infuriated me enough that I "grew some." Perhaps I should thank him in that regard. We'll see.