I ask myself this question nearly every single day. 

A few short years ago, I was working at a job in IT that I LOVED.    I had gotten a Master’s Degree in IT, and I expected to spend the rest of my life in a career that never felt like work to me.  Cancer was still something that happened to other people, not me.  After all, I have no family history, I don’t have any genes that would increase my risk.  But at age 40, I was diagnosed with stage III Ductal Carcinoma that had already metastasized in my lymph nodes.  Unfortunately, my job had become WAY worse than any cancer diagnosis ever could have been.

I started working for GSD in January of 2013.  Pretty early on, it became clear that one of my male coworkers had some anger issues.  The longer I worked there, and the more comfortable with the network environment I became, the more frequent and aggressive his outbursts became.   If I had to disagree with him about anything, there was a great chance that he was going to fly off the handle.

In addition to him screaming in my face, he withheld system accesses I should have been given, had an extremely loose understanding of security and honesty, and started getting in and messing with my servers and scripts, making things break.  I reported all of this to my boss, who would merely say he was “Not as bad as he used to be” or that she’d “Talk to him” about it.  I simply could not keep up closing all the security holes that he was leaving open, and if I questioned anything, he was likely to lean, red-faced and bug eyed, screaming into my face about how wrong I was.  I made a formal report of harassment and misconduct to the agency cabinet secretary in April 2014. 

I didn’t know it but that report would be the beginning of the end of my IT career.   

Immediately after my report to the cabinet secretary, my boss began reassigning my projects, leaving me out of emails, and making it as difficult as possible to do my job.  She would look me in the eye, and gaslight me about how this man treated me, telling me it didn’t happen or that it “wasn’t that bad.”  They never investigated my complaint, and refused to put anything in writing about it, despite it being in the written policy to do so. 

When it became clear that nothing would be done and he kept harassing me, I refused to attend meetings with him, or to put myself in harm’s way.  My boss would instruct me to do so, and I was written up for insubordination when I asked why everyone was pretending that this was not happening.  This began to take a serious toll on my mental and physical health.  I lost a lot of weight, and began contemplating suicide.  My doctor’s requested that my office be moved to a less stressful location, which eventually was done for 3 weeks, and then I was moved back to the hostile location where I had previously worked. 

I applied for and was interviewed for other positions, but once I had been disciplined for insubordination, that made it much harder as each interview asked me to disclose any previous discipline.   I even began looking for jobs out of state, even though my custody might not have allowed me to accept them.  I was desperate to get away from this devastating workplace. 

Out of the blue, the day before Thanksgiving in November 2014, my first mammogram discovered four cancerous tumors in my right breast.  Sadly, my first thought wasn’t that I might die and leave my 7 year old daughter without a mother.  It was that I would be stuck at my horrendous job for an unknown amount of time while I had surgery and treatment. You know when your job is worse than a diagnosis of stage III cancer that there is a serious problem.