So then…

I was working in telemarketing… and I was actually really good at it (like I said no one could see what I looked like on the phone). I didn’t make much money so I did live at home… I remember one night in particular. When you are telemarketing, the supervisors can come in on your line and listen to see how you are doing. You never know when they’re listening in on your calls… for some strange reason, I still don’t know why or how. I could hear the supervisors (on my headset)  in the main office, like it was them that I had called., I was asking to speak to the person I called, but apparently the call didn’t actually go through. Since they had no idea I could hear them talking they were laughing and making fun of me. They were talking about how fat I was and saying mean things. It took a few minutes for me to realize what I was hearing on my line was them in the office. I was so hurt. I wasn’t sure what to do. I got up from my station… opened their office door and told them. I just heard everything you said. Then I started crying and walked out. They later tried to apologize, but that’s the kind of thing you can’t really apologize for, because they had no idea I could hear what they were saying, they were their true feelings, and nothing they could say afterwards could make it any better… You know how people say, I wish I could be a fly on the wall (hearing stuff and no one knowing you could hear them)… I can tell you that is something you don’t want to experience. During that time in my life, I didn’t really care about much of anything. One night at work, I was called into the office of the supervisor and told that I needed to leave, because someone complained that I stunk. I don’t know if I did or not. I had been wearing tennis shoes with no socks, and you can get stinky feet from that… but that was one of my most humiliating days ever. I still get a stomach ache when I think about it (and it was over 20 years ago). The telemarketing company eventually closed down. We showed up for work one night and the building was empty…Then I was unemployed…

Living at home in my 20’s… I was abused by my brother both mentally and physically. I mentioned that when I was younger I had found an escape in television, especially soap operas… I got back into watching the soaps… I started saving my money so that I could go on trips to meet them. I met a lot of nice people, and made some good friends. But I got myself in deep debt, spending money, I didn’t really have. I was a soap opera star groupie… I know now, that it was just a way to escape from the misery of my life at the time. I traveled to California more times than I can count, to go and meet the actors. I often wonder what they truly thought of the fans, that traveled to meet them at public appearances. I’m sure they didn’t think much of us. But that didn’t stop me from doing it for over 10 yrs. I mean some of the actors were really nice and a couple actually became friends, but mostly over all I think the majority of them probably thought we were losers.

I got another telemarketing job (same type of organization) so that I could keep traveling. That place was also the same kind of thing… most of the people who work in telemarketing, are either fat or have some type of handicap that prevents them from having a job in the real world. There was a guy there, older man, probably 40 years older than me at the time. His behavior was the total definition of sexual harassment  The things he said, and did, it was truly shocking to me. Most of the women just laughed it off, so I did too, but I think about that sometimes and cannot believe that I, or any of us, let him get away with that. That company eventually shut down too. Apparently it’s quite common with telemarketing. I did meet someone there who was interested in hiring some people to do telemarketing from home. I ended up getting a job working for her. It was a time when I gained even more weight. I pretty much slept on the couch in my mom’s living room. I’d wake up, I kept the phone (it had a cord then) in the living room, on a TV tray. I’d do telemarketing for a hours, then I push the phone away and lay back down and go to sleep. It was actually horrible, when I think about it now, there were days at a time, when I never left my house, or my couch…

I’m not even sure where I’m heading with this post. It was a dark time in my life. I still traveled for soap opera trips a couple times a year, but the rest of my time was spent on that couch. My brother was still taking the frustrations of his life out on me. He couldn’t stand that I was always around. Always in the living room… he would come home late and night and be angry with me (pretty much for exsisting). One night in the pitch black, he threw a glass mason jar salt shaker at me. He threw it so hard that I had an instant lump on  my forearm (the kind that pops up on a cartoon character when they get hit in the head) I realize that if it had hit me in my head, it may have killed me. I had a lump the size of a baseball on my arm that was purple, red and painful. It lasted for a long time, even after the bruising went away the lump hung around for months.

It was around this time period when I kept noticing a lot of pain in my lower back area. My Dr. at the time always blamed it on my weight. It went on for over a year, I’d mention the pain was still there and she’d say “you need to lose weight”. I had to have a test for something else and that is when they found out that I had a kidney stone that was larger than my kidney, it was actually stretching out my kidney. My Dr. did apologize for not doing anything about my pain complaints. She said she felt horrible. I was sent to a urologist. I remember he said, “I hesitate to say this is the biggest stone I have ever seen, but… this is the biggest stone I have ever seen”. He didn’t even feel comfortable treating it or treating me due to my size. I was referred to a specialist at a prestigious hospital in Maryland. That Dr. was an amazing man. He never treated me like my pain was my own fault. I remember he called me “sweet pea”. He was so nice. He scheduled surgery, since it was so large it was going to take multiple surgeries. I was to be in the hospital for a week and there would be two days between my first and second. After the first surgery, my arms and legs were completely numb. They waited a few days and since it hadn’t gone away, they ended up sending me home from the hospital. They didn’t want to do another surgery, until the numbness was gone. It was horrible. I had all kinds of tubes coming out of my back and bag to catch my urine. It was so  uncomfortable, It still felt like I had to go to the restroom, but nothing ever came out, since it was going directly in the bag. I was so miserable and I just wanted to pull the tubes out of my back. It was a over a month later,  they did the second surgery. Six months later they did a third surgery. It still was not all gone. They didn’t want to do any more surgeries and said they’d have me check back for a test in another 6 mos to a year…

In between that time, the at home telemarketing job, turned into a full time (non-telemarketing) job for the same woman’s company (yes, I was now in my 30’s and was still living at home with my mom and both brothers). But this job was actually working in an office and feeling like a professional for a change, which was a great confidence booster. They all thought I did a great job. I was just an administrative assistant but, it made me feel so good to get up and take a shower and go to a job in an office building in the daytime and work a full day, be thanked for my hard work…  None of them seemed to judge me for my weight. The owner’s husband also worked for the company and he told her he had big plans for me… It was kind of a time of positivity, thinking maybe my life could change, maybe I wasn’t a waste of breath… I actually felt hopeful and proud of myself….

I am still not sure, that I am doing this blogging thing right, but I’m just putting it out there… its kind of like  stream of consciousness writing… I apologize if it is not the way this is supposed to be done. I’ll come back with more though. At this point I am just thinking, that putting it in writing is helping me to sort things out… Thanks for reading 🙂