Tag: FeculentCereal

This is one of the things I’ve been most worried about

ThedaCare requested Thursday that an Outagamie County [Wisconsin] judge temporarily block seven of its employees who had applied for and accepted jobs at Ascension from beginning work there on Monday until the health system could find replacements for them.

The employees were part of an 11-member interventional radiology and cardiovascular team, which can perform procedures to stop bleeding in targeted areas during a traumatic injury or restore blood flow to the brain in the case of a stroke. Each of them were employed at-will, meaning they were not under an obligation to stay at ThedaCare for a certain amount of time.

Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis granted ThedaCare’s request and held an initial hearing Friday morning. The case will get a longer hearing at 10 a.m. Monday.

McGinnis told lawyers for both health systems they should try to work out a temporary agreement by the end of the day Friday about the employees’ status until Monday’s hearing.

Otherwise, he said, the order prohibiting them from going to work at Ascension would be final until a further ruling was made. That means the seven health care workers would not be working at either hospital on Monday.

I intended to write about this when the saga first began because I was concerned, but then I though “Ha! There’s no way a judge in an AT-WILL EMPLOYMENT STATE would tell a bunch of employees they can’t quit their job”, but here we are.

A group of highly specialized hospital employees announced en masse that they were going to leave their current AT-WILL EMPLOYER to go to another facility that paid more. “After approaching ThedaCare with the chance to match the offers they’d been given, [one of the employees] wrote that they were told ‘the long term expense to ThedaCare was not worth the short term cost,’ and no counter-offer would be made”. Instead, the hospital went to court to get an order to prevent the staff from quitting.

And it looks like they’re going to get it.

This is only a preliminary injunction and it doesn’t tell the employees they can’t quit, but it does tell them that they can’t start a new job until the legal matter is settled. There is another hearing on Monday.

Keep in mind that 51% of Americans have 3 months or less worth of savings and 25% have no savings at all. The judge can’t order the employees not to quit but he can (apparently) prevent them from taking another job. I have no doubt the current employer knows, once their employees are prevented from taking another job, all they have to do is drag out the proceedings for a few weeks to a few months and their employees will be faced with the choice of economic ruin or going back to work for them.

It is no secret that hospital staffing is in a major crisis right now and a lot of what is driving that is people taking the opportunity to pursue better paying jobs. The femtosecond this ruling came down, I can guarantee that hospital CEOs all over the country were waking their corporate lawyers up and telling them to get to work filing for injunctions. Why pay competitive wages when you can just get a judge to force your employees to keep working for you? Why pay them at all in fact?

I am a highly specialized, essential worker who is not currently interested in doing the job that I am highly specialized to do.

I imagine people can see why I’m concerned.

Yeah, this is about what I’ve come to expect

Remember, a couple of times now I think, I mentioned how everything suddenly got much worse right after I started feeling like I was getting a few things off my plate? Well the basement floor is almost done (just ignore that it is still “almost” done after two months of wrangling with the floor people), I’m on a term break from school until the end of the month, I’ve got a three month break from cancer treatment, and I’m still, for the time being, working from home. Things are settling down and maybe, just maybe, I can come out of crisis mode for a while.

Yesterday, I found this in the downstairs bathroom –


That would be a leak in the plumbing somewhere in the ceiling. The bulge was not there two days ago and as for the (what are hopefully) patches of mildew (and not black mold) I couldn’t say how long they’ve been there. I don’t routinely inspect my ceilings because I am a shit homeowner, apparently.

The plumber is supposed to arrive in about fifteen minutes and then we get to spend a few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long having at least one bathroom destroyed (maybe both bathrooms if our usual luck continues) and then we get to spend another few thousand dollars and FSM knows how long getting it put back together again.

We made a big mistake when we bought instead of just continuing to rent.

Treatment #4; Basement Demolition days 1 & 2

This is something of a theme already but I feel moved to observe once again that the fatigue is real. I had planned to post most of this yesterday but the act of sitting down in front of a computer and trying to come up with words was going to take more energy than I had left at the end of the day. I messaged my sleep medicine doc regarding this whole fatigue thing and he said there were some things we could try but first he wants to check me for narcolepsy.

Now I’m all in favor of due diligence but I’m pretty sure there is a better explanation for my excessive daytime sleepiness than narcolepsy.

Anyway, the treatment schedule, as I understand it, is for two more weekly doses of BCG and then take 4-ish weeks off, do another scope and see what happens. This is good news in that it means I only have two more doses before I get some time off which will allow, hopefully, my energy levels to recover a bit.

Simultaneous to all this has been the demolition of the basement. I had more to blather on about with this but I’m kind of running down again so I’ll pick this up later.