An anonymous reader writes: I will be homeless and without any resources in one week. Any advice is welcome. Seattle/King County shelters are overcrowded and public housing hasn't accepted applications for months.
I started working at Amazon Nov 2013 as an E-Commerce Platform Security Engineer. I was an unusual applicant with special considerations — I have persistent chronic pain from a cancer that has been surgically treated but took years to be diagnosed. I was assured before being hired that I could get pain management and still work for Amazon.
A mere four months into working before management started to arrange special meetings for me. I wasn't performing "on the right trajectory" for an Amazon employee. I mentioned the Fentanyl transdermal patches as a source of brain fog, but my boss, perhaps being a security guy and suspicious of everything, actually had the audacity to imply I was wearing some sort of labeled tape placebo, and he recommended if this is what's holding me back, I get off the stuff ASAP. Two months of withdrawal later, and my job performance was even worse, despite ice packs and daily physical therapy. At this point I developed a crippling sense of fear pervasive in everything I did, personal or professional, and persistent chest pain became the new norm.
In pain every day, my motivation collapsed. I've been living on savings until now. I've applied for Leave of Absence as well as Short/Long term disability, but I have yet to collect any benefits. Despite my established symptomatology of cancer history and chronic pain, the Disability evaluators have insisted on a psychiatric evaluation (which has taken months, services are booked to forever out here). I'm starting to feel like all these psych requests are a way for the Disability evaluators to run me in circles and not pay any compensation.
Where did I go wrong? Should Amazon have accommodated my illness and cut me more slack? Are there companies that are more understanding of chronic illness? I was getting good work done. I can write testable, correct, highly-performant software for an implementation which spans an entire service stack. But of course, so can most of you. I'm clearly a lesser job candidate. Is there a place in the world for me besides Section 8 HUD housing?
