Fluorescent Vampire

Random List of Ways I’ve Gone a Little Crazy with the Hormones: Part 2

My first day at Gilbane was Monday, March 17. St. Patrick’s Day. Auspicious for girl of mostly-Irish descent at a company founded by guys mostly of Irish descent. We kick off each working week at Gilbane University (as my department is called) with a staff meeting on Monday mornings. We each take turns bringing in breakfast, and it’s great to frame the week with what you plan to do. We bookend the Monday morning meetings with a Friday afternoon email to our supervisors, listing our Accomplishments for the week. The idea of responsibility and accountability in the corporate workplace is something foreign to me in previous experiences, and something for which I deeply longed when it was missing.

Anyway, I had decided to keep the pregnancy under my proverbial hat until I was a few weeks in and a few more weeks along. Yeah, not so much. I found myself blurting out, just moments into my first day at Gilbane, that I was, in fact, with child.

Of course, the response was immediately positive, supportive, and congratulatory. My immediate supervisor has a 16-month old daughter who is just acclimating to day-care and requires him to have a flexible schedule. Another one of my co-workers is working full-time from home on a flexible-hours schedule while she cares for her 5-month old. The VP at GU is a woman who has broken through many a corporate glass ceiling as she’s moved through the ranks, and is extraordinarily supportive of our work-life balances — given the utter lack of the same support while she was breaking through those ceilings.

It turned out to be a good thing that I said something so soon, because I started that job around the 8th week of my pregnancy. I didn’t know this at the time, but a call to my doctor during my second week at work revealed it all. During an early-morning meeting with my boss, I had such blurry vision and dizziness I had to take a moment and call the doctor. It was then that he revealed to me that “I had picked the WORST possible week to start a new full-time job.” FAN-TASTIC! It turns out that weeks 8-12 are the worst in terms of the dreaded first trimester symptoms. There’s a laundry list of them, but my nemeses were nausea, migraines, and light sensitivity.

The light sensitivity turned out to be most vicious at work. My new office (with a real door! My return to the corporate world was to a proper office, not a cubicle) had fluorescent lights in it. Four long throbbing blue tubes. Being that I hadn’t worked in a proper office in a year and a half, and I’ve never been all that good in fluorescent lights anyway, the effects were swift and total. The moment I flipped that switch, my head would pound, my vision would blur, and my stomach would lurch.

So, I worked in the dark. Just me and the computer monitor. Coworkers kept forgetting I was there, or worse, kept getting startled by the bluish computer light and slight rustlings from what had long been a vacant room prior to my arrival. EVERYONE came by to see why I was sitting in the dark, and I had to pathetically explain that the fluorescent lights made me sick. My co-worker Jo summoned the Facilities Guy to come and take out two of the bulbs, and Drew from down the hall gave me his lamp. Brenda pilfered a desk lamp from Don’s office that we’re pretty sure he forgot he had, and I had a workable lighting situation.

Now, I’m happy to report, I can have my half-fluorescent lights on, and I still use the two lamps. Nowadays we joke about my vampire-like sensitivity to light. Brenda confessed the other day that had she not known I was pregnant, she’d have thought I was out of my mind.

So you see, sometimes letting the cat out of the bag isn’t the worst idea. At least my new co-workers aren’t worried about me being a total nutter. Or Nosferatu.