I am a little late to jump on this bandwagon, but I have a #Me Too moment I have been wanting to write about. I actually have a few things, looking back, that I could count as #Me Too, but one in particular stands out where I can be 100% confident I didn’t encourage in any way.
Over the years I have worked in so many workplaces where the atmosphere is particularly sexually charged...the restaurant business was especially true for this, but believe it or not I have found the healthcare setting to have just as many inappropriate conversations...
About 10 years ago I worked at an Urgent Care clinic. A job I hated but needed until I found something else. It was an odd mix of people who worked there, and lots of support staff were younger females. There was one older, foreign, male doctor who had a bizarre sense of humor. He would make weird sexual jokes (like he would pick up a pen and use it to make weird sexual remarks about size, stuff like that.) I was new at this place, and everyone sort of laughed him off as harmless, like “Oh, DrZ...” and shake their head at him. He was foreign and tended to mumble and talk low, so you couldn’t really catch half of what he was saying, although you would just sort of know he was trying to be inappropriate.
In healthcare, we work in close quarters and have to speak quitely, so there is a lot of up close contact...and people tend to be more touchy-feely than they would be in an office setting. After working at this place a while, it wasn’t uncommon to be shoulder to shoulder with someone looking at patient charts, etc. One night before I left, I was standing in that manner next to this doctor making sure he didn’t need anything before I left. I had put my hand on his back while leaning over to look at the chart. He put his hand on my shoulder and was mumbling something in my ear that I couldn’t quite understand, and grabbed my other hand and put it on his thigh and held it there until I pulled it away. I was a bit stunned but I just finished up and got my stuff to leave. I was near the time clock punching out, when he walked past to the front to pass of the chart, and on his way there stopped by me, put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in to a side hug (I had a clipboard in my hands) and again he was saying something unintelligible into my ear. As he pulled away he grabbed my breast. I stood there shocked as he went to the front and handed up his chart, and on his way back past me, I confronted him. “What in the hell was that? Why would you do that? What is wrong with you?” He just sort of shrugged and said nothing.
I felt absolutely violated. I was clothed, I wasn’t raped, but it felt like a total invasion. I am not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt awful. I didn’t give him permission or said anything that would make him think I wanted him to touch me in that manner. I was also very embarrassed, as if I had somehow brought it on myself. I did not tell anyone close to me, other than my husband. To this day no one around me knows.
I did report him to my bosses, and because there are cameras everywhere, they pulled tape and fired him.
I also reported him to the medical board that licenses us. The first step is a write up...I filed a written description of everything that happened. The turn-around Time is slow. I wrote it the day after the incident and sent it in. It was months later they called me. In between this time I had cared for and lost my father to cancer. I wasn’t in a good place. I was trying to take care of myself and my small children while mentally falling apart.
The next step is the board calls you in to interview you, and you have to sit in a room of people and tell your story and then they can ask you questions. I got asked about things I had said or didn’t say, asked if I have kissed this man...and they played the security tape and I had to give running commentary about what was happening. Which was hard, because the moment felt (and still feels) like it lasted much longer than it did, but on tape it was seconds and so happened faster than what I remembered. I also had to grab a woman’s hand the same way my breast had been grabbed (what position was his hand in? Thumb on top or under your breast?)
It was horrible. I can understand why victims do not want to report and testify. This wasn’t even with police or attorneys or criminal investigators, just with people from my Licensing board, and it felt like my character was being called in to question. I felt like I was the one under investigation. I didn’t feel good about this at all. I left feeling even more demoralized and victimized than I had when the incident occurred.
Some more months went by after that and then I was visited by someone from the board. I don’t remember why, but after the interviewed him, they had some follow-up questions. I remember I was in a really bad place mentally and I did not want to participate in this anymore, and the woman assured me that this would be it, but they needed closing statements or something so the board could make a ruling. She offered to come to my home. I don’t remember much except that she told me when they interviewed him he had nothing but wonderful things to say about me, which I thought was weird that 1) he would say anything nice, and 2) that she would even tell me that.
I think he ended up getting probation and a fine, since it was a first offense, and had to take some sort of classes about professionalism and sexual harassment in the workplace.
So that is my #Me Too story. I don’t think about it too often anymore, but it took a while for that to go away. The reason I reported him was that even though I was so ashamed that it happened to me, I knew I needed to tell someone. He needed to face consequences of behaving in that manner. The people he works with deserve to go to work and not have to worry about being harassed and groped. It was easy to sit and write down my statement. It was much harder to verbally tell my boss what happened. Telling those people actually helped to lessen my anger to a degree. At least I had done something. I feel like I would have held onto that much longer had I not spoken up.
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