This post is a little different from my usual format, but I wanted to set the record straight. So bare with me while I hop on my soapbox.
The Setup
I work for Mass General Brigham, Salem hospital. Well, not anymore. The reason I’m writing this post is to uncover some of the shady dealings that happened/are happening at the hospital. I’m gonna leave out the names of any persons involved because I don’t want to assassinate anyone’s character. What happened is between me and the individuals. It’s the organization I’m concerned about. Let me explain.
Paying My Debts
I started rebuilding my life after a volcanic event that happened in 2012, when I divorced my ex-wife. It was a difficult situation for everyone involved, and I don’t blame anyone for my actions. I hurt a lot of people including, and maybe most importantly, my ex-wife. This was the difficult beginnings of my rebuilding my life. Let’s start with $136,000.
My ex-wife and I had an equal split when we parted ways. I didn’t think we had any shared assets so I thought this made sense. I was wrestling with some unresolved childhood trauma, but that aside I discovered I was in $85,000 of student loan debt and $40,000 in credit cards. I would later acquire about another $20K in medical debt I got after crashing two cars, flipping one on the highway because I found out I had epilepsy the hard way. This raised my debt to a grand total of $146K.
I also took out double what my education costs. I didn’t know how to budget then and I was spending the surplus on living expenses for me and my ex. She was working as well, but we never spoke about… well about anything really. We ran two different households and she even said once that we felt more like roommates than lovers. She was right, but we brushed it off because we didn’t know any better.
Fast forward to February 2025, I had paid off about $126K of my debt leaving me with only $36K in student loans. If you’re doing the math you’ll have noticed that there’s about $10K missing. The only thing that pisses me off more than the medical debt (I’ll explain that later) is the $10K+ in interest I accrued WHILE paying off my debt. As my friend Melba would say, “is no bueno”. But I started a new career at Mass General Brigham, Salem Hospital, (MGB) and thought all my troubles were in the past.
Fresh Out the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Before I started at MGB I was working at my local Starbucks. I was making above minimum wage, had good benefits, including a 401k, reasonable health insurance at about $125 a month, and I couldn’t have asked for a better team to work with. But I had plans and thought that working for MGB would help me get my writing career off the ground. So I said good-bye to my co-workers and started off afresh, parttime at MGB as a float-pool secretary.
My Mismanagement
When I got there, the people I worked with on the floors were not only good human beings, but also funny as hell. There were only a few people and floors I had issues with which I’ll go into later, but over all the people there were great. Except some of the management.
My first meeting with my supervisor was with her and two other of her supervisees. She told us she was directly managing roughly 100 people, and needed to be brief. We chatted, it was amicable. She told me it was Ok that I wore a bandana because the women were allowed, to as long as I didn’t wear mine like 2pac (my words), which I thought was sexist but went with it. We parted ways and I didn’t feel any way about it.
About a month later she told me that I’d have a new supervisor. I’m not sure why, something about restructuring, but I was happy for them because no one should be asked to directly manage 100 people. I met my new supervisor in passing, we exchanged pleasantries, names, but she said that I needed more training because they were given feedback about my performance. This was news to me and I thought it was odd because I had gotten positive feedback from those who trained me and the work was easy enough. But I assumed we’d talk about it in the future so I wasn’t overly concerned.
A month or so later, I was told that I had a new supervisor. That’s three in the period of a few months. I was not told why, but I thought maybe this was the plan all along. That my second supervisor was a stopgap till they restructure things. My third supervisor is supper sweet with a kind heart, so I was glad to finally land somewhere stable.
The Golden Years… Months
For about three months things were running smoothly. I got into the rhythm, learned how to do the job and do it well. I even updated the phone directory list. Each floor had a different list of outdated extensions, so I compiled them all. There are roughly 300+ extensions. I also started to notice the culture on each floor was different. This would have been fine if it were just personalities, but it was also in practice. I thought this was strange because in my mind, things would run so much more smoothly if they all got on the same page.
I suggested to my supervisor that all the float secretaries get together and share their knowledge, so at least the admin team could be congruent. But I got no response and thought I could make an impact, however small, by example. Then things went south.
Getting Thrown Under the Bus
Floor one was a difficult floor to work on. The tone was set on this floor for me one day after my training ended, and I was running things solo. Before I begin, I want to say about my street cred.
I worked in the food and social work industries for 25+ years. One job I had was baking at a flatbread in Salem Ma. I was baking pizza’s on a woodfired oven that got up to 1,000° during the Halloween season, doing about 1,000 covers (or people if you’re not familiar with restaurant terms) a night. I was also assembling and running pies at the same time. It was one of the funnest jobs I’ve ever had. The team was amazing and you felt accomplished afterwards.
I also worked on Mass & Cass, housing the chronically homeless/drug addicted during the opioid epidemic right after the mayor tried to push the homeless out of the city. That was a mess. We were literally stepping over dead bodies with syringes sticking out of various body parts. The streets were littered with bodies. One person I walked by was moving like one of those wind-sock puppets, screaming gibberish at the top of his lungs, and clutching two fists full of syringes. The struggle was real and the turnover rate was impressive for social workers there. I know something about pressure.
During a busy shift on floor one, I was hustling. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I needed some questions answered by a doctor. He had signed off on something I was uncertain about, was walking by, so I chased him down to ask them to clarify the issue. I got his attention, made direct eye contact and asked him my question. He then turned around an walked away, ignoring me. I was floored. I figured out what to do, but it took some doing.
Later, when things slowed down, the Dr. was talking with a colleague. He said to them as I approached, “Adam (me) got a taste of how busy things get on this floor, didn’t cha” in a mocking tone. To which I replied, “I asked you a direct question, you ignored me, and walked away”, and then it was my turn to walk away.
The Bus Keeps Rolling
A few months later on the same floor I was working 7am-11pm, a 16 Hour shift, to pick up extra hours because I was still struggling to make ends meet. Even though I was making $21.75 and hour, much more than my previous job, but was still struggling which was mostly due to my health insurance costing around $325 a month. Did I mention I work for the hospital whose health insurance I was purchasing? I already didn’t like working that floor because it was a hostile working environment aside from my run in with the above doctor. There was a consistent flow of insults, mean natured conversations and slights. I did my best to keep my head down, do my job and get out.
That night, the same doctor who I had trouble with before asked me to put in a neuro consult for a patient. Those are a big deal and need to be put in within two hours or else lives can be lost is my understanding. However when I looked for the consult, one had been put in already, but there was no new one to put in. I tried paging the doctor multiple times but without answer. It was well past the two hour limit when I saw him again, so I asked them about the consult.
Having epilepsy myself, I understand how dangerous it can be. For context, I once had a seizure and fell into the subway pit at State St. in Boston. It’s not unusual for a patient to have multiple consults, so I wanted to be certain. He turned to me and said, “I don’t know. I tell the secretary, the secretary puts it in. Not my job.” before he walked away. Again, I was floored.
I was used to this behavior from the nurses and charge nurse on floor one, but this involved somebodies life. I reached out to every manager I could and they told me that they either didn’t know what to do, or to reach out to my supervisor, who also didn’t know what to do. Except one person who told me to write a safety report, which I had to figure out how how to do on my own after I emailed someone who told me how. The details are a little fuzzy because I sent so many emails, but I got it in.
Much later I overheard one of the heads of the doctors consoling a family who had a bad experience with floor one and thought this would be a good time to refresh his memory about the safety incident. They were supper nice, but probably as overextended as my previous supervisors. He asked if it was about the doctor who was being rude to me, glancing over the safety event. By now I was used to this behavior, so I said sure, let me know if you need anything and we parted ways politely. My dad would call this benign neglect, but like I said they were kind, just clearly over worked.
That Damn Bus…
Two days earlier on floor one, before the safety event with the doctor, I arrived for my shift and started updating the patient board/responder. The patient board is as it sounds; It is a list of patients, who their doctor is, which room they are in, who the nurse is, and the nurses aid who is supporting the nurse. I had done something like this at the adolescent residential for teens in state custody that I worked for in my 20’s. We updated it every shift and it’s important because it gets busy, and if someone calls a critical, the emergency responders need to know this information at a glance. The doctors change weekly and we update them on Wednesday mornings. However, it was Thursday morning, two shifts had passed and the doctors had not been updated.
This was before the incident with the doctor about the consult on the same floor so I still had more faith that things would be taken care of. I told the charge nurse and a floor supervisor who was helping floor one because their floor manager was away. I later filed a safety report about the issue. I hadn’t heard anything about it for a few months until I spoke with my manager about me getting a PIP, or performance improvement plan.
Is Their Anyone I Can Talk to?
I was told by my manager that I was being put on a PIP for an unspecified reason. I told her that I didn’t do anything wrong, but that fell on deaf ears. I sent multiple emails to clarify, but again, received no direct response. Or from any of my emails for that matter. But I persisted regardless.
Let’s back it up a bit. While I was working on another floor, floor three, I spoke with my first supervisor about the charge nurse there. I told her that the charge was so burnt out that I was worried about the safety of the patients. For example, when I asked him about what time something was happening he told me it was under a pile of papers. For reference the charge nurse also told me stories about how when he was a farmer in the Philippines he had to kill poisonous snakes while carrying 150# bags of rice. In my 20’s when I baked I could barely carry a 100#s of flour. But to kill life threatening snakes while doing it? That’s next level. Impressive, yes. But would you want someone giving you meds if they were so burnt out they couldn’t tell the difference between a piece of paper and the time? As they would say on the floors, he was not alert and oriented. My old manager brushed it off saying that’s just how it is.
So I went higher on the chain. I spoke with my first old manager’s boss about everything. From the PIP and my training, to the neuro consult, floor one and the confused charge nurse. However, I was stonewalled. They looked at me, nodded, asked a few polite questions, but showed no concern. Or at least concern equal to the gravity of the situation. He did however tell me that it wasn’t unusual for supervisors at MGB to directly manage 100+ employees without batting an eye. I left not knowing what to do. Then I talked with my current manager again who told me I was getting a warning.
The Warning?
When I spoke with her, she had a laundry list of offences that people were bring against me. There was the extended training issue which I knew about, but also that there was an unspecified safety concern on a floor, floor one said I didn’t know how to update the patient board, and that both floor one and the confused charge said that I left the floor without telling anyone. These were all people and floors I brought up concerns about and it felt like retaliation.
None of these allegations are true, and I refuted them all. I sent more emails requesting the exact times, days, people involved and any other details about my transgressions. I did not get a response.
More Debt
Let’s jump tracks for a second to when I recently got sick and needed to take some time off. I tried to work through being sick because like the overworked charge nurse I think I’m more capable of handling things than I really am. But one morning I woke up with a numb arm, some confusion and balance issues. I thought I might be having a stroke so I went the the closest urgent care where they sent me to MGB Salem Hospital. I was given a $40 co-pay, and they got me to the ER in under an hour.
But when I got to MGB I waited in their ER for sixish hours, and another one or two hours in the ED. The ED is a room inside the emergency department. The ER is the room where everybody waits, and the rooms where patients are seen are called the ED. It wasn’t as bad as the waiting room at BMC’s methadone clinic on Mass and Cass, but I also thought I might be having a stroke. When I work on the medicine floors in the hospital we call a “code stroke standby” if we think someone is having a stroke, and the stat nurses and a whole team of nurses and doctors are there in minutes. I was there seven hours.
They sent me home without running any tests, just a few questions and a flu swab. I got the COVID swab at Urgent care who were more professional and quicker to react. If that wasn’t bad enough, when they presented me with the bill. It was a $300 copay. Not to mention last time I went to the ER I was charged about $1,100 by Tufts, and MGB $820 for a follow up.
Ok, remember the $20K I told you about? If you’re doing the math, that’s about $2,200 for my recent visits. Add that to the $20K I already paid off, that’s $22,200. The average doctor in MA makes about $237K, but can range as high as $720K. I make about $40K a year. Get ready for this, if an average doctor and I had my medical debt and they were hourly and working parttime 36 hours, what I work, with their pay it would take them just under five weeks to pay it off if they put all their earnings toward the debt. It would take me roughly six and a half to seven months to do the same.
But don’t forget, I also have bills to pay, and let’s not forget that MGB owns the insurance company I’m using. On what MGB pays me it would take me roughly two to three years to pay down. And they charge me $325 a month for insurance, and I’m on the cheapest plan. Not to mention I have to pay $4K deductible. I’ll let you know how much the new ER bill will be. That’s the definition of usuary. Credit card companies are at least upfront about their interest. And not to mention your health is on the line.
I had no idea what to do, and was planning on talking to HR. I had been reaching out to them for about three weeks, but hadn’t gotten a definite response about talking, or meeting with anyone. So I decided to go back to Starbucks.
Taking the Hit? Or Being Taken Care Of?
I called my manager first to see what we could do and they talked me in more circles. So looked at my budget to see what I was going to do to make up the extra hours. But when I did the math, making $16.25 an hour, $5 dollars less an hour than what MGB was paying me, I’d be making about the same amount take-home. Insult to injury.
So I went back to Starbucks, talked to my old manager and when I asked him if he would take me back he said, “yeah, how many hours do you want?” I was floored. In a good way. He said he had a meeting in a week, but would reach out to me the next day. No questions asked. He said to apply online, and when I did there was a shift lead position open. Which means I’ll probably be making more than I was if I get that role. I’ll be making more take home pay, with better insurance than I would making $5 more an hour working for MGB, a hospital, that owns the insurance company they offer… And Starbucks has a 401K. MGB has a 401k with a three percent match, but I won’t be getting it because I haven’t been there a year.
That’s a Wrap
That’s my story. Please, share this story so other people who’ve experienced this type of treatment may get the courage to speak up too. Like I said, I worked with some amazing people at the hospital and I love pretty much everyone I worked with. One of which has a hilarious podcast that’s on my sites and finds page, “High Functioning, Slightly Faded”. When they introduced themselves they told me to tell them to stop talking if it was too much because she could, “literally talk to a brick wall.” 🙂 And, as always, peace, & thanks for reading 🏔️🌙:)
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