Location: Eastern Iowa
I don’t know how to even start this because I was severely depressed during the beginning but none of my documentation was fraudulent or altered.
I had worked full time at a major online retailer for over a year at this point. Full time status, not just working 40+ hours a week as a seasonal temp. My mental health, while not great in the first place, severely went down hill around the beginning of 2025. Leading me to become suicidal and I eventually went to the emergency room for such.
This is where things get confusing because of the state I was in. In march, the night I went to the emergency room, I tried to put in for an LOA and scheduled it for two weeks not knowing if I would be in in-patient care or not. The whole night was an experience but that’s neither here nor there. They gave me choice of either going home with my husband or sending me to a facility hours away. I chose to go home because I would be so far away from my support group and with no income from my job during those weeks, it would have made it difficult at best to come and get me.
In my fear of running behind on bills, I tried to cancel my leave and suck it up to go back to work but I could barely function. My manager, the awesome woman that she is, tried to send me home but couldn’t because of how this place is so compartmentalized and had not put me back on the schedule. I talked to HR and they said I was fine to go home. This wasn’t just a “Yeah, sure whatever.”, it was all documented within my files. The next day, similar happened and HR stated that since I was on leave in the system, I could stay home for the week in accordance with my return date, which I had asked to be shortened to a week.
From that point, things improved. I had gotten in contact with a psychiatrist and a therapist, put on meds and I had my psychiatrist write a doctor’s note to attach to my leave request. It seemed like it was all behind me.
Mid April, I notice an email saying that my leave is being investigated and that my doctor’s note wasn’t accepted. I jumped on it immediately to make sure everything was taken care of and submitted a doctor’s note that had my diagnosis on it, the treatment plan and the dates that needed to be covered, along with a release of information that allowed the company to contact my psychiatrist’s office directly. Apparently that’s not what my investigator wanted, said they couldn’t verify my documents and that it would be handed over to site HR.
When talking to site HR about it, everything was taken care of and I could continue to work as normal. I worked for a whole month after that, thinking things have been resolved. My medicine was working wonders for me and honestly, it was the best I had felt in years.
I then get a call from the company saying that I had been terminated for falsifying documents and that there was no appeal process to this what-so-ever. I took that to heart until I saw that someone was able to appeal and it got them their job back. When I went to do so as well and I was told it was too late and that it was off by a week.
I have tried multiple different ways to get my job back but every my documentation has been ignored and I get told that this one investigator’s say is all that matters even though it was admitted that she never got in contact with my psychiatrist or the office he works out of.
Is there anything I can do legally about this?
Old post got removed, fixed it to align with the rules. I apologize for not thinking about the company name.