‘I Thought I was Getting State Paid Leave. Then My Claim Got Rejected’
glamour.comAs told to Photography by Tiffany Mrotek, 35, is director of career pathways at American Forests. She lives in Reston, Virginia, with her husband, Andrew, and her two children, Porter, three, and Harvey, three months.
She had planned to take Washington, DC, state paid leave, combined with disability and some additional topped-up paid leave from work, in order to have 16 weeks off work—about a month of which was to be unpaid.Return to the main article.The run-up to Harvey’s birth was incredibly stressful.
While she was in the womb, the doctors discovered she had a heart defect, and also that she wasn’t growing as they’d expected.
They were concerned that she had a genetic disorder—22q11.2 deletion syndrome, or DiGeorge syndrome. The worst-case scenario for a child with this is a life expectancy of two years, and while we didn’t think that was the case with Harvey because she had been healthy in utero otherwise, the doctors wouldn’t be able to test for it, or know the severity of symptoms, until she was born.Life just felt like a whirlwind.
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