When Being Fired Felt Like Freedom

Sharisse Stephenson
Dec 31, 2025
2 min read

When I opened the termination letter from Bon Secours, most people would expect me to crumble.

Instead, in a strange, fierce way, I felt relief.

Relief because I was finally out of a workplace that treated safety like a performance metric and punished anyone brave enough to ask for basic accommodations. Relief because I no longer had to choose between my health and feeding myself. Relief because the slow, institutional strangling had finally stopped.

But that relief came with a cost — and it wasn’t mine alone.

It was paid by patients.

How “For Cause” Became a Weapon

Bon Secours fired me “for cause” for doing 1099 clinical work while I was on ADA leave.

On paper, that sounds neat and justified.

In reality, the timeline tells a different story.

I was placed on leave after asking for a safe workplace and a basic accommodation. Their disability insurer refused to pay me. I was locked out of clinical systems and denied a meaningful path to return to work. When survival required me to accept clinical work elsewhere, they used that necessity as the pretext to terminate me — and then demanded repayment on top of it.

That sequence isn’t accidental.

It’s a pattern.

One designed to silence clinicians who raise concerns, ask for help, or refuse to quietly absorb harm.

Freedom for Me, Harm for the Community

For me, the termination was a kind of freedom.

I am free from daily humiliation.

Free from being gaslit.

Free from an environment that actively degraded my health and my ability to care for patients.

But that freedom came at the expense of the community.

My patients no longer have a neurologist.

The emergency department has had days without neurology coverage.

Appointments that already took months to schedule are pushed even further out.

Continuity of care has been shattered.

This is the ugly calculus corporate healthcare refuses to acknowledge:

When you silence clinicians, patients pay the price.

Executives call it “risk mitigation.

”Patients experience it as abandonment.

Why I’m Sharing the Receipts

I’m not done.

I will keep documenting.

I will keep filing.

I will keep speaking.

I’m sharing my termination letter (redacted for personal contact information) because receipts are the only language large systems respect. This isn’t about spite. It’s about transparency — and about making visible the real consequences of retaliation.

Silence protects institutions.

Speaking protects patients.