The Family Medical Leave Act was made to provide all full time employees with a way to handle major medical issues for themselves of an immediate family member. This is for any full time employee who has worked for full time for a minimum of one full year. It cant be 11 months and 20 days even, it must be the full year. An employee is granted up to 12 weeks of time off. Very few companies are nice enough to pay their employees for the full 12 weeks.

Eric is right, you can not be terminated before you exhaust the 12 weeks of FMLA. A good friend of mine recently experienced the same thing when she hit week number 13. She was then fired for her attendance after being a model employee for 7 years. In todays economy it seems like all employers are tightening their belts and anyone who becomes a potential risk to the employer is let go. Most businesses if they want to get rid of someone they will work to find a reason to fire them, even if they need to build several weeks of documentation to do it.
In my situation, I was very lucky my employer paid me my whole salary for 13 weeks. After the 13 weeks, I was paid half pay for the rest of the time I was off. Their catch was I needed to return to work before it became a full year off. After that my company would have worked with social security for permanent disability. My medical situation was severe enough to force me to remain home for 11.5 months before I tried to return part time. As luck would have it my job title was overstaffed and they offered a buyout to leave. Since I was not physically able to do my job anymore, I took the buyout and left. After going thru the FMLA paperwork thru 3 rounds of OC, I learned quite alot about FMLA guidelines. I also had previously been the one to hire/fire for 12+ years in the jobs before Verizon. I had also been a union steward for several years so went into enough dismissal grievance meetings and heard alot more info than I wanted to about how people would attempt to get around the FMLA guidelines.

I wish you all the best with finding another job. If you are physically able to work you may want to apply for unemployment. It doesnt hurt to apply, you can now do it right online. The worst that can happen is they deny you and you need to then file an appeal. At least if you get unemployment it would be something coming in while you are searching for a new job. Good luck!!!