Optum reviews

My first few months with this company were rocky because I was dealing with some medical and personal issues. My performance was okay but my attendance was quite bad. My manager told me that she wanted to give me a 3 on my performance review, but her manager told her she had to bump it back down to a 2. No problem, I was put on corrective action plan and given a chance to improve. Over the next year, my attendance and performance improved. However, I was also supposed to do a "special project" to boost my standings, because performance reviews are on a bell curve and they try to give bad reviews to people who have already had bad reviews in the past. I did the project my manager suggested, but it was quite small so towards the end of the year I jumped on a much larger project. This project was much more involved and I took on a leadership role and delivered a truly incredible product in a short amount of time, receiving praise from C-level executives at the company for my hard work. When I had my performance review in March, I was told that nothing past October (5 months prior) would count towards my current performance review. My manager said she was once again asked by upper management to give me a 2, even though she said I was better at the job than others in my role and quite frankly deserved to have my pay grade raised. She directly told me: "I am supposed to put you on a corrective action plan, but there really aren't any actions to correct so we'll have to figure out what that will be for." A month after this, I was let go with no actual explanation, but it is clear that it was because of my performance review.