As a resident, my greatest pride was in never having missed a day for illness. I’d drag myself in and sniffle and cough through the day. Once, I’m embarrassed to admit, I trudged up York Avenue to the hospital making use of my own personal motion sickness bag every few blocks while horrified pedestrians looked on.
Now, though, I see the foolishness of this bravura. And I confront it almost daily in my primary care practice. No one can miss a day ”” a minute, even ”” of work, carpooling, volunteering, vacation, anything. “I don’t have time to be sick!” my patients wail. Everyone must soldier on, leaving sick days to those with less important things to do.
And many patients aren’t satisfied with sympathy and friendly advice. They have come to the office for that little piece of blue paper, the antibiotic prescription. “I would never ask for this under normal circumstances,” I’m told ”” except (pick one) I’m getting married tomorrow; leaving for a month in the Amazon; having 25 houseguests for the weekend.
Never mind that antibiotics are useless in treating colds and viral illnesses, and that they have their own dangers and side effects. Some doctors will write the prescription just to get on with their day.
My employer, in a fit of idiocy, once establish a policy of bonuses for perfect attendance. Which resulted in various plague victims bravely dragging themselves in to work where they could then proudly infect the rest of us. Eventually, the policy was rescinded when they realized that having plague victim zero stay home resulted in greater attendance and productivity that did the pandemic model they were promoting.
I’m grateful that Dr. Valinoti wrote this, and in such a broadly-read medium. As a fellow health care professional, I completely agree with her.
Years ago I was working in a bookstore, and one of the other employees came down with a bad case of acute bronchitis. He refused to stay home; and, at first, to see a doctor. He finally saw the doctor when the coughing got so bad he couldn’t even talk, and the boss threatened him. He infected a fellow employee and massively aggravated her underlying asthma. All the rest of us were coughed, sprayed, and spit on to some degree, and spent all of our spare time wiping sputum and bacteria off computer screens, counters, books, phones, and ourselves. It was putrid and uncalled-for, not to mention unfair to the other employees and all the customers in our store.
It’s good advice–if you are, in some way, expectorating blood and/or body fluids, and especially if you are febrile, STAY THE HECK HOME.
As a clergy wife as well as the child of two preschoolers, it often feels like we are at ground zero for every passing bug. If it comes through the kids or through the church, it is likely that we are going to get it. You just want to beg people – please stay home if you are sick! Whatever you are doing can’t be that valuable, and it is incredibly selfish exposing everyone around you to your crud!
One of my previous employers got the brilliant idea of doing away with any distinction between sick time and vacation time–and substituted something called ETO (Earned Time Off). It didn’t matter whether you were staying home because of the vacation you had planned for a year, or because you had just come down with the most infectious and virulent stream of bugs known to humankind. It all came out of the same pot of days.
Needless to say, people dragged themselves in regardless of how sick they were–because every “sick day” meant one less vacation day. Consequently, everyone ended up sick.
In a country where people are afraid for losing their jobs, of course people will drag themselves to work.
the schools harp on the perfect attendance thing too. I am proud to say our children do not have nor will ever have “perfect” attendance – we use an occasional day off to learn outside the classroom. I’m sure some people think DSS needs to visit over such choices…..