So. what’s the sickest you’ve been and still managed to stumble in to work like a plague victim? Mine was when I was age 19, in 1986, and had my first real office job and was frightened I would lose it if I called in sick. I contracted some mutant flu from Hell where it felt like the ends of my bones were on fire and rubbing against one another. On top of this, I didn’t have a car and (cue violins) had to walk two miles each way in the January snow to work, which lead to severe respiratory problems. In retrospect, I probably had walking pneumonia.
I went on like this for four days until I passed out at work one morning after slogging through the snow and a kind soul gathered me up, drove me to their house and watched over me for a few days. I was dreadfully ill for two more weeks but have not had the flu in any way, shape or form since (19 years!)
In late 1993, I had a nasty throat infection. Since I didn’t have health insurance, I tried the old “if I ignore it, it’ll go away” trick. Didn’t work.
I ended up going to one of those walk-in clinics. It took about four weeks to get rid of the crud.
I went back to work an hour after having had all four wisdom teeth cut out (under general anesthesia). I felt like crap, but I was scheduled to do something that no one else in the office knew how to do, so I felt obligated to be there.
When I was in grad school and working as a TA, each of us had to take turns replacing the professor for one lecture during the semester. On the day it was my turn, I woke up with a horrendous, migraine-type sinus headache that I couldn’t seem to knock out. So I delivered my first lecture to 500 intro psych students in spite of it. It actually went amazingly well and I got lots of positive comments afterward. I think the pain distracted me from being as nervous as I normally would have been.
I relocated to another state a few years later and experienced a lot of sinus-type problems. I was again at a new job and I woke up one morning with my eyes swollen shut. I managed to hold one of them open with my fingers long enough to drive to work. I looked so terrible when I got there that the President of the comapny, a notorious cheap ass, had someone drive me to urgent care and paid for it (my insurance hadn’t kicked in yet.)
When I had a job picking up the golf balls at a driving range I had the flu and still came to work for a few days. On the worst day before I finally called in sick, my temp was “emergency room” high and my vision was blacking out every few minutes. This was also on one our coldest days of the year (I think the high was around 50°) and I was sweating profusely with only a light jacket on. I also though I was having a heart attack every time someone WHACK hit the golf cart I was driving because my hearing was so sensitive. I did call in sick the next day and my boss said something like “That’s fine - we’re overstaffed anyway!” :rolleyes:
Wow, you people have got me beat by a landslide, but since I’m already here…
Went to work one morning with what I thought was a slight stomach ache. The train ride and subsequent subway ride made the fact that I had the very nauseating variety of stomach flu much more apparent, and by the time I hit the office door, I was practically crawling. I went straight to the bathroom, threw up, then crawled right back out of the office and back on the train (which was another load of fun).
On the plus side, I ended up in the hospital later in the day because it was so bad, so I felt slightly justified. :rolleyes:
If you’re willing to accept sea-sickness - the worst I’d felt but been able to function was during the March 1993 Blizzard that hit the Atlantic. I was on Virginia CGN 38, and we were doing 30 degree rolls, with the shimmy-shakes* and I saw a roll on the roll indicator in one of the control rooms when we hit about 38 degrees. The period for these rolls was about 20-30 seconds, and one third of the crew was completely incapacitated, so people were going on watch and doing things who would normally have been lying in their racks they felt so bad.
Normally I don’t get seasick, but as any sailor will tell you, there’s no one who’s immune to it. Eventually everyone will get seasick - once the rolls get bad enough. What made this particularly bad was that the storm kept following us, and we couldn’t get out of it. Anyways, I was on watch constantly tasting my last meal of dry crackers (because, dammit, it’s better to puke than have the dry heaves.) and trying to take logs on the TG’s. Perhaps the longest five hour watch of my life.
*The shimmy shakes were what happened when our two-screw vessel rolled so far as to bring one of the screws out of the water - the screw, coming out of the water would spin at high speed as the resistance of the water on it ceased, then it would slam back into the water as the roll submerged it again. This whole process would also torque the hull, so that the bow would twist away from the screw that had come out of the water. Then back again. It’s a really awful feeling, especially if one were up in the fo’castle.
During my first year of teaching (specifically October of 96) I went to work suffering from Food Poisoning. After about an hour of being on campus, I was sent home because I was pale, sweaty, and had bad cramps (the real fun stuff came when I got home). I didn’t think it was FP; I don’t know what I thought it was, but not that. I ended up taking 3 days off work (Wed, Thurs, Fri). In the 5 days that I felt the effects (nausea, runs, cramping so hard I projectile vomited), I lost 7 pounds! I also felt like someone had used my stomach as a punching bag. Mom came very close to taking me to the ER.
Turns out the culprit was a Lean Cuisine Beef and Portobello Mushroom meal that had gone out of date. It was not pulled from the shelf at Kash N Karry when it should have been, and because it had thawed and refrozen after the date, that gave it plenty of opportunity for bacteria to grow. I complained to the company and they sent me a whole bunch of coupons, which I gave to a friend. I have not visited Kash N Karry nor eaten Lean Cuisine since then, and everytime I see that meal, I feel sick.
I spent 8 1/2 months puking my guts out (hyperemesis gravidarum, for those who are interested) and working full time. I missed a handful of days to get IV fluids, but otherwise I was there, green, miserable, and running to the bathroom at least 6-8 times a day. I couldn’t even take a sip of water without it coming right back up. That sucked.
I don’t get that sick very often at all (knock on wood), so I don’t have a work story, but in college I once showed up for a play rehearsal with a nasty case of what I thought was strep throat – it turned out to be mononucleosis. I felt like death warmed over, I had a fever, and I wasn’t able to say my lines because my throat was so swollen and sore. I mostly showed up to run through the blocking, which was somewhat complicated. I was stupid, and should have stayed in my dorm room!
Side story, just 'cause I’m still proud 13 years later: I had to miss the first few nights of production, but when I was able to get back to performing the director told me that he’d never seen anyone step into a run so smoothly.
One Sunday night a few years ago, I started to get a headache. No big deal–I drank some water and figured I needed sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later and started puking, now with a splitting headache. It got so bad that all I could do was lay very, very still and get up and puke every half hour or so. I couldn’t keep water down. I called in sick that day and almost passed out during the phone call. The rest of the day was a blur of puking, diarrhea, and passing out. At one point I had a vague thought of calling an ambulance because I knew I was dehydrated and very woozy.
I went into work the next day feeling as though I’d been run over by a Mack truck to work on a project that my idiot boss could have reassigned but didn’t. I felt better as Tuesday moved into Wednesday. I went into work at 9:00 a.m. Thursday and didn’t leave until 5:00 p.m. Friday. That’s when I knew I needed a new job.
For the last three months I’ve been having teeth out, two Mondays a month in the first part of the day and going to work after I get the prescription for Vicodin. If I’ve been in pain, I couldn’t tell.
Generally, I am healthy as a horse and haven’t had more than a cold in years. Except for the occasion a couple of years back when I went to work feeling OK, and as the day wore on, I started feeling like I was fixin’ to die. Chills and sweating and I was turning green and needed to lie down, though there wasn’t anywhere but the floor of an empty office. People were saying that I looked terrible. I called my wife, and as it turned out she was experiencing the same thing. She tried to drive to come and get me, but had to turn around and go back home. I ended up taking a taxi home, and dove into bed. When I woke up it was three days later (!) and we both went to the hospital. We both had pneumonia. I was off by doctor’s orders for three weeks.
Fever and abdominal pain. I went to work anyway, as I thought it may have just been a flubug. The fever kept getting higher and my boss FORCED me to go to the ER. I thought that was just stupid, as I just had the flu.
When I was working as a camp counsellor at a sleep-away camp (no sleep + contact with children = siiiick) I came down with, on separate occasions, an ear infection and strep throat. With the strep I also had a nasty fever, which didn’t immediately respond to antibiotics.
I was the only drama counsellor there that day (everyone else had a day off) so I spent all day leading drama sessions for 6 - 13 year olds with a fever. THAT was fun. Luckily my day off was the next day, so I rode home that evening with my dad driving and lying on my mom’s lap in the backseat. Nothing like fever to revert one to infancy.
When I was sixteen I caught the summer cold from hell-a constant hacking cough that could be heard from a mile away and seemed to last ALL DAMN SUMMER.
My boss sent me home twice, both times reading me the riot act for coming in. Then my dad bitched at me when I came home for doing so.
I went to work 27 days after splitting my liver in half, incurring a major concussion, and tearing my medial collateral ligament.
I went to work the day after I drove a 3 inch corrugated roofing nail thru the base of my foot.
I went to work once feeling slightly ill and was sent home after 10 hours, because I had passed out (I got home and slept for 30 hours, straight thru).
The end of the winter semester of my junior year in college, I had an upper resperatory system infection. I ran a fever that fluctated between 102 and 104.5 for almost two weeks. I only missed one day of classes, because I went to the doctors. They told me I would be better by Christmas (it was like the 12th). I would have gone to my afternoon classes that day if I hadn’t been dragged to my room and put to bed by a friend. I went through all of my classes and took five finals in that state. I had no energy and didn’t eat for days at a time. But the doctor told the truth. The first time I was hungry was Christmas Eve. I’ve never been that sick. And I have to tell you, December in New England is the worst time to be sick ever. There had been 25 plus inches of snow the weekend before I got sick and it sleeted for days, while I waited, shivering and fever ridden for the bus to class and to my finals. God willing, I will never be that sick again. Or someone will have the sense to shoot me and put me out of my and their miseries.
Every freakin’ time I get my period. It’s bad enough to think–rather, wish–I was going to die once a month, without having to crawl out of bed, swallow as much Tylenol as I think my liver can handle, and literally sweat out nine hours of being vertical. Whee!
