I’m on a paid sick leave right now and not even terribly sick. I’m sure I could’ve handled my morning shift even if it would have sucked to do physical work outside in sub-freezing temperatures while sniffling and coughing and having light fever.
Made me think though about working while sick - some people don’t get paid sick leave or feel like they are indispensable or have an inflated sense of duty about coming to work or whatever. What’s the worst case you’ve seen or done yourself? Was there any consequences?
Not exactly on point but in the spirit of the OP question:
I worked with a woman who was pregnant. In fact, she was due the next day. She worked a 12-hour shift (without complaining), then drove herself to a hospital after clocking out and gave birth two hours later.
She was a strange, largely unlikable woman, but I am in awe that she did that.
mmm
I’d been off work sick with some sort of virus and thought I was well enough to return, but I got halfway through the morning and felt like I was getting worse - so I went home, but home was at the end of a 1.5 hour commute by train and foot - and I had really let it go too far - on the train, I started to get severe nausea, pins and needles/coldness in my extremities, plus tunnel vision - I felt like I was going to pass out at any moment. I have no memory of walking the two miles home from the station, but I somehow got home and got myself into bed with my clothes and shoes still on.
I have a deal with myself, that if I work “sick” I earn a day off when I can enjoy it.*
So, I’ve worked with viral gastroenteritis that had me taking vomit breaks, very high fevers, etc. I returned to work 48 hours after a heart attack and stent placement, instead of waiting for my doctor’s ok at my one week follow up. Basically, I go to work if I’m not hospitalized.
But, I take days off when I’m healthy equal to the number of days I should have taken off while sick and I have a very good time.
*I’m not saying this is a “good” think, but it’s worked for me.
Not work, but when I was in college, I woke up one morning feeling lousy, but really didn’t want to miss classes, there was a lot going on. I made it through my first period class. About 20 minutes into 2nd period, I raised my hand and said “is there homework, I have to get out of here, I’m really not feeling well.” The professor was shocked, smiled, and said, “in 20 years of teaching no one has ever done that, feel better.” Long one short, I had a 104 fever and slept for about two days straight. When I got back, the professor made a point of asking how I was.
Tried to work one day while coming down with the flu. I don’t even remember the end of the day, I managed to get some work done but returning to work a few days later found out I’d mostly written a lot of useless notes about a problem I was working on.
Warehouse – you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Worse I ever saw was a guy wrapping an ACE bandage around his arm in the men’s room; he fell in the parking lot before work and thought he had broken his arm. After work he went to a doc-in-a-box and confirmed that the bone was actually broken and had it set and cast. He was back the next day doing small-sort/small packages.
Worse I did personally was a dislocated wrist. I got a friend to help we snap it back into place and continued my shift. I would not do it again.
We get a lot of fevers and flu cases but most are pretty obvious and easy to avoid.
Once my wife was gone out of the country for few weeks, and came home to find me with pneumonia. She immediately phoned my boss to tell him I would not be in the next morning, and he said “I don’t know why he kept coming to work anyway.” I was salaried, so pay was not an issue.
I was on a business trip to Sulawesi a few years ago. The client had requested (and paid-for) me to come and train their guys how to use my company’s equipment. I had spent a couple of days in Jakarta before getting there and I ended up with the H1N1 flu beginning to manifest itself as we boarded the flight to Makassar. By the time we landed in Soroako, I was a sick puppy. However, I had no choice but to carry-on with the training. My head was draining like a water faucet and I was working through cyclic bouts of fever-induced frustration and euphoria.
I knew I’d be okay but I hated the fact that I was spreading the germs to all in my midst. At the time, I just thought I had a really bad head cold but my colleague went to hospital the next week where they diagnosed him with the H1N1.
I had a hell of a time finding anything like benedryl over there. I ended-up with some type of cough-syrup that had diphenhydramine in it. Benedryl is now a primary component of my travel medicine pouch.
Quality checking a proposal - On Christmas day - with pneumonia. The night before a thief had broken the window behind my desk, and there was cold air leaking in past the plastic I taped up over it.
I was coughing so hard that at one point I completely messed up some formatting when my forehead hit the keyboard as I doubled over. It was a 20-hour day and I didn’t see daylight for a week afterward, and it turned in pleurisy.
We won the work though, so another year of employment for me! I was so . . . er . . . happy . . .
I was just a year or so into starting my own Web development business. My partner and I had worked for most of that time building a new site for a really huge client, a big plastics company. I was like 22 or 23, zero experience in my field and not the person who was supposed to be doing server-level support.
It was time to launch the site. For some reason my partner was not available. I think some sort of family vacation, I don’t even know. That’s the kind of stupid shit he does. It was my job to launch it.
I got the stomach flu. Bad. The first time ever, too so I had no idea what way going on. Emptying from both ends and a terrible fever.
I was working from home (normally worked from my partner’s house). The site got launched but…the internet at my house went down. Of course, there were problems with the site that needed fixed as they were found. Phone ringing off the hook. No way to fix them without internet.
I had to drive to my boyfriend’s house a half hour away (trying not to shit myself) and do the work from there, between bouts of being stuck on the toilet and halucinating on the couch.
The site went up and 15+ years later they are still our client. Whew.
I’ll guarantee you my partner has no recollection of this. I’m sure he had a lovely time away.
The day before I was scheduled to be off for two weeks after surgery, I woke up with a horrible stomach pain.
I drove myself to the hospital, threw up in the parking lot, and hobbled into the ER. It turns out I was passing a kidney stone.
Got the really nice IV drugs, then around lunch time I drove myself to work. I was going to be off for two weeks and there was stuff I had to get done.
Boy, was my team mad at me when I showed up. I stayed for about an hour, went home, peed and caught the damn stone.
I showed my surgeon a picture the next day and she was most impressed. If that never happens again it will be too soon.
When I was in graduate school I was a teaching assistant for a large Psych 101 course. The professor required each TA to do a lecture. I was terrified at the prospect–I’d never done a lecture and there were about 500 students in the course. The morning of the class I woke up with a severe, migraine-style headache. For me, headaches usually got my stomach involved, too, and I had to stop several times on the way to the lecture hall to vomit in the bushes.
The strangest part was that, somehow, being in that much pain took away all the stage fright and I completely nailed it. Got a lot of compliments afterwards on how well I had done.
I’m not sure I would recommend that approach to everyone, though.
Had an evening-shift job waiting on call to go repair faulty ATMs, back when they were new, fragile and it was worth keeping crews on standby to go fix simple problems and keep their uptime high. (Otherwise, a jam would take the machine out of service until the bank personnel got there in the morning.) Some nights we ran like hell; others we never left the office.
Went in with what was probably the flu and a 102-3 fever. Slept on the nice cool carpet with my face under a chair to block the light. The other team handled both calls that night, mostly out of boredom, and I bought the pizza. But I was only semi-conscious most of the time.
My business partner somehow got it in his mind that he was a spartan who could withstand anything and wait out any sickness. He was sick at work every day for two months. Repeated attempts to send him home were met with deaf ears.
The result? He finally went to a doctor who immediately sent him to the hospital.
Sever Pneumonia so bad that at one point his chances of survival were less than 50%. Collapsed lungs, heart attack and intubated and put into a coma for over 30 days.
Last year, I was in the hospital for two weeks. Thought I was just popping in for a quick procedure that wouldn’t require me to stay overnight, so when I was admitted, it was quite the surprise.
Not knowing how long I’d be there, I had a friend go to my apartment and get my laptop so I could work remotely.
What was going to be a stay of a few days ended up lasting 14, due to a reaction to the medicine they’d provided.
I was actually more productive from that bed than I was in the office, due to being awoken at 4 am, and not having anything else to do all day.
I probably earned more “work cred” and accolades / respect from that than anything else I’ve done at this job.
I work alternating days and nights. One Friday morning I was feeling a bit off but decided I would probably feel fine when I awoke that evening to go to work for a night shift. And, hey, we were short handed. I need to just suck it up and go work.
I woke up feeling awful. And it was too late to call sick at that point. And I went to work a Friday night shift at a 9-1-1 center. And I was working with only one other colleague on shift. And I had laryngitis.