Wages of Imbalance

By Olive L. Sullivan

A few weeks ago I posed a question about trying to cram 70 hours of life into the far fewer hours left over after a 10-hour day at a desk and in a car. What happens when you can’t find balance between your job and the rest of your life?

I found out that what happens is you get sick.

I haven’t had more than a slight cold in several years, but this year, wham! I was laid flat out for two days. My body was telling me to slow down and rest. The surprising thing is that I listened.

In the newspaper business, a little thing like pneumonia isn’t supposed to slow you down. I’m sure that’s true in many other workplaces as well. How many times has a colleague shown up at the office with a hacking cough, a fever, strep throat? I bet you’ve done it yourself. As a reporter, if you’re ambulatory at all, you’re supposed to be working. You can at least sit at a desk and make calls, right? You can get a story in, even if it’s not a scoop worthy of the front page. If nothing else, you can do a lifestyle report on the cold and flu epidemic! But you show up, pop cold meds, and get on with it.

The result is that the work gets done, albeit at a lower standard, and whatever you’ve got not only lingers with you, it decimates the rest of the office until it resembles a tuberculosis ward more than a newsroom or other place of business.

Two things conspired to make it easy for me to stay home and get well. One is that I take a medication that prevents me from using any form of antihistamine. Nearly any over the counter cold remedy you choose is prohibited. I can get prescription cough syrup, but I can’t pop Dayquil or Sudafed or any of those other pills that make you feel well enough to go to work, even if you should be home resting. Without the OTC remedies, you truly feel your illness.

The second thing is that my boss is a bit of a germophobe. She has good reason; as the comptroller of our manufacturing plant, she is the only one who understands the NAFTA shipping regulations. She deals with all the international clients personally, and without her, the place would literally grind to a halt. So she can’t afford to get sick. When I called in, coughing, and told her I’d be in once I’d seen the doctor, she didn’t hesitate. “Stay home,” she said.

The doctor concurred, and I did. I e-mailed Nancy and said I’d be in the next day. She wrote back and told me to stay home as long as I was running a fever. So I did. I had fantasies of cleaning house, writing, getting things done around the place. Instead, I spent most of my time napping and reading, getting up now and then to heat up a can of soup and down some more prescription cough syrup. My friends and relations stayed away in droves, although my boyfriend Spike was very good about calling each evening to see how I was doing. Usually, how I was doing was coughing too hard to talk on the phone, but it was a nice thought.

By the third day, I was beginning to feel guilty. In addition to missing work, I was missing a hefty chunk of a short course I was taking in Illustrator, a graphic design software I use at work and home. However, I blame my sickness on that class anyway — the girl next to me had been hacking and sneezing for a few days before I came down with my cold. The professor later told me that he felt the computer lab was a veritable Petri dish for germs. Students come to class sick because they need a good grade, they cover their mouths politely when they cough and sneeze, and then use those same germy hands to type on the keyboard that the next student then touches. When you think about it … ick.

I called Spike and suggested that I was well enough to venture out for tea at Sweet Greens, so he came to fetch me and we had a nice little visit between fits of coughing. The next day I went back to work. Given my past history of The Cough, which has included more than one attack of bronchitis working its way into pneumonia, I expected to keep coughing for months to come. One year I literally — and I have the medical records to back it up — coughed for six months. This time, within a week, I was fine. I was able to quit carrying my Halls Defense fruit drops everywhere I went, and sleep through the night without medication. I did miss out on a week’s worth of walking, but overall, it was a relatively painless bout of illness.

I began to wonder if it was so painless because I actually took my body’s cues and rested. Could it be that simple? We worry about losing income, hurting our grades, getting fired. But wouldn’t everybody be a lot better off if we stayed home when we were really sick? Wouldn’t it be nice if all businesses had a policy that allowed sick people to stay home? That might include health insurance benefits, or paid sick leave, or even just a lack of penalty if you came in with a doctor’s note. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sick people stayed home and got well, and didn’t come to work to spread their germs to the healthy? I bet the world would be a more productive place.

Well, it’s a nice dream, but I doubt even Obama can manage to make it come true. Next thing you know, I’ll be lobbying for paid nap time, because the American worker is also chronically sleep-deprived!

My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on January 12, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.