I'm a hybrid worker on paper but a remote worker in practice because my boss doesn't care if I sit in a cube. On June 19 this year, I had an accident while rollerskating and shattered my tibia and fibula near my ankle. I had surgery and spent 4 days in the hospital.
I panicked about the new employee I had to train who started on the 20th, and about the system upgrade that we had planned to start. No one else was able to do the actual upgrade work, because my last coworker who did this job with me left in October. The company wouldn't offer an appropriate salary for this skillset so we never found anyone with experience, the person we did hire and only experienced the system as an end user.
So, like a dumbass, I took 5 days off work in total (most of which was spent getting traumatized in an overcrowded hospital) and was back online the next week after my accident. I was worried about the work I needed to get done and since I WFH I rationalized that I didn't need to take even short term disability.
7 weeks after my surgery, I am still in so much pain and am struggling to get a fraction done of what I used to. I finished the system upgrade (including late night weekend work on my own) and have been training my new co-worker. The rest of my team seem to have run out of patience with my injury and are bothered that I'm not the effective worker I used to be before I had titanium in my bones, 10 fresh incision scars, and fragments of my fibula stabbing me in the leg 24/7. Last week I found out that my healing is going very poorly and I may need another surgery in a few weeks.
No one has acknowledged how much effort it has been for me to come right back to work, or to do all the things that no one else had the skills to do if I had taken leave. No one even asks how my healing is going, ever. And you know what? I blame myself for forgetting that this shit is just a stupid fucking job and at the end of the day my coworkers and boss really only care if I'm pulling the majority of the team's weight like I used to. It doesn't matter if they're mostly nice or I don't want to let them down, I should have put myself and my health first and taken short term disability leave that I was entitled to.
Don't be like me, friends. Take whatever leave you can if you have an accident, regardless of how bad the timing is. And just because you work from home doesn't mean you shouldn't take disability leave or should push yourself to return to work after surgery. If I do have to have another surgery, I'm taking at least a few weeks off so I can actually get some rest. If my team is not equipped for my semi-sudden departure, it's on my boss/company and not me.