I think it’s really sad that when I’m sick my first concern is “if I’m sick any more often I’m gonna get fired”. I haven’t even called off sick that many times, but proportionally I’ve missed a lot of days for how long I’ve been with my company. I’ve been working there for around 4 months now, and have missed around 2 and a half weeks of workdays. The first was a stomach issue, the second was 2 weeks for getting Covid-19 (I stayed home for 2 weeks due to company policy, despite CDC regulations saying I can return after 5) then last Thursday after my return I had a flare up of covid like symptoms and an inability to breathe which took out the end of last week. Then this morning I started to vomit blood so I needed to take one last day to really rest up.
My company, despite how I described the toxic work environment in another post, has been really accommodating to all of this all things considered. I don’t get paid sick leave for the covid nor do I have paid vacation or sick days to cover my other sick days, but they haven’t held my sicknesses against me so far and do have some genuine concern for my well-being. It’s a comfort, but I worry about when too much will break the camels back, I don’t take sick days just because, I had almost perfect attendance to every year in school because I only took sick days for absolute emergencies, so I have some sort of bias against me needing time.
But why do I have to feel scared that being sick will get me fired? I’m planning to move to working remotely for housing reasons and personal medical reasons (as I need the income and I can’t go to work with any covid like symptoms per policy) but I’m angry that somewhere along the system I had the fear implanted in me that being sick is next to a crime. I’m inclined to believe that it started from school since I was imparted with the parenting that some sicknesses aren’t sick enough to really care, but they never really drew a line at where the “sick enough” was. I’ve gone to school with pneumonia, 105 fevers, blinding pain that rendered me useless, unaddressed broken wrists and otherwise. If it was still there later that day, then apparently I was sick enough. But all it did was delay which day I actually took off.
Why do we let this happen to us? I know that we can’t call off for every little sniffle and headache, but when I’m throwing up blood and all I can think of is “man my manager is gonna hate me for this one”, I think that constitutes a bigger problem.