My son, who is constantly in and out of the hospital) is currently in critical condition due to respiratory failure (he’s going to pull through), and my job got me gift baskets and made a video of the entire staff wishing my son well. Additionally, they’ve allowed me to take unpaid leave without consequence to take care of my boy.
My wife’s job, on the other hand, has refused to let her take off unpaid and has ordered her to use all of her vacation time to tend to him, which would make us need to cancel both of our family vacations this year. To avoid this, she’s literally working on her laptop by his bedside.
As if this wasn’t a big enough disgrace, they had a meeting today to let her know that her lack of productivity while my son was in the hospital has been inconveniencing her team, and that she needs to start logging everything she does in the hospital and bring it to a meeting with HR next week. So while we didn’t even know if our child was going to live, her bosses were discussing her lack of productivity. They also are denying her request to work from home three days a week which would allow us to pull our son from daycare where he keeps getting gravely ill.
She makes good money, but I told her that if the meeting goes poorly, I’ll support her completely if she just walks out.
Edit:
For folks asking about FMLA, her company requires that she burn every PTO day before allowing her to use it, and they want documented proof every instance where we would use FMLA. So even if she did file for it, it would wipe out our summer vacation, our Christmas vacation, mental health days, and anything else she desperately needs after the last six months we’ve had