First is my current situation. It was 16 days ago that I started to feel ill on a Thursday and by Friday morning I made a doctor's appointment. Sure enough I already had pneumonia! I was really sick and my work schedule was that I was supposed to take a red-eye flight to Boston early that Sunday morning for an important meeting. At that point it was a no brainier that I could not go. No one else from my office was available to attend so no one went. I was able to cancel my hotel reservation and defer the air travel to another ticket. Being that sick made the decision easy for me. Our family doctor even called on that Saturday to check up on me. More meds were ordered up on Sunday when my wife called him at home.
I stayed home the entire next week coughing and coughing to the point I gave myself a hernia and pulled a muscle in my stomach. Am I lucky or what? By that next Friday I had been to the doctor twice more and was starting to feel better.
The following Monday I called in for a couple of conference calls and then I had another important meeting in Salem, Ore., that I had committed to being on a panel. Four hundred mile round trip down and back and I was now headed in a reverse direction, ending up with a sinus infection when I saw the doctor again the Thursday after doing a presentation on Tuesday. One somewhat funny incident happened on the Wednesday when I took the train into work in Seattle. On the way home I started coughing and all my seatmates quickly abandoned ship like I had the plague and left me to myself and my coughing.
Which brings me to the point of this blog post: When do you press on and when do you pull back when you are sick and needing to get things done at work?
The "by the book" answer is if you are sick, you should stay home so as not to infect others. I have to say that I've not always been a good follower of that advice. I don't go into work because I want to make others sick, but I need to get things done and I've always been a doer. The one thing that has been an issue for me, both in the Army and emergency management, is losing my voice. In the Army, I remember whispering commands to my Jeep driver for him to relay over the radio during field exercises. If you can't talk, it is hard to be effective during an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) activation, but I've done it.
We all know that one maxim of EOC activations is that after about 10 days everyone is getting sick. Maybe because of stress and being cooped up in a single room with lots of people. When we designed the King County ECC, I told the engineers that I wanted the HVAC system to move twice as much air as required to help with this air exchange and people being sick during a disaster.
The other side of the coin is people who have a sore throat and call in "sick." I'm not saying you need to be on death's door (or as sick as I was and not able to travel to Boston) before not going into work, but where is that balance? I have to admit that after 45 years of work experience I've not found it. The reality of it is as I get older I am, of course, more prime to get really sick (by the way I did get the flu shot and a pneumonia shot last fall).
My trip to Salem could have been put off. They had plenty of other panelists, and the trip certainly set me way back. The night before the event in my hotel room I knew I should not have traveled. In the morning it was worse, but I rallied and put on my best face and cough for the event. Great connections were made, and it had been on my list of things to do for a long time. When would the next opportunity come if I did not go?
My wife has been hounding me the past few days to "take it easy." We have a long planned trip coming up and she says, "I'll put a plastic bag over your head if you are coughing on the plane."
One thing I'm going to try and do is not come back so "full bore" after being sick and not fully recovered. It goes against my nature and past behavior, but I'm thinking I'll need to modify my actions to come in line with my physical capabilities.
That said, I have not coughed for about five minutes!
