I put it that way because I can use 'sick time' for preplanned medical procedures. I used sick time when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I used sick time when my mother had an procedure done at the hospital. And of course there's the more often used... calling in sick to work (or as I use it, going home early because I'm sick).
Now I know everybody is an individual and comparing something like this to other coworkers isn't exactly a good idea. But it's about all I have. My coworkers have a LOT of sick time built up. Enough so that when we're fully staffed and slow they'll use their sick time to go home early instead of their annual leave. They do it regularly enough that our supervisor would ask 'OK, who has a headache?' instead of 'OK, who wants to go home?'.
Many of them also have long term disability and that comes in two price points. You pay full price for it until you have 130 hours of sick time in the bank, then you get a steep discount. If you never used sick time, that should take you about a year to build up. Most of my coworkers have that steep discount as they've collected well over 130 hours of sick time.
Me? I have a little less than 8 hours of sick time right now. I checked just the other day and it was at 8.2 hours. I'm owed the 4 hours from last pay period (it just hasn't showed up in the system yet) so that would put me at 12.2 hours. BUT I went home after only a half hour on Friday with a migraine, taking that back down to 4.7 hours of sick leave remaining. It would be simplistic to simply say I call into work sick once a month and therefore eat up all my sick time that way... but I don't do that. I go to work, try to work, and when I see that I can't, I go home early using sick time.
That's not normal. That's not good.
Before I transferred to this job two and a half years ago I had about 30 hours of sick time. Yea, I was sick at my previous job too, but not nearly as much as I am here. The main reason I use sick time is my migraines. Now as I teach at work, a migraine isn't simply a bad headache. It's a pet peeve of mine... it's NOT just a bad headache. A headache is often PART of a migraine, but it's not the only part. For me the symptoms often include; severe headache, sensitivity to light, sensitivity to sound, vision blurring, a slowing of my thought process. That last one is kind of hard to explain. Simple repetitive tasks get confusing. I can't rely on muscle memory as it will fail me. A simple example... I'll get into my car to go home from work with a bad migraine, and I'll have trouble starting the car. It's not difficult and I don't even have to think about it when I do it most days. Step on the brake, push the start button, turn the shifter dial to R, back out of the parking spot. But when I have a bad migraine, I'll just fail at it.
Obviously, I can't work when that's happening. I can't have that failure to perform basic tasks while I'm drawing up insulin for one of my patients. That could literally lead to death. So I do the responsible thing and go home.
Maybe my migraines are just getting more frequent or more intense. But my 'fuck work' attitude is coming from more than frequent migraines that are eating up all of my sick leave. I'm having more headaches. Not migraines... just headaches. I'll be sitting at the computer in the morning and feeling fine. I'll take a shower and get cleaned up for work and feel fine. I'll eat breakfast/lunch and feel fine. I'll watch a bit of TV and feel fine. I'll get changed into my scrubs... and a headache will start up. 10 minutes later I'm pulling out of the driveway and my headache is really starting to sing. When I get to work I pop a couple acetaminophen tablets and an ibuprofen tablet and hope that it kills it or at least stops the headache from getting worse.
It's gotten to the point that I'm taking that Tylenol and Motrin combination two or three times a week and will even take it BEFORE I leave for work once a week. On days that I don't work? Nothing. I don't get that headache at 10am every day. When I drove down to Texas and back.... six days off of work... I took Tylenol once. One headache. And the Tylenol eliminated the headache, not just reduced it and made it bearable as will happen at work.
I can't imagine it's stress. Seriously, while this job has some stress I wouldn't call it a stressful job. There's problems with some co-workers, but nothing that elevates to this level.
And then one other way it's impacting my life. When I get home a little after seven o'clock I'll eat dinner then start my evening. Sometimes that's a movie, sometimes that's TV, sometimes that's a game on the computer, but most often that's logging into D+X. But not recently. Not for the past couple months. In that timeframe I've been too frustrated after work. I just sit in front of the boob toob not really watching it while I flick through Google News or Facebook on my iPad.
I'm not really sure what to do about it. Maybe it's staffing... we're short a nurse and that certainly leads to frustration at the end of the day. Maybe it's the fact that this job lacks the responsibility and importance of my last job. Maybe it's the fact that I only have a 10 minute drive to and from work. The frustrating thing is that I can't come up with a solution without knowing what the problem is.
And that leads me even further into the 'fuck work' mentality.
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