Everyone is ill sometimes. Flu, colds, stomach bugs... they're everywhere. They make you feel bad for a while, but after days or weeks you get better. Until you do, you normally take time off work. Now, here's a question. Why? What makes people stay at home when they are ill?
The first and most obvious answer is the risk of infection. It's common decency to stay at home when you're leaking germs everywhere. But what about the others? It seems that there is a general agreement that if someone feels bad or is in pain, they shouldn't have to work.
And that's OK. That's good. Unless you don't get better. or never were better in the first place.
And this is what I want to talk about. How do I make the decision to take a day off sick when I am always ill?
So, a bit of background info. I have chronic pain and chronic fatigue. As you might imagine, this makes me feel pretty rubbish all the time, very rubbish some of the time and almost OK a bit of the time. But on all this background of "meh" how do I decide if I am going to go into work or not?
Well, it isn't an exact science. Firstly, I can't infect people. Which is one of the reasons for staying home ruled out. So, my choice to take the day off comes firmly under the "I feel too awful to be expected to work category". Or does it?
Actually, when you're talking about chronic illness, a new category comes into play. This, I think of as the "pacing day".
Pacing can be a difficult concept to grasp. Basically, people who are chronically ill still have to or want to do stuff. Things like going to the shop, going to uni, spending time with friends, sports. These things can cause us pain, make our fatigue go out of control, leave us barely able to move out of bed. But we still want to do them because, in our order of "important things", these rank highly.
Let me say it again. People with chronic pain choose to do things that will make our pain worse, because we think it's worth it. Because it matters.
What we do to allow us to do the things we want is pace. What that means is that we choose to not do some things to allow us to do others. This might mean we go and spend our lunch breaks sat on our own rather than chatting to our friends, so that we have the energy to get through the afternoons teaching. It might mean doing extra hydrotherapy in the week before I go sailing so that I'm less likely to hurt myself. And, when my fatigue is particularly bad, it might mean choosing to take a day off when I have nothing timetabled rather than pushing through to the end of the week and missing teaching, even if I'm not so bad that I would normally take a day off.
So, the two things that make me go off sick are feeling really bad, or feeling quite bad and needing to something energetically demanding later in the week. But what do I do when I have taken that decision?
Well, lying at home doing nothing is a good start. Sort of. It helps a bit, but actually what I normally need to do is a combination of things. Start with something with a low energy demand, then add activities that are good for my physical and mental health. Physical might be hydrotherapy or cycling, mental might involve talking to friends or shopping with my mother. Spending the whole day inside doing nothing normally means making physical problems worse, and isn't good for my mental health either.
So, a brief summary would be this. My day off ill is different from a normal day off ill, but it's no less valuable. I will probably not spend the whole day inside, but will go and do things good for my physical and mental health. The decision itself is still difficult. Every day I have to spend off feels like a failure, it reminds me that I can't do what so many people can.
And I think that's OK too. Sometimes, I need to just spend some time feeling sad. I need to think about these things, or they rot inside me and emerge as bitterness. I am a happy person, I love my life and the things I do with it. And if sometimes I need to take a day off so I can continue to enjoy it?
That's fine by me.
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