Buy HEALING at a discount
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and my publisher has made my book Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient available at a 20% discount in recognition of that. Click on the link to Workman Publishing and enter the code HEALING20 to get your discounted copy: Order HEALING here.
Illness recovery takes time
I tested positive for Covid Monday, September 19, which was four weeks ago, plus two days. At this point I am mostly OK, but still tired and my throat still sometimes hurts and I still sometimes cough. My husband and son both said it took them about four weeks to feel fully normal again after Covid and it is comforting to know that I seem to be on schedule. I also remember when I got H1N1. It took me about four weeks to feel well then, too.
I bring this up because while I felt lots of empathy for my husband and son when they were recovering, I have a much harder time generating the same amount of empathy for myself. I encouraged them to rest and take it easy until they felt better. It’s great advice, and I have been following it, but I also judge myself at the same time, which I think is at least in part because in America we have such a strong culture of labeling people as malingerers when they are actually sick.
A google search of “malingering” pulls up multiple images and cartoons, along the lines of:
In my book HEALING I mention that Australia, like many industrialized countries, requires that all employees get paid sick leave per year: four weeks for all Australians. As you may know, the United States is the only industrialized country that has no paid sick leave policy. We saw the downsides of this during Covid, when sick employees working frontline jobs often felt they had no choice but to work sick, leading to other employees getting Covid, and to staff members who were ill getting even sicker.
When I worked as a nurse, coming into the hospital when one was sick was the expectation. Many physicians and other health care workers feel that same pressure. There’s no slack in the system so employees have to show up no matter what. Many businesses in the U.S. that similarly run lean will be as demanding toward their staffs even, as we all saw, during a global pandemic.
Now I return to the idea of malingering. Are Americans uniquely suspicious that employees pretend to be sick to get out of working? Or has the aggressive capitalism of our system made it impossible to accept the reality of illness? I think it might be explanation number 2 more often than we would like to think. I remember when I was recovering from H1N1 and spoke with my hospital’s HR Department about their sick leave policy, which I said encouraged people to work sick. The staff member in HR actually told me, “We understand that people get sick; just don’t be sick when you’re scheduled to work.”
I own the bumper sticker above—it’s thumbtacked to the bulletin board in my home office and I built a column for The New York Times around it. It’s a form of sickness itself that in the richest country in the world we can’t seem to tolerate the inherent frailties of our own bodies, and the bodies of employees in particular. The fact that the problem is rampant among health care workers says something really negative about the culture of health care in our country.
For my part, I’m not working clinically now so I can be kinder to myself. I have had work to do while recovering from Covid, including giving a talk in Hershey, PA last Thursday evening and participation on an NIH panel the next day. Both went well. I explained why my voice was raspy and got on with the job. But neither was a twelve hour gig where I would be on my feet all day with few breaks, little time to eat, and very sick people to care for.
It should be obvious that the demanding work of caring for the ill needs to be done by people who are well. The health care system, such as it is, needs to summon empathy for staff. For my part, I’m giving myself time to recover from Covid and though I’m sad not to be working clinically, I do not miss the pressure to only be sick on the days when I was not scheduled to work.
I can visit your book group!
When HEALING came out, I offered to zoom in to book group discussions of it and I had my first book group meeting a couple of weeks ago. A group of hospice nurses in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin invited me and it was a lovely event. We talked about having cancer and how hard Covid has been on them. It was gratifying to me to connect with working nurses who found my book useful, and I also appreciated them sharing their stories with me. If you are interested in having me come to your book group, contact me through my website. I will send you signed bookplates for all your copies of HEALING:
Next week I’m off to Montreal to speak at a palliative care conference. I’m excited for the conference and the city, which I’ve always wanted to visit.
Stay well and hugs to all,
Theresa
I love every part of this essay except the fact that you are still feeling some effects of Covid. I remember you once saying that you got your immune system at Crazy Eddie’s Bargain Basement, and I am sorry that it continues to cause you problems.
It’s so interesting: as someone whose immune system is truly excellent (my recent bout of Covid felt like a few days with a mild cold, e.g.), I struggle not to mentally accuse people who aren’t as lucky as me of malingering. My husband gets horribly sick with everything, and it lingers forever. I have to remind myself that we’re all built differently, and that something that is no big deal for me can be a huge challenge for someone else--much as, for example, I can’t do a single push-up, but they’re super-easy for other people.
And I agree that paid sick-leave is a crucial component of any country’s fight against the pandemic. I wrote about this on my own Substack recently ( https://marischindele.substack.com/p/this-is-how-we-protect-ourselves). Among the many reasons that Switzerland did extremely well during the pandemic, in spite of being in a very bad situation at the start, is paid sick leave, and a cultural objection to forcing workers to come in sick, which is sadly the norm in the US. Paid sick-leave is a necessity for protection our health and that of the economy, and we should have that right nationwide.
Our misguided but corrupt leaders must be help responsible for lying and killing millions while enriching themselves.