My Facebook friends are all sick. I wonder if there is a wonk at Facebook graphing the rising trend of the status updates including the words "sick" and "ill" and "coughing a lung out."
In the comment section of the previous post, Western Dave writes, "Significant
Other and I have been dealing with major stress with sick kids. It's
been over a month since either of us spent a full week at work. Any
chance of having an open thread or discussion on this?"
My kids are healthy right now (salt, wood, spit) and I don't have to be in the classroom, so I am not dealing with work pressures and vomit on the floor right now. But sick kids and work have been a huge issue for us in the past, example here and here.
So open thread. Vent. What reforms should be made?
UPDATE: Lack of Paid Sick Days May Worsen Flu Pandemic
UPDATE2: Check out Jill at Feministe.
Apt. 11d 
I’ll stop sneezing on door handles if my coworkers start bringing treats more often.
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My daughter reports that only 13 of 21 kids were present in her class today. I’m scared but can’t do much except wash hands, wash hands, wash hands. Next week we should be able to get vaccinated. (Ontario is vaccinating high-risk people first, and I guess we should be glad we don’t qualify.)
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Reforms? We just had three kids home with swine flu for a week. I don’t know what reforms would have done – well, my workplace is very sympathetic, and my wife works a great deal from home, so we set them in front of the TV and intubated them. Low quality care. As it happened, we were very lucky in how light the flu was for us – our kids were never in real respiratory distress. The other great help is that my wife’s brother lives with us. When my wife was at a law firm, they had a contract with LPNs who would take care of the kids if they were ill, and that was a help for some people, though we never used it.
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My kids both just got sick on our vacation to visit my parents in DC. As sad as I was to have sick kids on vacation, there was a tiny part of me that was thinking, “well, at least they got sick on days I already took off work.”
Luckily, both of us can work from home and have reasonably flexible jobs, so sick days aren’t the end of the world for us. Stressful and tough, but not the end of the world.
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Mine wipes boogers on my pants or shirt, never on his own. So I’m glad that we are currently free of colds.
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At least you have the option to stay home with your kids – here in Korea, I have almost never actually had the option to exercise my three sick days that my year long contract says I have.
Here everyone goes to work and school sick. I’m curious to see how H1N1 might change that.
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Actually – reforms, I’ve been thinking. The border fence could help. This is a blog written and read by college-educated chatterers (my people!). The family with the mom working for walmart and the dad, if present, delivering auto parts – how do the employers find it in their interest to contract with a ‘sick-kids’ care place like the one my wife’s former office hired? Or to hire temp employees to get those carburetors to the mechanics? Through employee scarcity, which can happen only if we get control of the borders. YMMD.
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Amanda, is the ‘three sick days’ just a feature of your contract or is it typical?
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Both my daughter and I have runny noses/sniffles/sinus headaches (mine is not getting worse, so it looks like I might ride it out by simply feeling crappy for a few days). She is sneezing more but insisted on going to school anyway, and since she doesn’t have swine flu (no fever or sore throat–just a head cold), I’m letting her.
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