In the past 14 days, there has always been at least one person with a fever and a hacking cough. The TB ward. We probably had the flu that mutated into bronchitis, but I'm not entirely sure what the flu is.
Right now, Jonah is home for the second day. He missed two tests and a report deadline, so there will be lots of catch up over the next week. Now that he's in 7th grade, missing school because of an illness is a major pain in the neck. I already wrote to all of his teachers and offered to pick up classwork from the main office.
Two weeks of illness would have been a disaster when I was working a traditional job. Now that I'm writing freelance articles, it has definitely knocked me off my rhythm, but at least I'm not getting fired from anywhere. I finally sent off a pitch this morning – the first one in ages.
Steve kept going into work, even though he had a fever.
I'm going to collect Jonah and take him to Panera's for some chicken soup. We need to get out of the house and some fresh air will do him good.
Question of the Day: If your family got sick for 2 weeks, what adjustments would your family have to make? Disaster or not?
Apt. 11d 
I have 400 hours of paid sick time. Practical issues would probably prevent me from being out all that time at once, but two weeks would be doable most times of the year.
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Not a disaster but precisely for the same reasons that you have – I am not working a regular paid work job so I am flexible. I am the fallback.
Now we DID have a stressful time last year – I was in the hospital for two weeks straight. It took a lot of juggling on my husband’s part to keep things rolling. Luckily he is senior enough that he can shuffle things around to do pick up and drop off of our daughter but he still had to work late at home after hours to keep up.
If he had a job where facetime was critical and where he could only do his paid work AT the work place, then I really don’t know what we would have done.
If we had family in town young enough to pitch in and help, that’d be another story…
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“Now that he’s in 7th grade, missing school because of an illness is a major pain in the neck…”
I think we’re already there in 4th grade. It’s really hard to make up even one day of missed work.
“If your family got sick for 2 weeks, what adjustments would your family have to make? Disaster or not?”
The main issue would be keeping up with school work.
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Total disaster. I go into work sick so that I can retain the option to cancel one class during the semester in case one of the kids gets really sick. No family within 4 hours’ drive. No friends nearby who would be willing to sit with a sick kid because the friends we’ve made here all have their own kids.
My former university employer had contracted with an on-call caregiving service and picked up most of the tab when one needed last-minute care. I would have preferred that they hired a sub for my job so that I could stay home with my own sick kid, but , still, that was a nice perk. My current university employer calls itself family-friendly, but the last one really was.
You really feel like you’re letting your kids down when you have to pay someone else to stay with them when they are sick so that you can go to work.
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Hell, my kids are only still in preschool, but it would still be a total disaster. We’re self-employed, and when we can’t work we just have to kiss some of our income goodbye.
Get well soon!
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When I was in 3rd grade I missed about a month of school with pneumonia- about a week at home, then two weeks in the hospital, then at least a week, maybe more, at home again. (I also couldn’t go outside to play for another few weeks.) If it had happened a year or so later, I likely would have had to repeat the grade, as a rule was put in place to that effect. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to.
Flu is a virus, so if you really had flu, getting antibiotics, as you did, was close to malpractice on the doctor’s part. Antibiotics do nothing for viruses. But, doctors often prescribe them to people who demand them, to get them to go away, even though all this does is make the antibiotics less effective. Also, flu is very bad- high fever, hard to do anything at all, etc. Most people who think they have it don’t, though perhaps you did.
Its really a terrible thing about the US, and shows one of the crazy things about it, that people would not send Steve home. Someone coming to work with a fever isn’t good- it’s a horrible, even pathological idea. It’s not his fault, I’m sure, but a culture that wants that is awful. People who are sick should stay home, and the people who are at work should want the sick people to stay home, even if only for selfish reasons. Only a stupid and/or cray society would think otherwise.
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“When I was in 3rd grade I missed about a month of school with pneumonia…”
Speaking of which, it seems like lots of young, healthy people that I know have been getting pneumonia lately (up until the past couple years, I’d always thought of it as an old person sickness). The one that really took the cake was my in-law who had a chain saw accident, followed by a foot infection. Sometime later, he started getting really bad respiratory symptoms. He went to a small town ER and they figured it was asthma. Much later, somebody figured out that it was in fact pneumonia and that the infection from his foot had spread into his lungs. That was really weird.
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Flu is a virus, so if you really had flu, getting antibiotics, as you did, was close to malpractice on the doctor’s part.
Bronchitis isn’t necessarily viral.
Also, TB? Hope that was just for a test.
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Bronchitis isn’t necessarily viral.
Right, but then, if it’s not viral, it’s not flu, either. Sometimes people get secondary infections when they have a virus, and antibiotics might help for that, but an awful lot, doctors give antibiotics to people whom they won’t help to get them to go away and stop asking for them. This increases costs and makes antibiotics less effective, so I wish they’d try educating people instead.
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Uh, I think it’s fairly important not to try to diagnose/recommend treatments based on their internet descriptions of their symptoms.
Now, the general statement that doctors sometimes over-prescribe antibiotics may be true, and worth reminding people in general, but I think its presumption to assume that’s happen in any individual circumstance.
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We’ve had illnesses that have affected all the family for a 2 week period, though not one person for 2 weeks straight of missing responsibilities. I guess my answer is it’s not a disaster. My son has had pneumonia (asthma-related–sometimes we do a bad job of managing it), but he never missed that much school because of it.
When these things happen and my kids do miss school, they survive the schoolwork thing. They just catch up eventually. My husband and I are exhausted for a while; mainly we switch off days off based on work responsibilities. If I were in real trouble, my boss would help me figure out how to manage everything, maybe I’d get a sub (though our university is being difficult about paying subs) or I’d schedule some “research time” for the students (sometimes it’s nice to teach writing–when you need not to teach a class, just have them go to the library or write an in-class essay! Whee! It’s relevant to the course objectives!).
I have to hijack a little and tell a wonderful story about something that happened yesterday. The context is that I’ve been having a really bad time the past 2 weeks because of a problem relating to my son and how people deal with his Asperger’s. bj, sometimes I wish you weren’t so private because I’d love to talk about this with you. Anyway, my daughter’s middle school team has what they call an “on a roll” breakfast where they invite about a dozen kids and their parents to breakfast and present the kids with certificates and credit them with their achievements, not academically, but in terms of character and improvement and things other than test scores. It was my daughter’s turn on Friday, and when they talked about her achievements/excellent qualities, they talked about her ability to think out of the box and how they saw her as someone who wouldn’t go into a business profession but would probably go out and get involved in social justice or something like that.
*blahblahsoshulistteachersblahblahdon’tcare*
What I saw is a group of teachers who appreciate the unique qualities of my kid because, surprise surprise, I want her to be that kind of person and have tried to raise her that way. And I also think that she is in part that way because of her brother’s Asperger’s. E’s problems don’t have easy solutions, the kind that work for everyone, so we all have to think outside the box every day. I also want to point out that another of the kids honored was, from my perspective/experience, obviously on the autism spectrum, which was also reinforced by the teachers’ comments about how he was improving so much in certain areas that just screamed Aspie.
I know it’s fashionable to hate teachers, but yesterday morning, I saw 4 teachers who really *get* it. As a data point, I just looked up our district’s rankings, and we’re in the low 100s in a state of over 332 school districts. So we’re by no means one of the “top” schools.
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Sorry about your son’s problems, Wendy. But very proud of your daughter and your whole family. Dealing with disabilities is character-buildling. And nobody has to work harder at it than your son.
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I was thinking about Jonah when I was posting this too, how you’ve always said he is very kind. This quality comes from you and Steve, of course, but it also comes because of Ian.
Back to my sorry life, no one gets an opportunity to screw with my kid twice, and I didn’t spend the last 2 weeks only feeling victimized. Have set a few things in motion to ensure that people learn from this situation.
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“Back to my sorry life, no one gets an opportunity to screw with my kid twice, and I didn’t spend the last 2 weeks only feeling victimized. Have set a few things in motion to ensure that people learn from this situation.”
I’m dying to hear about this.
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