Illness and Employees

I'm suddenly feeling rather cranky.

I've had a touch of a cold this week. Nothing much. I did have a low-grade fever on Monday, but rest and tea and garlic helped. Today I noticed that my eye felt funny. Checked in the mirror, and sure enough, down in the conjunctiva of one eye, it's getting red instead of the white and pink it's supposed to be. I've spent the day washing my hands, flushing my eye frequently, and even taping on a slab of raw garlic for a few hours. With only 6 hours of treatment under my belt, the pink eye hasn't begun yet to improve much.

Then it crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, I ought to check at work to make sure it's okay for me to come in tomorrow. The pink eye should be much improved by then. And it's not like I'm sick and can't do the work. Granted, pink eye is very contagious, but I'd be washing my hands frequently to protect myself from spreading the virus to my other eye, and this hand-washing would protect my co-workers too. Still, I thought I'd better verify that it's okay for me to go to work tomorrow.

And it's not. Shoot. I can understand their perspective. But still ... I'm letting them down, not showing up tomorrow as I was scheduled. Shoot.

They asked if I'd been to the doctor to have it diagnosed. Pink eye? Doctor? It's pink eye. How hard is that to diagnose? Besides, why go to a doctor for something viral -- something for which the doctor has no cure, no remedy, no treatment. All he can do is tell me to wash my hands a lot ... or maybe to wait until my eye gets bad enough for a secondary [bacterial] infection to set in and then give me a prescription for that. But I have no intention of sitting around waiting for the whites of my eye to turn red and for pus to build up. Icky!!!

Having a day off work should be nice, like one of my regularly scheduled days off. But I feel like such a schmuck to stay home just because of pink eye.