Maybe it wasn’t pneumonia. Maybe it was the flu or just a
rotten cold. On occasion, it was a more serious condition that should have been
tended to. But we’ve all done it – tried to ignore it, tried to soldier on – sometimes
because we were “understaffed” and couldn’t afford to get behind at work,
sometimes because we needed to save our PTO days for when our kids or parents
were sick, and sometimes because we feared the “political” (in a working sense)
repercussions we might face.
It starts innocuously enough, in the early years of our
careers. We see that always being available and reliable are table stakes in
the work world – not just for women, but for everyone seeking their way up the
ladder.
The situation intensifies – I believe more for women than
for men – when we become parents. That’s when women, in particular, feel
compelled to prove that being a parent won’t stop them from focusing fully on
their careers…because that unspoken assumption about women lurks to this day.
As a younger friend of ours remarked after becoming a first-time mom in 2015,
she never realized until then how the working moms she had known were
“scrambling into the office every morning, looking so put together and
composed, but feeling totally stressed and thrown together every day.”
There’s barely enough time to get dressed and put on makeup.
There’s just no time – or tolerance – for getting sick. That unrelenting
pressure, born in the early career years and amplified ten-fold when we’re child
rearing, never seems to recede.
I was “lucky.” After our daughter was born, I left a
full-time job to work from home, doing communications consulting, freelance
writing and college-level teaching. Lucky in the sense that I could rearrange
my schedule and sneak a few hours of rest when I was feeling particularly under
the weather – but still scrambling to get to client meetings and teach classes
and get as much done as I could between the start and end of each school day, heading
back into my home office after dinner to work well into the evening hours, and
spending many weekend days there as well.
Once our daughter headed off to college, I returned to
full-time corporate employment. But the compulsion to work through the colds
and coughs and flu bugs didn’t wane. It got worse.
It was partly the particular corporate culture in which I
found myself – one where “work/life balance” was a nice catch phrase but a
concept seldom honored. But it was more a realization among the women I worked
with that we had to be more resilient, more reliable, and always on the job if
we were to be given the same opportunities as our male counterparts that really
drove that compulsion.
Eventually, though, illness catches up with you. It happened
to me.
Two winters ago, I tried for more than a month to bull my
way through what I thought was just a stubbornly persistent flu bug, dragging
myself into the office every morning. But when I found myself struggling to
stay awake on my 45-minute drive home, I gave in and went to the doctor. A
week’s course of Tamiflu later, I was no better, and had added a nagging pressure
on my right side to my list of symptoms. The doctor sent me for an ultrasound, after
which I was promptly dispatched to the ER.
Good thing it’s a Friday night, I thought. They’ll give me
something stronger, and I’ll be back into the office on Monday.
Six weeks later (during which I worked from home), a non-functioning,
infection-swamped kidney was removed. And three weeks later – three weeks
sooner than my doctor recommended – I was back in the office.
I had to be. I was dealing with a gullible boss and an
opportunistic staffer who’d been using my illness and physical absence to try
to move me out. It took the boss a number of months to figure out who the true
problem was, but in the meantime, I’d gone back into the office before I should
have, still hunched over from major abdominal surgery, still in pain and still
needing more time to recuperate.
If I felt so compelled as a communications director toiling
in relative obscurity to disregard medical advice by going to work when I
should have stayed home, I can only imagine the pressure Hillary feels as the
nation’s first major-party female nominee for President. The pressure would be
on her even if her opponent and his spin machine hadn’t already been conjuring
up delusional accusations of near-death crises for months on end (while
limiting his own health reporting “transparency” to a preposterously absurd
letter from a sycophantic physician).
Looking back on my own illness, I know that I should have
said, “The job can wait…the problems can wait…I’ve got to get well.” And
looking ahead toward Hillary Clinton’s presidency, I am hopeful that it will
help spark a far more serious, meaningful and productive conversation about
work and health in America than the one being tweeted and shouted by her
opponent today.
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