Champagne and Socks

This is the end of my third day of sick leave. I took Friday off feeling really awful. I’d spent the week struggling on with a Crohn’s flareup that was making eating things I can generally tolerate quite unbearable. I had a mild asthma attack and used the nebuliser a couple of nights. And then Friday I woke up in agony – with some kind of head cold that never eventuated but my jaw drama had been slowly spreading to my neck which was losing mobility and causing me a searing headache. It was the last of these that had me admitting defeat and calling in sick.

I feel like I’m still in burnout and my body lacks robustness, knock me and I fall over. Work has been stressful since the beginning of July and shows no sign of abating. And that’s a problem.

On Monday I emailed in sick and my boss said I needed a medical certificate because it was the second consecutive day. I was kinda annoyed because really, I just needed to stay in bed and would have crawled in the day after. Turns out though, that he did me a favour because my doctor not only gave me yesterday and today off and would have given me tomorrow as well but I thought that excessive (I know, but I have deadlines and meetings later this week) but she also gave me drugs! To help! And had I not schlepped my arse 1.25 hours to the doctor and 1.25 hours back, I would have just pressed on and probably been no better for it next week and wanting just a day to catch my breath again.

I got chill pills. Looooottts of chill pills. I dunno that they’ll help the causes but at least they’re helping with the symptoms. And it turns out, if you’ve been under stress for a long period of time, it takes time for the effects of that to ebb away. So she wasn’t surprised and just nodded and so on. And she said “of course your Crohn’s is flaring up” and so on. So she gave me A LOT of chill pills. Really, they seem to be overkill. But … they’re good. They’re a combo of painkillers and muscle relaxants. And they’ll help my body to feel less stressed and clenched, which is how it feels. And you know, as I said, I would have dragged myself in to work again because, stress, you don’t do anything about that, do you? But … I didn’t realise til the pain stopped just how much pain I was in. And the label says “for severe pain” and I’m not sure that’s what it is, apart from the earache from the jaw clenching, but there’s chronic pain, and that all goes away for 6 beautiful hours at a time. And comes back on cue right when the next drugs are due.

I’m still not sure that the doctor …well last time I was there for the earache she made a comment about “all those lazy people who come in for medical certificates”  – and that’s totally why I didn’t take the third day! And I’m all still, you think she was being really sympathetic or fake sympathetic? But she’s usually pretty stingy with the drugs, every other time I’ve been there. And she’s given me like hundreds of days worth of painkillers here. I hope that’s not how long the pain is going to last.