Working While Sick

Sometimes when you're at work and trying to focus on the task at hand, your body has other plans for you. You might have a cold or a hangover and find it hard to concentrate, but since it's not a "real" sickness you stick it out as long as you can... you just drink water and hold off until you can go home and nap because you don't want to take sick time or because missing work due to a hangover is too shameful to imagine.

But for some of us (approximately half), our bodies sometimes sabotage us while at work in another way, not a cold or hangover or depression, that in addition to not feeling like a "real" sickness worth going home for, going home would feel like betraying decades of struggle for gender equality in the workplace.

Of course I'm talking about menstrual cramps.

What to do when you get bad cramps at work? I've come up with a few options:

1. Do drugs. (OTC painkiller)
2. Eat chocolate and pretend it also works as a painkiller.
3. Take a walk until it gets better.
4. Take a walk to find some drugs.
5. Take a walk to your house and stay there.
6. Suck it up and pretend you can still do meaningful work because women can do anything men do including write coherent emails while bleeding painfully from the inside.

Today, not having number 1, I tried number 2 and contemplated 3 through 5 until it passed, which means I successfully carried out number 6. I've done number 5 in the past but there is always the guilt.

I absolutely cannot stand when women are referred to as "the weaker sex." I mean sure, on average men have greater strength and muscle mass, but just because they can - on average - bench press more seems a pretty narrow criterion with which to define a whole gender as weaker. And then I get bad cramps and think, "well damn, this would be quite a disadvantage if I was being attacked by a mountain lion right now" or "if I was out hunting wildebeast" or whatever prehistoric men used their muscle mass for... it was probably for fighting other prehistoric men, but anyway.... my point is, it feels like Nature is trying to remind me that women were intended to be weaker whenever my uterus punches my insides.

Obviously I think it would be better if all sicknesses were treated equally. For anything that makes it impossible for someone to work productively - with the possible exception of the hangover because you only did that to yourself - it should be up to that person how to deal with it, whether they go home, nap on a workplace couch, cry in the bathroom, take a walk, or stick it out and pretend nothing is happening.

Personally, I would suggest having some dark chocolate, because it is possible it also works as a painkiller and may have other curative properties.

Disclaimer: As an academic I can pretty much do what I want, so I don't really know what the constraints are in a real workplace setting when you have a "not quite sickness." This is another reason why science wins.