Taking Sick Leave in Cloud Cuckoo Land
A medical visit I will never forget
Calling in sick can be such a headache. Or at least it can feel that way in France. Here, if you come down ill, you can’t just tell work that you’re taking the day off. For administrative reasons, you need concrete proof that you are in fact unwell.
In other words, there’s no lying your way out of an honest day’s work — not that, I’m assuming, you’d want to anyway. So even if you’re nauseous, low in energy, and shivering like a madman, you still have to drag yourself to the nearest doctor to confirm what you already suspect you have.
And therein lies the problem: the very act of going to the doctor can rob you of some of the rest you need to recover.
So at the end of September last year, you might say it wasn’t the brightest idea to come down sick.
To be fair, I hadn’t planned on catching the flu in New York, where I was staying at my sister’s place. But due to the city having one of the wettest weeks in its existence, when it rained every day bar one — beginning, coincidentally, the day I arrived — I eventually began to feel under the weather.
It didn’t help that when I was walking down Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, there was a torrential downpour that made a mockery of my raincoat’s water…
