Dear Diary: 14 November 2022

Last time I posted, it was following an evening outing and following crash.

It took a whole to recover from this crash. I was off work for 6 days (including weekend) and only one day away from needing a fit note from the doctor (which I have no idea how easy or hard would have been to obtain). Even once I was working again I was far from “back to normal” (well normal for me) for about a week after.

During my week “off sick” – I actually DID log into work every day for one or two little things. Did one of my staff’s performance development reviews, attended two online events for staff development day, and also had a meeting with an external occupational health organisation bought in by the company I work for.

The occupational health review was a “frustrating” meeting as instead of asking me to explain how I find things – they just had me answer multiple choice questions for 30+ mins. I was not really that impressed. However a week or so later I got my report sent back to HR and HR sent me a copy. It was actually quite good. By quite good I mean quite bad… as in it said I needed help and explained where and how. It made recommendations for HR to act upon.

I then had a meeting with HR and a senior manager (one of the directors in this case) to go through this with me and see what the organisation could do to support me. Unfortunately the answer was basically: “We want you to feel supported by us not actually being prepared to do anything to really provide any support beyond “managers discretion”.

Although I am currently working from home, and have been for nearly 3 years, they are not prepared to make any commitment to keep this for me. They did say that “flexible working” will not go away – but they did say that it’s always possible they will require everyone to come into the office for at least some of the week. I explained that this will make me ill and their response was basically “Well lets hope it doesn’t”.

With regard to night duty manager shifts, the only thing they were prepared to say is “lets exempt you for 3-6 months and then see if you feel better”. As my condition isn’t a “temporary” condition – what possibility would there be that I would “feel better” in 3-6 months? Apart from that, 4-6 months in reality means 3 months and I probably wouldn’t be required to do one before then. At most it would be “getting out” of one shift.

To give an idea of the difference it makes having to come into work, a few days ago I had to go in for the day for a large management meeting of all the mangers. I usually get out of bed around 6:45 and start work around 7am, and this meeting was at 9am. In order to actually get there by then I had to start getting ready to go out by 7am. Instead of simply logging into work which takes very little effort, I had to spend much longer getting ready for work, then driving there, then walking down from where I park etc. By the time I got to the event venue, I had already used as much energy as I usually use by 11am or later. I usually go for lunch at 11am too – and the main reason is I am fairly out of energy by then. This time of course I couldn’t “stop” when I got to that “nearly out of energy” but had to carry on till lunch time which was 12:45pm. At this stage I was extremely fatigued, I was aching all over and both ankles felt like I was half recovered from sprained ankles and each and every step was painful. I was also only just about managing to speak (almost) normally with minimal slurring of speech. I had to leave and go home at lunchtime and go home and to bed.

Fortunately while I was then very worn out and went straight to bed for a while, and although I was still very worn out during the weekend and in some pain particularly my ankles still, I was not so bad that I had to stay in bed all weekend and even managed to drive out to do some shopping on Saturday morning.

My last real crash took a while to recover from and I never got QUITE back to where I was before, and then this weekend I am not QUITE back to where I was before Friday but I am “close”.

Knowing though that my work isn’t prepared to do much for me officially – and its down to my direct line manager, which doesn’t protect me at all if he leaves was upsetting. Knowing that if it comes to it – they are more prepared to allow me to become more ill than to put themselves out for me after 23 years of faithful service is not a good realisation to have to come to. If I thought I could do it – I think I would look for somewhere else to work. However, with cognitive problems I have – I would not perform well at an interview, plus I cant deal with the extra stress (at least at the moment), it would push me over the edge to a crash almost certainly worse than my last one. It also should not be forgotten that I have 23 years service where I am, which would amount to a decent amount of redundancy if I am ever made redundant. Going somewhere else would wipe that out. So for now at least….. I’m staying put.