Sick Day

I came home sick from work a couple of weeks ago. Nothing serious, just a small stomach bug that was bad enough I couldn’t really handle being at work.

Or maybe it was just work making me sick. That’s always a possibility too.

Anyway, I ended up staying home a few days, which for some reason makes me feel guilty. I think that’s a pretty common sentiment for women in general, for some really odd reason. Maybe it’s because we’ve been ingrained with the belief that we have to work our full time jobs, come home and tend to everyone’s needs, keep the house in order, and finish, rinse, repeat.

In my case, it could very well be that I had a mother who was rarely sick herself, and often “powered through” when she was. I mean, for crap’s sake, she went to work teaching Fifth Graders with her legs swollen up like tree trunks and not enough energy to walk from her classroom to the restroom across the hall. Her friend finally convinced her to call me around noon and I took her to the hospital where she died having heart surgery a week later. THAT’S how determined she was to go to work, no matter how sick she was.

When I was a kid, there were only three ways we were going to get to stay home from school: fever, vomiting or diarrhea, or preferably any combination of the three. Bleeding was not an excuse. That’s what bandages were for.

My Dad had the same work ethic. He also rarely got sick, and he wasn’t one of these men who got the “man flu” and spent a week pretending to die when he caught a cold. Injuries rarely got him down either.

Dad worked as a lab technician at the Texaco refinery in El Paso. He worked around all kinds of toxic and flammable chemicals and heavy machinery. Injuries and accidents were bound to happen, and they did.

When I was very small, he was sent to the E.R. with a piece of metal in his eye. They got him fixed up and luckily, it didn’t damage his vision, but he came home with a bandage on his eye and looked like a pirate. Despite my mother’s objections, he was all set to go back to work the next day (less than 24 hours after his accident), but the Union and the company forbade him from it and forced him to take a couple of days.

He went to work on no sleep the morning after my brother came home late one night at age seventeen, heavily intoxicated and they got into a physical fight because Dad asked for the car keys and my brother refused. Dad broke a bone in his hand that night and never went to the hospital or even the doctor. He wrapped it and babied it until it healed, and he never missed a day of work because of it. 

Years later, Dad slipped and fell in the shower, tearing his rotator cuff trying to catch himself. The doctor recommended surgery that he never had. He just kept going to work. 

He worked right up until his cancer surgery. Are you seeing a pattern here?

Emotional trauma didn’t keep him from work either.

There used to be cylinders of some kind of gas or chemical that they worked with regularly in the lab (sorry I’m hazy on the details…I was a child when this happened and the only details I got were from Mom who only heard the story once from Dad because he only ever talked about it once and refused to talk about it ever again). Whatever gas or chemical these cylinders contained was very unstable, and had to be handled with the utmost care. They had to be kept at a certain temperature range or they would explode.

They were so dangerous that the crew even referred to them as “the bombs”.  As in, “the truck is delivering the bombs today”.

On this particular day, the truck driver had arrived with his delivery.  Again, the details I have are hazy, but somehow, one of the “bombs” ended up being placed in this very deep, metal sink they had in the lab. I don’t know if the driver placed it there to later be placed in cold storage or if there was some other reason he placed the cylinder in that sink. All I know is that Dad happened to step into a curtained off area in the lab, and luckily for him, the curtain was lined with lead.

Apparently, after Dad stepped behind the curtain, the driver reached back into the sink to pick up the cylinder and it exploded in his hands. The blast blew his hands completely off, and the shrapnel caused other injuries. Mom told me if the cylinder hadn’t been inside the sink and if Dad hadn’t been behind the lead curtain, the shrapnel would have blasted out farther and surely hit him as well. If it hadn’t been in the sink, it could’ve very well ignited other things in the lab.

But of course, when Dad heard the blast, he came out from behind the curtain to what must’ve been a horrifying scene. A traumatic scene. The kind of shit that gives people P.T.S.D.

He had to fill out an accident report. He had to come home and tell my mother. Then he got up the next morning and went back to work the next day like nothing happened.

They couldn’t shut the lab down. The machinery they ran, and the cooling tanks they were in charge of, were as delicate as the “bomb” that blew up in the sink. Gauges had to be constantly monitored and adjusted, because if the cooling tanks didn’t stay cool, they would level an entire refinery and a few nearby city blocks. I’m sure Dad could’ve taken time off, and someone would’ve picked up his shift, but that wasn’t in his nature.

Mom said he spoke of the incident to her in detail only once. He would mention it only to let her know he was going to his deposition or that something else had come up, but he never talked about the trauma of the day with her after that and he never talked to us kids about it. Mom says after he gave his deposition and the case was settled, he never spoke of it again.

He just kept going to work, every day, in that same lab, for the next twenty years.

The only change an outsider might have noticed was that nobody called cylinders “bombs” anymore. They were just cylinders after that.

You can understand, then, why I may feel a little uneasy about leaving work with a “tummy ache”.

Of course, I do what any person does when they want to forget their guilt or not think about the million and one things they could be doing around the house. I binge-watch Netflix and Hulu.

On this particular binge, I switched between a series called Cold Justice and The Golden Girls.

What can I say? I’m complicated.

Cold Justice is a reality docu-series about a prosecutor and a CSI who travel to different cities, helping the local police departments solve cold cases. Half the time, they are able to bring indictments against suspects. Half the time, they don’t get enough to go further.

The Golden Girls (as you probably know) is an eighties sitcom about four senior ladies living in a house in Florida. Dorothy and her sarcasm are savage. She’s my spirit animal.

For every four rapes, shootings, stabbings and arson, I have to balance that with a zinger from Dorothy. That’s the ratio.

During my binge, I also learned a few things:

• when people “accidentally” fall down, they don’t suddenly have cardboard and other stuff fall on top of them that mysteriously ignites, burning down half the house.
• Dorothy thinks Blanche should put her bed in the Smithsonian because it has more miles on it than The Spirit of St. Louis.
• your body language always gives you away. If you’re being questioned by the police, don’t fold your arms across your chest and don’t think for long periods of time about your answer. Just say “I don’t know” if you can’t think of a good lie on the spot.
• Sophia’s spaghetti sauce is so good, if it was a person, she’d get naked and make love to it.

I never said I learned anything I would actually use in life. But I have to say I learned something; otherwise, I feel like I wasted three days of my life.

Stay weird, my friends. Normal is boring.