Sick Days for the self employed

It was just two years ago, February 2009, that I caught the flu.

No, it wasn't the first time I have ever had that, but it had been many a year since the last. Good thing for that, because this was a serious case. Young folks who have never had a bad bout tend to treat it lightly, but flu can kill - it's nothing to be joked about.

Though really, I had to laugh when I heard myself say out loud "Oh, man, I've got to lie down!".

I know, that doesn't sound all that funny. You have to know the context to appreciate the humor: I already was lying down. Had been, in fact, for almost three days at that point.

Probably I wanted to lie down "more". That is, I felt so sick and weak that simply lying about wasn't enough, I needed something less strenuous.

That's why I laughed at myself.

It's possible that being drugged up with codeine might have had something to do with my illogical desires. I was taking it to quiet a deep and racking cough that kept me from any possibility of rest. The codeine was barely giving much more than lip service to its intended task, partially because I resisted taking it because it gives me headaches and makes me quite stupid.

But without it, the cough really could have killed me. No joke there, this was serious, so I was gulping the stuff down as prescribed. It was helping, it just wasn't helping enough.

As the gods of chance hate me for not believing in them, they arranged for a good customer to have a major problem half way through my misery.

Too sick to work

It's one thing to bluff your way through a cold, especially for those of us who can do most or all of our work over the Internet. I have been much more than slightly miserable and have done work for customers with no one the wiser, with the possible exception of my wife, who will always scold me for not resting when I plainly should.

No bluff, no "manning up", no case of will overcoming weakness was going to help here. Obviously I could not go to the customer's site; leaving aside that driving while heavily dosed with codeine would be stupid, dangerous and illegal, I really couldn't even sit up for more than a few minutes, never mind walk once I somehow got there.

I couldn't talk him through anything on the phone, either. Never mind the racking cough that would leave me gasping for air, my brain was clouded by both fever and the drug that was at least trying to put down the coughing.  I could no more solve a mystery computer problem than I could draft a plan for world peace: I wouldn't know where to begin and I was selfishly preoccupied with my own survival anyway.

I told him as much. Well, my wife told him as much. I just groaned when she told me that he had called - well, probably I had a nice little forty second coughing fit, rolled my eyes, groaned, weakly moaned "I can't" and offered up another thirty seconds of brutal coughing as punctuation. Whatever I said, my wife got the gist of it and passed it on.

My employer understands

I took a full fourteen days off, maybe fifteen. Most of that was spent in bed and even after I went back to work, I didn't do much and still felt somewhat weak until well into March. 

As a self employed person, I have no limits on sick days and I didn't need to consume any vacation days to pay these back. I had no suspicious boss wondering when I would return.

I did have customers, though, and unfortunately I also had some potential new customers who wanted to talk to me during this flu. Those are pretty much a lost cause: an existing customer will probably not abandon you over an illness, but being unable to talk to a potential customer will likely lose them forever. When opportunity knocks, you have to be able to get out of bed and answer!

We really can't afford to be sick

In some ways, the self employed can handle illness better than the employed. We are masters of our own schedules; a minor cold requires nothing more than a little calendar shuffling. If we are smart, we do that immediately, and get the rest we need to prevent a small illness from getting any worse.

Our wage slave counterpart may feel forced into working through a minor illness, and that may cause them to become more sick. As they may very well feel they have to soldier through that, too, their overall health suffers more than ours. As their fellow employees live under the same demands, they get exposed to more disease also.

But when serious illness strikes, we can be hurt more. Existing customers can't wait forever and new customers are usually looking for attention now. If you have employees or partners, you might not lose so much, but you will likely lose something. There simply are some unavoidable downsides to small business self employment.

Be smart

Be smart about your health and your business. Working for yourself can be quite demanding; you need to be healthy to perform at your best. "Manning up" when you really shouldn't may seem to be necessary, but it isn't always smart.

There are worse things than a cold or flu, unfortunately. You could suffer a stroke or a heart attack. You could go blind, or damage your spine and be unable to walk: these types of things could halt your business in its tracks.

Disability insurance can be prohibitively expensive, especially if you are not young. In some occupations, there are ways that you could keep operating even after a serious health issue: employees, aides, or extra equipment might keep you at least somewhat solvent.

Planning for such potential disasters and major illness can be worthwhile. If you already know that you have a high risk factor for certain problems (I know that I have a high risk of blindness, for example), you absolutely should be doing your planning far ahead of time.

Like most self employed folks, you'll probably tough out this season's cold or flu if it hits you. You'll "man up" and work through it, won't you? Sure, I understand. You do what you have to do and so do I. But try to give at least a little thought to your own best interests. A day or two of rest won't destroy your business, will it?

Maybe you could use the time to do some planning about what you'd do if it were a lot more serious? That way, you wouldn't really be taking time off, would you? That sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?

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