I wish to apologize to my readers for being absent a week ago. My blog was being glitchy and not allowing me to post. I resolved the issue by contacting NAIWE, who fixed the problem. Hooray for NAIWE!
My question for this week is: When you are self-employed and work at home, how do you handle things when you are sick? And I do not mean just having the sniffles or a mild cough. I mean completely-knocked-out sick.
I have to say now that I have literally spent half of this summer sick with one ailment or another. From mid-July until late August, I suffered from hand, foot, and mouth disease, which the nurse practitioner and my doctor both told me is common in children but rare in adults. I’m 47 years old, so leave it to me to get it! I was infected with it three times in a row, meaning I had it for weeks. However, having it did not stop me at all from working. With my sore throat and the subsequent open sores in my mouth, I continued to work on the website I’d been working on (EDITOR’S NOTE: I finally finished the site on August 26! Yaaaay!) even on the one day I felt badly enough that I stayed in my pajamas all day.
However, two weeks ago, I came down with another disease, whose symptoms mimicked those of COVID–hacking, uncontrollable cough, congestion to beat the band, loss of taste and smell. I scheduled a COVID test, which turned out negative (thank Heaven). My nurse practitioner diagnosed me with viral bronchitis, which I think morphed from a wicked summer cold (summer colds are the absolute worst kind). Meanwhile, I took three days off of working. I could easily do it because I get paid by the hour and only for the time that I am actually working. I hated to do this to my client and to my paycheck for the month of August, but I felt so drained, hot, and badly that there was no way I had the energy to edit during those three days.
Now, the website did not have a hard deadline. Had I been working on something with one, I would probably have had to bite the bullet, to use a tired cliche.
How about you, fellow editors? How do you handle it when you get sick while working on a project?