Taking FMLA in a rage over RTO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Op here. I’ll try to address some of the questions.

-I work for a very large organization

-I actually WAS trying to comply with the RTO requirements, and ended up back in the hospital at the end of august because of it. I would go in to the office by drugging myself up and then sit there, trying to make an appearance. I never made it more than 2-4 hours before I became too ill to be at work. I couldn’t even drive myself there and back and was relying on Ubers.

-I already had an intermittent FMLA in place earlier this summer because of how much time I’ve been out

-my employer was entirely unwilling to work with me on any of this-they wouldn’t let me work remotely when sick (even though we allow 1 day a week of remote even under the new rules). I was completely out of sick time and burning vacation to cover my absences, but the rule is that vacation time must be approved in advance and I was using it day by day to cover my illness. I really was between a rock and a hard place and they were making it impossible for me to comply.

-when I was informed verbally that no WFH would be approved as part of the reasonable accommodation process, I got documentation for a continuous FMLA.

-the headline of my post is overly provocative and I wish I could change it. I shouldn’t have titled this post the way I did.

What was it about sitting in the office that made you sick, while sitting at home did not?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

[Anonymous]

How long have your health issues been going on? Unfortunately it appears from what you have said, that your employer would like to be rid of you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How long have your health issues been going on? Unfortunately it appears from what you have said, that your employer would like to be rid of you.

Op here. Since end of June.

Yes they want to be rid of me.

Trying to buy some time so I can get better and hopefully land something else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

Not OP but probably take naps, baths, extended bathroom breaks, having unfettered access to healthy food in her kitchen.

Question to OP: are you actively applying for remote positions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In the old days, you would go out on disability. Have you looked into that? It doesn't pay as well, though. Definitely take the three months now, though. I am tired of all the whining about going back to the office -- I have been in person the entire time -- but in your case if I valued you as an employee, I would have worked with you to keep you on, especially with medical documentation. I would say they don't want you there, so move accordingly.

This is key. The only times I have seen a company fight a reasonable accommodation is when the person has been an ongoing performance risk and they don’t believe the request. It’s way too risky for them to deny requests otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the old days, you would go out on disability. Have you looked into that? It doesn't pay as well, though. Definitely take the three months now, though. I am tired of all the whining about going back to the office -- I have been in person the entire time -- but in your case if I valued you as an employee, I would have worked with you to keep you on, especially with medical documentation. I would say they don't want you there, so move accordingly.

This is key. The only times I have seen a company fight a reasonable accommodation is when the person has been an ongoing performance risk and they don’t believe the request. It’s way too risky for them to deny requests otherwise.

YMMV but I have often seen the opposite, where the supervisor was on board with an accommodation to keep a good employee but the HR rep, who knew nothing about the employee's work performance, was determined to fight to the death to reject all remote requests because "if we give it to one person than everyone is going to want it." I'm in management and have heard some cringey thinks come out of HR's mouth like "anyone can get a doctor's note" and "this person might be telling the truth but others will hear about this and abuse the system."

[Anonymous]

OP, I think instead of looking for a new role, you should run out your STD/FMLA leave, and then apply for LTD at your current job.

Take the time, recover, and then look for a new position.

If you take a new job, there is usually a waiting period until you can take LTD for a pre-existing condition. Usually it’s a year. So if the requirements of the new job change, or if the new job doesn’t approve of your mid-day breaks, you’re in a bad place until you hit that year mark.

[Anonymous]

Welfare until you get a new job. Understand a lot of work from home jobs will be data entry where you are tracked for key strokes. These jobs will be lower pay as you will be competing with those from all over the US.

[Anonymous]

This reminds me of second job. We had a guy obviously too sick to work who not quit.

He bought a big Ford Van drove it to work with a full bed on it and fridge. Guy literally would sleep in it at lunch, disappear at breaks went on for a year.

If you really can’t work do on disability.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

It is not difficult to understand for anyone with a serious chronic health problem.

All travel consumes energy. Healthy people have that energy to spend; many people with disabilities do not because we are using substantial amounts of it on surviving. (In OP’s case, on healing from sepsis, FFS.)

Commuting spends energy in particular ways—the repetition, the alteration to sleep/wake patterns, either having to drive (which is a substantial cognitive burden) or having to use transit (which means a lot of time “in public”—sometimes a problem for those of us with socially problematic symptoms like needing to lie down or quickly find a bathroom. Metro has none BTW.)

A workspace in a home can be set up to meet the priority of getting the work done while also fully accommodating the body of the person doing the work. Shared workspaces aren’t like this; they are designed for default humans who don’t need to do things like lie down intermittently or have immediate access to bathrooms, food, drink and medications.

People here spouting off about getting “welfare” or “going on disability” have no idea how difficult any of the programs implied by those terms are to access.

OP, I am sorry—it all sucks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

It is not difficult to understand for anyone with a serious chronic health problem.

All travel consumes energy. Healthy people have that energy to spend; many people with disabilities do not because we are using substantial amounts of it on surviving. (In OP’s case, on healing from sepsis, FFS.)

Commuting spends energy in particular ways—the repetition, the alteration to sleep/wake patterns, either having to drive (which is a substantial cognitive burden) or having to use transit (which means a lot of time “in public”—sometimes a problem for those of us with socially problematic symptoms like needing to lie down or quickly find a bathroom. Metro has none BTW.)

A workspace in a home can be set up to meet the priority of getting the work done while also fully accommodating the body of the person doing the work. Shared workspaces aren’t like this; they are designed for default humans who don’t need to do things like lie down intermittently or have immediate access to bathrooms, food, drink and medications.

People here spouting off about getting “welfare” or “going on disability” have no idea how difficult any of the programs implied by those terms are to access.

OP, I am sorry—it all sucks.

DP. Great explanation. It sucks because most office jobs are just paper pushing BS that can easily be done from home as proven during the pandemic. We had a woman in our office return to work porting around an oxygen tank. It was just sad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

It is not difficult to understand for anyone with a serious chronic health problem.

All travel consumes energy. Healthy people have that energy to spend; many people with disabilities do not because we are using substantial amounts of it on surviving. (In OP’s case, on healing from sepsis, FFS.)

Commuting spends energy in particular ways—the repetition, the alteration to sleep/wake patterns, either having to drive (which is a substantial cognitive burden) or having to use transit (which means a lot of time “in public”—sometimes a problem for those of us with socially problematic symptoms like needing to lie down or quickly find a bathroom. Metro has none BTW.)

A workspace in a home can be set up to meet the priority of getting the work done while also fully accommodating the body of the person doing the work. Shared workspaces aren’t like this; they are designed for default humans who don’t need to do things like lie down intermittently or have immediate access to bathrooms, food, drink and medications.

People here spouting off about getting “welfare” or “going on disability” have no idea how difficult any of the programs implied by those terms are to access.

OP, I am sorry—it all sucks.

Op here. Thank you so much, PP. You explained it better than I could have.

I feel like so many of the replies here are coming from a place of assuming I’m lying. I have an infectious disease that is confirmed by testing and imaging. It’s not possible to fake it. It is fatal in many people. And I’m not even referring to the sepsis, which was a whole other thing.

When I was trying to go to the office, I would pump myself on adderall and sudafed (to amp me up and combat fatigue), plus Vicodin (to deal with pain), and Tylenol to minimize risk of spiking a fever. I’d also bring immodium because when I overdo it, I get diarrhea. The immodium and Vicodin both help with that.

At home, I work in a spare bedroom
With an en suite bathroom
And a bed, plus a fridge with ice packs and snacks. So I’m
Able to just grab what I need. During the 5 minutes it takes to go to the bathroom at the office, I can go in 1 minute at home and then lie in bed for a few minutes. Instead of chit chatting with coworkers, I can lie down and apply ice. On my lunch break, I can take a hot shower. All of this stuff helps immensely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you have to drug yourself up to go to the office? Are you well enough to be working at all? Does your employer offer LTD?

Op here. I can work from home no problem, but I have to take breaks.

I wasn’t really well enough to go to the office but felt backed into a corner.

OP, this is difficult to understand. What do you do during your "Breaks" at home that you could not do in the office?

It is not difficult to understand for anyone with a serious chronic health problem.

All travel consumes energy. Healthy people have that energy to spend; many people with disabilities do not because we are using substantial amounts of it on surviving. (In OP’s case, on healing from sepsis, FFS.)

Commuting spends energy in particular ways—the repetition, the alteration to sleep/wake patterns, either having to drive (which is a substantial cognitive burden) or having to use transit (which means a lot of time “in public”—sometimes a problem for those of us with socially problematic symptoms like needing to lie down or quickly find a bathroom. Metro has none BTW.)

A workspace in a home can be set up to meet the priority of getting the work done while also fully accommodating the body of the person doing the work. Shared workspaces aren’t like this; they are designed for default humans who don’t need to do things like lie down intermittently or have immediate access to bathrooms, food, drink and medications.

People here spouting off about getting “welfare” or “going on disability” have no idea how difficult any of the programs implied by those terms are to access.

OP, I am sorry—it all sucks.

Op here. Thank you so much, PP. You explained it better than I could have.

I feel like so many of the replies here are coming from a place of assuming I’m lying. I have an infectious disease that is confirmed by testing and imaging. It’s not possible to fake it. It is fatal in many people. And I’m not even referring to the sepsis, which was a whole other thing.

When I was trying to go to the office, I would pump myself on adderall and sudafed (to amp me up and combat fatigue), plus Vicodin (to deal with pain), and Tylenol to minimize risk of spiking a fever. I’d also bring immodium because when I overdo it, I get diarrhea. The immodium and Vicodin both help with that.

At home, I work in a spare bedroom
With an en suite bathroom
And a bed, plus a fridge with ice packs and snacks. So I’m
Able to just grab what I need. During the 5 minutes it takes to go to the bathroom at the office, I can go in 1 minute at home and then lie in bed for a few minutes. Instead of chit chatting with coworkers, I can lie down and apply ice. On my lunch break, I can take a hot shower. All of this stuff helps immensely.

I think the reason that most posters think you’re lying is that the original title of your post says that you are taking FMLA because you are in a rage about returning to the office, and your original description of the problem is more about your anger at returning to the office without any explanation of why your medical situation would require something different. I hope that when you present the case to your current or future employers you can leave the anger out of it and focus on the health issue and your ability to do your job with some reasonable accommodations.