The Lost Art Of Convalescence

It's funny how lots of things sometimes conspire to form a pattern. I was having a conversation with Chris, Alison and a couple of others a few weeks ago about, among other things, the expectation to rush back to work after sometimes quite serious illness. The example of the chest infection that Chris and Alison both had last year that triggered ongoing problems for both of them was a classic example. The fact that both of them still suffer to some degree from the aftereffects yet both were back at work as quickly as possible is pretty significant. We were reflecting on the fact that once upon a time, hospitals were supplemented by cheery places called Convalescent Homes, where people who had had operations, or particularly debilitating illnesses could take the time to recover properly. This whole concept has gone away entirely now, and we're left in the kind of world where Dave can't even get a hospital bed the night before his major operation, but has to go, check in, then be sent home overnight (on his own recognisance, so to speak. You know - the way open prisons work....) Then it seemed like he'd barely been operated on before they were turfing him out.

We discussed the attendant rise of all those cold cures which are advertised in ways that suggest that being sick is an admission of failure, and that anyone taking a day off is weak, and at the mercy of less scrupulous colleagues (you know the ones, I'm especially thinking about LemSip Max Strength, but it's far from the only culprit).

And recently, I've been particularly aware of this same thing via an absolutely shocking set of tube ads for Lockets throat lozenges which again suggest that all sorts of terrible things (infidelity, stolen ideas, etc) will be perpetrated by the scumbags with whom we apparently all work should we ever run the risk of being off sick.

This is all of a piece with the way our society pressurises us all to get our work/life balance all wrong. It's interesting that the ads all focus on work situations, and therefore feed off and into the far greater sense of job insecurity which we all feel today compared to previous times.

But in the longer term, we're doing ourselves damage by not taking the time to heal and properly recover.

Posted on March 7, 2003 02:44 PM

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