When The COVID 19 Victim Returns To Work

Preamble

COVID 19 continues to showcase itself as a pandemic beyond the walls of the hospital. In other words, it is more than a problem of doctors managing the victims and public health, but also a problem for business leaders since it already has political leadership folding up their shirtsleeves in the battlefront. Businesses must identify with the challenges of the returning employment and make accommodation for the management of their full recovery. Being diagnosed as COVID 19 negative is the beginning of months of nutritional, physical, and mental well-being for the victim.

Recovery from COVID 19 Illness Takes Painful Months

I got attracted to watching Chris Cuomo of CNN during and after his battle with active COVID infection. For weeks after returning on air, he would insist that physical recovery was a challenge. Late on, he started joking during interviews about being slow to react mentally when interviewing total strangers. Remember that this was in the height of the Trump — Biden election battle. He was using his personal experience to prove that the disease is real and nothing to wish on anyone else. And you could see him emphasizing this point when his colleagues, including Dr. Sanjay Gupta tried to show empathy. Personally, I cared little about repetitive political debates but now I realize that subconsciously, he projected a physical evidence of what an infected victim luck enough to escape hospitalization goes through. Recent CNN publication of a study in Lancet suggesting that more than a third of COVID 19 patients suffer residual mental and/or neurological damage is difficult to swallow but many affected individuals including myself can identify with this report. It tells you the truth about the devasting battles of oxygen deprivation that COVID 19 rages.

Everyone knows that the nerves are the least like of body tissues to show signs of oxygen deficit. However, for the long-term effects of the infection be so severe as deserve the title of a brain disease confirms that many of the sub-clinical symptoms most victims face are real challenges that require longer term care. Essentially, the path to recovery is not a hop-step-jump affair, sick one day, well the other as with most infectious diseases. Recovery appears to be a long-drawn out process taking months not weeks as personal experiences continue to show and as this CNN report equally suggests. For me, I describe my recovery path as occurring in aliquots (defined margins, almost with precise dates) rather in phases because the word ‘phases’ suggests smooth transitions rather abrupt jumps from one step into another phase.

For example, because one can jump out of bed and take a shower does not mean that you can jump into your car drive the next 50 miles without physical exhaustion and taking breaks of nearly 10–20 minutes in-between. There are stages where you cannot climb your regular stairway from one floor to the next without 5-minute breaks. Imagine what effect that has on someone who must report for work in a shipping operations business because he has been declared not infectious anymore, and one must try to maintain a normal disposition because he is supposedly healthy now.

Even though, one may appear to be eating, the transition from the fluid diet of the infectious stage to more solid diet takes time, about a two-week aliquot. To transition from twice a day multivitamin intake to once a day, and into if needed occurred in their own two-week margins. For my friend, to reduce narcotic analgesic intake against work-related sever muscle pain to regular consistent Brufen intake, and then wean consistent Brufen to as needed from it had their own aliquots. In my case, transitioning from a twice daily multivitamin intake to once a day and to as needed transited through their own aliquots measured by the coating of my tongues and mouth odor. Certainly, these took weeks, not one-da recovery. It is a process that continues to be worrying victims discover new information from doctors trying to unravel this novel disease.

Conclusion

COVID 19 continues to challenge humanity. However, no one wants to be accused of causing another to commit suicide. Yet, stigmatization of the returning employee has been a concern from the onset of the pandemic. Smart leaders are considerate in their speech and actions. They are acutely aware of their responsibilities and ethically guide interactions with their staff and visitors to their area of supervision. The employee returning to work following a COVID 19 has nutritional, physical and mental challenges and must be managed as such.

Author:

Noah The Cultist, author of Target The Executive Suite studies the influence of workplace culture on career growth within business organizations. He reaches out to young managers for mentoring at various levels.