Back to Work

I had been signed off sick until the end of June, the week before my sick note ran out I started to think more about how I felt and whether I was ready to go back to work. It’s funny because a lot of people when I contemplated this with them said “absolutely not!” or “You must put yourself first!” I felt so anxious that I thought that perhaps they were right, but I think it depends on what job you do. For me I now work from home, I wouldn’t say that I love this set up. My colleague is my husband and he’s grumpy most day’s, sighs a lot and has only just (after a year) started making cups of tea! However, he can make a cup of tea in 5 minutes...at the office my colleague took anything from 10 minutes to an hour, we'd find him slowly walking down the corridor like Mrs Overall trying to balance mugs of tea on a tray. There are silver linings I guess and the main one is that I don’t have to travel into work, even if I’m feeling unwell I’m just seconds away from my bed and don’t have to get in the car to drive home.

Part of me felt that I needed to get through my treatment first before I went back to work and focus on getting my anxiety under control, but then I thought about this and realised that part of controlling my anxiety is by actually going to work. For some I realise that going to work just induces anxiety but in the past I’ve found that my job settles me down, I can focus on my job and not on how I feel. I like to get to the end of the day and feel like I’ve achieved something, the other day all I achieved was eating half a bag of midget gems and finding out which celebrities had been through Thyroid Cancer...Rod Stewart, Baby from Dirty Dancing, Sofia Vergara, in case you’re curious. No, it was time for me to go back to work...I was developing a Google addiction. 

I was advised that if I was going to go back then I needed to do it properly and go back on a phased return, thankfully my Manager agreed and worked out a timetable to ease me back in gently. The night before I went back I felt a mix of nerves and excitement, all I would be doing was going into my office upstairs and logging on to my laptop, but just the purpose of doing something made a huge difference to how I felt. The next morning I felt a bit jittery and wobbly but I dusted off my laptop...seriously there was about 3 inches of dust on it and tried to remember how to log on. As I accessed the system it was like I’d never been away, nothing had changed, there were 200 emails in my inbox and the phone started to ring pretty much straight away...and normality resumed. I could sort out other people’s problems rather than my own and that felt good. For the morning I could be me doing my job, not me lying on the couch catastrophising about why my leg had gone dead...because I’d been sat on it!

I worked the morning logged off and then accessed some sessions with Maggie’s, unsurprisingly I fell asleep before the session ended. Later on that evening I fetched Lily and surprisingly she told me she wanted to watch England play Germany in the Euros. She also decided that she wanted cocktail sausages and crackers to watch the game with...all that was missing was a pint. Lily spent the entire game asking me what was happening, who was that man with the funny hair?  Why did that guy fall down? Why are they getting a free kick? Why is he wearing orange? Why is that man not wearing a shirt, he’s got a big belly and a hairy chest! Out of everything that happened on my first day back at work I’d say that those ninety minutes of football were the most stressful, I felt happy knowing that going back had been the right decision.