My Excuse Note For Being Absent

I missed blogging yesterday. Sending a shout out to Anonymous who said they missed my posts. It's nice to be appreciated and/or loved, even if you don't know who it is. So let the postings continue!

It's been a rough couple of days. As I mentioned earlier but you may not have remembered- I'm currently enrolled in graduate school. I'm only taking one class this semester because David is also enrolled in grad school and it was either we only take one class a piece or I'd have to sell a kidney. I'm sort of partial to my organs, so we're going at it slowly but surely. On those days, I leave home around 6 AM (to get ready for the day but also to get a good parking spot) and I teach the youth of America (AKA I hear my name being called a 1, 984 times in one 7 hour period) then go straight to class and get home after 8PM. I make it home just in time to put my daughter to bed before I try to tackle my work. Since I usually start to nod off around 10 PM, there's not a lot of constructive work time if you subtract showering and other grooming rituals. It makes for a long Tuesday. I know some of you out there are saying to yourselves that if I think I have it hard, I should listen to your story. Don't tell me....you walked to school barefoot, in the snow, and uphill both ways, right? I know, I know...I don't have a bad life, but since it's the only one I have, that's all I know.

Another thorn in my side this week is that I'm sick. On Monday, I got up (yes, at 3 AM..read earlier post) and felt like I had been hit by a truck. I was dizzy, even laying down, my chest was tight, and my throat hurt. So of course, I sucked it up and went to school. I'm never out. I always go to work. At school it just got worse. Between all my talking and the acid reflux acting up because I had a Diet Mountain Dew, my throat was in even more pain and I could feel my asthma starting to kick in. Since I've had a couple of kids out already this year with strep throat, I was thinking that was what I had.

So today, I thought that I'd try to call one of my doctors to get an appointment after school. You might be asking yourself why I wouldn't just take a day off? Let me just say that if you aren't a teacher, you can't understand what being out of work entails. With most jobs, if you don't go, life goes on. You just pick up where you left off when you return. Or perhaps like most of the food service industries in town, you are just short-handed. That so isn't the case with teaching.

To be absent and not have the small worlds of 25 nine-year-olds fall apart, it takes me about 4 or 5 hours to write very detailed lesson plans to leave for the substitute. You have to write down everything you do and how you do it, because keeping the kids in their routine is crucial. (This is how we walk in line, this is how we go to the bathroom, no you can't let the kids use my teacher sharpener, don't believe them when they say I don't assign homework..... and so on) After you write the plans, you have to get them and all the copies you'll need to your room. So even sick, you have to go in to work. When I am out it seems like I'm trying to "clean up" both figuratively and literally for two weeks. You keep hearing about all the stuff the kids did that they weren't supposed to.....you remember how it was when you were in school and there was a substitute. So the mental picture of potential shenanigans makes me want to be there. I'm somewhat of a control freak. Also, I have meetings every day this week, even on Friday. I'm always positive that if I miss a meeting, they'll cover something critical and I won't know what's going on. I already have a problem with that when I am present.....so being there is important to me.

So I figured that I could call one of my doctors this morning and get an appointment after school tomorrow. No luck. I called 4 different doctors, including a clinic that I don't go to and NO ONE could see me. They wanted me to wait until next week or come in during the day. Most people have jobs where they have a phone at their disposal and a lunch hour to themselves. If they're out due to illness, you call the boss and that's that. No one fills in and you don't have to leave a detailed description of everything you do. So not the case with teaching. So after my calls it was apparent that I'm the only person that works past 3 PM. I tried to tell them that I thought I had strep throat and I may be dead by the time they could see me. Their response to me was to go to the emergency room. Now to me....the emergency room is for people with gunshot wounds, broken limbs, heart attacks....you get my drift. Also, did I mention that I'm a teacher? My insurance isn't the greatest. I really don't want to go the emergency room if I absolutely don't have to. What I found interesting is that every doctor's office told me the same thing. What's with that? I mean, I know the emergency room is there for emergencies, but when you know what's wrong and you've been to that doctor so much that they've offered you frequent flyer miles, you'd think they could squeeze me in. I even asked my primary care physician if they could call in a prescription for me. No dice.

It wasn't a good day.

So now I'm at home, sitting in my pj's and needing to do more school work even though I feel yucky. The work continues to pile up...present at work or not. I just hope that if I had a real emergency and was sitting in the emergency room, that the arm I'd broken wasn't my writing arm since I'd have to sit there and write my lesson plans for the next day. Yeah....that sounds like fun.