Work Schedule

I read a study that said the rate of employment for dialysis patients was as low as 19%. Looking at the patients at my dialysis clinic, that number seems believable. A lot of the patients are much older than me and wheelchair bound. There aren’t many young patients; maybe they are all doing dialysis at home.

When I was on hemodialysis the first time, my dialysis schedule was T/Th/Sat from 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm. I typically worked remotely from home Tuesday and Thursday mornings, then went to dialysis after lunch. This was pretty convenient since I got most of my work done in the morning and delegated the rest to my staff for the afternoon. I didn’t formally tell HR about missing work two afternoons per week but took occasional vacation time to make up the difference. Fortunately, I’ve worked for the same boss since 2000 so he knows I’m not a slacker and was supportive of my schedule.

Fast forward two and half years to now. I’m still at the same company but have different job responsibilities that are less task based. Also my dialysis schedule changed to 9:00 am to 1:00 pm so I can only work remotely after dialysis. It’s been much harder to work Tuesdays and Thursdays this time so I’ve taken a lot more vacation days. I still have about 180 hours left which is ~22 days. If I take two days each week, that will last me another 11 weeks during which time I will accrue an extra week, so a total of 16 weeks or 4 months. I’m hoping that I will have had my transplant surgery and recovered by August so I won’t have to go to part-time status.

In the meantime, I’m still struggling to be productive at home. It’s hard since my projects were not well defined and it’s hard to communicate over the phone. In addition, we’ve banned Zoom from work meetings and currently have no video conferencing or screen sharing capabilities.