Even though the pain in my right foot has not come back, I still can’t fall asleep. I think it’s a combination of staring part-time work and wondering about UCLA transplant committee’s decision about my sister.

I got confirmation from HR today that I will be classified as 3/4-time starting this week. I already went into my calendar and blocked off more time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Since the work schedule is pretty flexible for salary employees, I assumed an 8-5 work schedule with an hour lunch to come up with the 40 hours. Since I’m now 3/4-time, I left 2-5 pm free. That adds up to 30 hours total for the week.

HR said they will send me a letter with all the details on salary and benefits changes. I know that I’ll lose 1/4 of my salary, plus receive no pay for holidays. We have nine fixed holidays and two flex days. I wonder if I’ll lose all 11, even if I’ve taken the two flex days this year already.

It’s a big hit financially but I was going to run out of vacation days soon. I’ve already taken 26 PTO day this year, plus four sick days and the two flex holidays. That’s a total of 30 for only six months (I was out on leave all of January). I have about 12 days left in my PTO bank, plus I’ll pick up ~9 days for the rest of the year for only 21. That will probably only last until Thanksgiving so I would have to make the change at some point if I don’t get a transplant this year. For transplant, since I’m out of medical leave days per FMLA, I’ll have to use the three month unpaid sabbatical leave if it comes up before November 11th.

It’s official. I’m now a part-time worker. I talked to my manager today and we agreed that I should switch to 3/4-time status, which allows me to keep all my medical benefits, but lose 1/4 of my salary and paid holidays. I think stock vesting is also pro-rated at 75% of normal. Since I don’t have Medicare Part D for prescriptions, my work insurance pays for all my medications so I need to try and keep it as long as possible.

The problem with 3/4 time is that I’m supposed to figure out which 75% of my job to work on. I’m basically on a special project plus I help out when other people in the department gets stuck since I’ve be there the longest. There’s no real good measure of the amount of work, just whether you’ve completed your responsibilities. For now, it’s so I can take the 10 hours off per week for dialysis. Once transplant happens, I probably have to go back to full-time but not sure how to do that from home without being assigned any daily tasks.

Just as well. I’ve been thinking that I’ve spend enough time at the current job. I just passed my 9 year anniversary. When I was first hired, I didn’t think I would make it past 5 years. I’ve been talking about getting a lower position closer to home since the commute was pretty brutal. With COVID-19 restrictions, the freeways of Southern California have not been congested at all. Anyway, maybe I can find an entry-level analyst position (that’s 5 levels below my current title), and take it easy until retirement.

As of last night, we were up to 80 infected employees at my work site. Sigh… I was planning to go into work this Sunday to pick up some stuff, but mainly to dump old personal documents into our shredder bins. I’m shredding a lot of paperwork, but it’s tedious with a 8-page personal shredder.

This means 8 employees were infected over the weekend and another 5 this week so far. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly from activities outside of work but how much of a risk am I taking to go into work for a few hours? I really want to “borrow” my 30″ LCD monitor but I’m not sure where I can put it. My desks in the home office are full of computers and monitors already. Maybe I can put in a Helpdesk ticket and ask someone in IT.

Since I’m kind of out-of-office twice a week, my boss asked me to look at additional leave options. I’ve known him for about 20 years and work for him during 17 of those years. He really wants me to get better before stressing out about work. With the growing number of infected employees at our work location, it’s getting more stressful.

I checked with work and they said the FMLA leave limit is based on a rolling 12-months and I’ve used up 59 out of 60 days of allowed leave. That rules out additional medical leave or intermittent leave options since I only have one day before it resets this November. My only options are taking a sabbatical, which is only three months max, or going part-time. To keep my benefits, I would have to work 30 hours/week minimum.

Since we have a few work emergencies, I think I would go with the 30 hour options so I can still work on my project and provide support to the department. This was, even though there’s a 25% pay cut, I’m still occupied and still make a good salary.

Since I was at UCLA in the morning, I decided to stop by work on the way back. I got notification that I had a package delivered so I needed to go pick it up from the automated lockers. It turned out to be just a bunch of bank statements.

The last time I was in the office was March 13th so it’s been just over a month. The facility is still open since there are thousands of factory workers that cannot work from home. The office side, with all the engineers and support staff, is pretty empty. For all of finance, there are only four of us here today and I’m almost done. I’m tempted to grab my 30″ monitor and bring it home but it’s too big for my home office desk. I already have a 24″ monitor from work so it’s better than just staring at the laptop screen.

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.