Like a lot of companies, we've begun paying closer attention to our employees' health and wellness issues in recent times. We're not the only ones. As the costs of medical coverage escalate, employers are spending more time and resources telling people how to be healthy.
Our first conspicuous move toward health came after the warnings of an impending bird flu a year ago. Concerned that we might be decimated by an avian pandemic that would ravage our workforce, we took steps to forestall it by mounting hand sanitizer dispensers all over the building. Soon afterward, the fingers working our keyboards were among the cleanest in town.
We raised the standard higher when our regular "Employee of the Month" gatherings began to favor fruit and vegetables over doughnuts and cookies. This was a controversial move, especially given that snack machines were only a dollar away, but people eventually accepted this as part of a more caring environment.
In a short time, we were all about health and feeling good, taking it to the next level at our company's annual employee health fair last October. This has usually featured great snacks, a welcome foodstuff after fasting overnight for a blood test. But healthful change was apparently in the air when — for the first time in memory — there were no bags of those wonderfully salty potato chips.
I would have alerted the media but we were already present.
For the first time, too, our company health fair even offered free flu shots. The jury is still out as to whether flu shots work, by the way; even physicians I ask are undecided, and research conducted on the military proved inconclusive. Nonetheless, having a propensity for free things, I took advantage of this and rolled up my sleeve for the inoculation.
Not long afterward, we announced a program providing employees with a pair of new shoes to exercise in, one more way of encouraging them to get out and do it. Over the months, we encouraged fitness memberships, weight-loss programs and, in general, healthy lifestyles.
Yes, it was also going so healthily until one of my associates, looking even worse than he sounded, said he had a sore throat during the holidays. Ringing in the New Year, the worst flu in modern history began making its rounds in our office.
Methodically and systematically, management and staff alike went down. Some employees boasted of how they had escaped its insidious attack. Slowly and surely, it caught up with each of these braggarts.
Some of my teammates marveled at how quickly they had recovered and could get back to the famed nightlife here. It heard their happy voices and in exchange offered many a dreaded relapse.
It was on a tired Friday that I detected the virus' signature fever, known to result in the sort of delirium usually reserved only for amusement rides at the Stratosphere. Almost as if by plan, I had just finished reading "The American Plague," a book about the American yellow fever epidemic at the end of the 19th century. In case you're wondering, once you contract yellow fever, for which there is no known cure, you have eight days to live, a nightmare that wove through my feverish dreams. In that wake-sleep netherworld known as illness, I began to count the days remaining.
Remembering how the illness had lingered in the other people at the office, I headed down to the local urgent care on Saturday, where I sat and shivered with a group of brethren from around the sickly neighborhood. When I saw the physician, he wrote me a couple of prescriptions, one of them for a steroid.
I took the medication immediately and even ordered some chicken soup from the local deli, each substance accelerating my recovery in its own way. As a result, I was back on my feet by the time Monday rolled around, though I was still taking the steroids, which would not run out for another few days.
As they apparently did with so many professional athletes, the steriods resulted in higher-than-normal productivity and boosted my performance substantially. Of course, now that I have revealed this, it is possible that I may never be admitted to the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame.
As I write this, we are on the road to recovery around here, but we have been enlightened by a virus. Even with the best of plans, health is a risk. The advice here is to eat all the doughnuts and cookies you can get your hands on.
Source: In Business Las Vegas
