You can legally use 40 hours per year to take off sick to care for a family member where I live in New York City.

The FMLA–Family Medical Leave Act–is a national law that allows a person to take up to three months off for a health condition.

I once told a woman she shouldn’t have gone into a hospital–she should’ve used the time to go on vacation or to go to a spa instead. This because she had confessed going into the hospital hadn’t really helped her.

If a person absolutely needs to go into a hospital by all means they should do it without delay. They should have an explanation for why they took time off from the job.

On the job if you ask me it helps to frame requesting a reasonable accommodation thus:

“I want to exceed your expectations for what I can do. To do this I will need an accommodation. Here’s what I think might work. How does this sound to you?”

You tell HR–the Human Resources Department staff member–and can tell your immediate supervisor that you need an accommodation. Ordinary coworkers don’t have to know and often shouldn’t know about this. They might think you’re a slacker who can’t do the work and is trying to get out of doing your fair share.

Thus it might be better and more helpful to frame the request in terms of a functional limitation not in terms of a diagnosis. I would go so far as to refrain from calling it a functional impairment. I would use the word limitation instead.

Here’s the deal: so-called normal people get accommodations on the job for all sorts of reasons not having to do with illness. And their bosses don’t blanch to give them these modifications.

A co-worker can request and be granted a different schedule–coming in earlier and leaving later–to take Hebrew lessons.

Another co-worker could take a longer lunch to go shoe shopping and no one else knows this not even the boss. In fact Penelope Trunk The Brazen Careerist talked years ago about taking longer lunches.

It might be a function of having a creative job or other kind of job that is not in an office. This is why I’ll always recommend non-traditional work for those of us with an MH challenge who would wither and die working in a cubicle in a job with narrowly defined duties and a power hierarchy.

In the next blog entry I’ll talk about why we shouldn’t limit ourselves or accept the boxes others try to place us in.