This is the first day off of 18 or so, starting now until the end of the calendar year. I'm using up my illness time because if I retire with it intact, I will in essence lose it (a hundredth percentage increase in my retirement service years is all I would get).

I've spent so many years going in to work even when I felt lousy, staying home only when too miserable even to get out of bed, that I feel faintly guilty about "using up" my sick leave.

My current boss is on board with the concept and has even asked to coordinate with me, so that the days he is taking as vacation (we have a use-it-or-lose-it policy) will be on different days from my illness days, so I'm not sneaking around or lying to him. He's OK with it.

But still, it feels strange. Like playing hooky at school. I used to be absent a lot, usually with a cold or with the childhood diseases (measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, etc.) and felt not a twinge of regret or guilt. In fact, school was so boring it was fun to stay home and read, once I was on the mend.

I learned to value the quiet and the solitude, and I still do.

However, as an employee, I brought with me a strong sense of responsibility and wasn't absent from work unless I was too sick to handle the tasks. I had an enormous number of illness hours in the bank until my husband needed urgent home care and nearly daily transportation to medical appointments. Then I used most of it up on FMLA leave (FMLA protects your absences from retaliation, but the time is still deducted from your illness accrued).

So I have 18 days left and I'm going to take them between now and Friday, December 23rd. Guilt, begone!