What do you do when you get sick on the road?

So, you're out on the road and you get sick....as strep throat or the flu. Wadda ya do? I mean, do you get better in the truck wherever you are, or do you try and make it home and convalesce? What if home is on the other coast?

 

You surrender your load and send in a macro covering your butt. You go to the nearest ER and take a few days off to get better. No job is worthy of death.

 

If you're that bad then call 911.One time I had 2 real bad toothaches,found a trkstop,dropped the trl then bobtailed to the hospital.If you have the flu you tell your dispatcher and maybe theyll send someone to you to pick up your load and let you have the rest of the time off till you get better.Thats what Werner did with me anyway.

 

You call 911 if you're that bad.One time I had 2 very painful toothaches.I drove my rig right to the hospital.Then another time I had the flu,werner sent someone to come pick it up and let me have the rest of the time off till I got better.

 

A friend of mine had a GI bleed... He called his DM, had the load 'repowered' and headed to the nearest Hospital... Almost didn't make it there and almost didn't make it out again!! Thankfully he is OK now... He was in the hospital for a couple weeks... If he had been a company driver, they would have come and picked up his truck, there by leaving him with no transportation and he was several states away from 'home'... One of the fun perks of this life of trucking we lead...

 

I got sick once with Stevens. I had emptied out in Memphis and was parked at the Pilot in W. Memphis.Nasty flu bug. My fleet manager gave me two days to recover but used me to repower a load that was getting another driver home to Dallas. Driver 1 dropped his loaded trailer headed to Dallas to get my empty for a reload there in Memphis and the 2nd driver arrived 6 hours later to grab that load to go home after he emptied out in Memphis. The next day I felt good enough to get rolling.

 

If you get sick out on the road,,, always take care of yourself first. Then hope the company you work for,,, is understanding. If you get sick, then for the most part, try and work through it. Suck it up and try to continue, BUT only if your are comfortable with it, and NO MORE, but you have to be willing to work with the company. if they are trying to get you home or off a load.

 

dayquil, gatoraid, advill, tylenol, asperin, water, immodian. i have always figured i can be sick and be broke, or be sick and make money. one expeption, pnuemonia, I could not keep my eyes open and stay awake. I had to drop a back hall 40 miles from yard on monday am after my 34. i got there and unloaded and was having a real bad time so they actully sent a driver out to get my rig and dropped me home. i was off for 10 days due to the medication "vicodin for coughing" . 50 years old and the only time i missed work for being sick
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Getting sick on the road is tough. I went to the ER a few months ago for a bad (but passable) kidney stone. Heres a tip - Tell your doctor you're a driver. My doctor wanted to give me Percocet, but instead gave me something else so that I could still drive. I was down less than 24 hours. Most of it was my 10, and I had a little extra time on the load, so with a little creative(but legal) logbook work I still delivered on time. Like kidsdad said, I'd rather be making money while I'm sick, as long as I still have the capacity to do so.

 

One thing to keep in mind is that driving ill or fatigued nets you 10 CSA points, the highest amount you can get for one violation. The thing with that one is it's up to the discretion of the officer whether to deem you too ill to drive.

I've driven with the flu a couple of times. It sucks like others mentioned. You just have to determine for yourself if you're safe to drive and if you can at least pass off yourself as being healthy enough to drive. If you don't think you can do the job safely, don't do it.

Man, that's my nightmare right there. I had kidney stones twice before and it's by far the one thing I don't want to have happen out on the road. Every once in awhile I get a pain that reminds me of what you feel when it starts and I can't stop thinking about it for the next couple hours. I had both after bone implant surgeries and the doctors told me that the bone growth creating abnormal levels of something or another most likely caused them, but I still worry about them.