Hiding Ulcerative Colitis Flares from Coworkers: Benefits and Drawbacks

There are many benefits to keeping your personal and professional lives separate. For one thing, your personal life, including your medical health, is no one else's business. For another, if coworkers know that you have ulcerative colitis and experience flares, decisions about promotions and projects might be tainted by that knowledge. Hiding your ulcerative colitis flares from coworkers is neither wrong nor difficult, but you do need to make a conscious decision.

Benefits

The benefits of hiding your ulcerative colitis flares from coworkers are numerous. First, you won't be passed over for important or career-changing projects because your superiors are worried about whether you can handle it. This might not be a conscious factor when your boss decides what his or her subordinates can do, but you'd be fooling yourself if you thought it would never come up.

Furthermore, in hiding your ulcerative colitis flares from coworkers, you don't have to worry about embarrassing questions or whispers behind your back. All it takes is a cursory Google search to learn about the symptoms of ulcerative colitis, and since "diarrhea" is No. 1 on that list, you might feel a great deal of shame. This is only natural considering your disease, and you shouldn't have to answer for it.

You might also find that hiding your ulcerative colitis flares from coworkers places you on a level playing field with everyone else. You can't be chosen as a "favorite" of the boss if there is no reason to show favoritism, and your abilities will never be called into question. Unfortunately, mitigating circumstances such as a disease can have both positive and negative consequences in the workplace.

Drawbacks

Obviously, hiding ulcerative colitis flares from your coworkers will require extra work, which can in turn create extra stress on the job. Using a different bathroom each time you get the urge, making excuses for ducking out of meetings, and hiding your medication can make you feel as though you're working two full-time careers. Additionally, stress is a major component in determining the severity and intensity of your ulcerative colitis flares, and as such, it isn't healthy.

You'll also notice that hiding ulcerative colitis flares from your coworkers can feel wrong or dishonest, even though you have every right to privacy concerning your medical health. You can't spread ulcerative colitis to your colleagues, nor is it considered a biohazard. But you might be close with several of your coworkers and thus feel some degree of accountability.

Challenges

The major challenge to hiding ulcerative colitis flares from coworkers is using the restroom. In fact, this is the major complication with every aspect of UC, and it can disrupt your life in more ways than one. First, you have to find a bathroom (preferably unoccupied), and then you must be able to explain extended absences while you deal with your flares.

The trick is to avoid stressing out over whether your coworkers know. When we're trying to hide something, we believe in our paranoid state of mind that everyone can read our thoughts as though they were scribbled across our foreheads. In reality, multiple trips to the restroom could easily be explained away by drinking too many bottles of water or by the Mexican food you ate last night at dinner. Avoiding the discussion is a top priority when trying to hide.