One morning in 2013, Amanda* texted her fellow servers at a seafood restaurant in New Orleans to see if someone would pick up her double-shift that day. Amanda, then 23 years old, had vomited several times throughout the night. As theand sharp stomach pain continued to impede her ability to stand up straight, her coworkers declined to help.
Her roommate held Amanda's hair every time she crouched in front of the toilet that night. As they kneeled on the cold linoleum floor, Amanda swore she hadn’t been drinking. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Amanda said, her head hovering above the rim. In the back of both of their minds, they worried about bills. “If Amanda couldn’t work, we didn’t know how we were going to make it through the month,” her roommate recalls to me.
At the hospital, Amanda was diagnosed with having two kidney stones and three cysts on her ovaries. She was given a prescription for Percocet for her pain, Allopurinol for the kidney stones, and a note for her manager. She returned to work the next day. She struggled to pay bills, but she said she got lucky considering the diagnosis. Her pain was controllable, she passed the kidney stones, and the cysts disappeared without an expensive surgery.
Line cooks work sick more often than servers because customers can’t see them, according to Brandon Blietz, an executive steward who oversees operations at five locations for a major chain in the Midwest. Blietz, 45, has worked as a line cook, dining room manager, production manager and a general manager during his 30 years in the industry, and he said“I’ve seen line cooks who look miserable, three different shades of green,” he says.
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