should I tell my boss about my coworker’s heart attack at work?

A reader writes:

A month ago, my coworker had a heart attack at work. As a woman, her symptoms didn’t fit the standard “clutch your chest, and your left arm hurts.” Her vision suddenly doubled out of nowhere. I offered to walk her to the ER (we work next to a hospital), and she declined. I set a timer and told her that if her vision didn’t improve by the time the alarm rang, we were headed to the ER immediately.

The timer dinged, and she told me everything had more or less returned to normal. I realize now she was probably downplaying her symptoms.

With my encouragement, she contacted her doctor, who scheduled an urgent appointment for her later that day. It wasn’t until a week later, after testing, that she learned she had a minor cardiac event. Looking back, my coworker displayed symptoms for two weeks prior, but she attributed them to something else: anxiety over the political attacks on higher education and research; tiredness from doomscrolling; tightness in her chest from the aforementioned anxiety.

A few days ago, she came into work complaining that her chest felt tight. I told her to go straight to the ER. She declined; she thought it was a medication she’d taken, and she felt better after she took a second medication to counteract the first. I again told her the ER was the best place for monitoring. She said she’d think about it.

She did go eventually, and she was correct thinking that the second medication would fix the issue the first medication caused.

I’ve kept the knowledge of her heart attack quiet from my boss at my coworker’s request. It’s my coworker’s health issue, and I do feel that she has the agency to keep that information private. (Ironically, I coached my coworker through how to tell my boss about her health issue without actually using the words “heart attack,” from past advice you’ve given.)

Now, after her second health scare in as many weeks, I’m wondering if I should ignore my coworker’s request and let my boss know anyway. Right now, the boundary I’ve drawn for myself is that if anything else happens at work, I’m telling my boss immediately. The first incident came out of nowhere, and my coworker’s own doctor failed to recognize what was happening at the time. This last time, I felt my coworker acted irresponsibly, knowing that she just had a heart attack. I’m caught between wanting to respect my coworker’s wishes and frustration that she’s not taking this as seriously as I think she should.

Err on the side of respecting your coworker’s wishes, because she should get to control information about her health.

That would be the answer regardless, but it might be easier if you remember that now that she’s been through the initial heart event, she presumably has guidance from her doctor on how to know if she needs to act with more urgency in the future. She also happened to be right about what to do during the second scare, which indicates that she has some degree of knowledge about how to manage her condition. I can understand why it rattled you, but she’s better positioned than you are to know if her actions were irresponsible or not. They might not have been.

I do think it’s reasonable for you to say to her, “This is serious enough that I’m really uncomfortable being the only one at work who knows it happened, and I want to be transparent that if it happens again, I wouldn’t feel comfortable staying quiet about it.” Be aware, of course, that that may just result in her not telling you if something else happens! But that’s her call to make; the part that’s yours is to tell her what you are and aren’t comfortable doing in the future.

But I would also push a bit on why you think it’s so important that your boss know someone else’s health info, to the point of considering going over your coworker’s head to share it. I’m guessing you’re thinking that if more people at work are aware of your coworker’s history, they’re more likely to spot it if she has worrisome symptoms in the future and can push her to address it … but that’s pretty squarely your coworker’s decision to make, rather than yours. I also suspect that the recency and the fact that it happened at work are both playing a role here, and that if she told you she’d had a heart attack two years ago or at home, you wouldn’t be having the same strong sense that her boss needs to know — even though you’d still have a coworker with a cardiac history. (For what it’s worth, you probably do have other coworkers with scary health histories; you just don’t know theirs.)

Telling your boss also isn’t guaranteed to fall into “this action will save my coworker’s life” territory; it could fall into “this action could wrongly affect my coworker’s job and also not result in anything that helps her” territory, and that’s another reason to default to respecting her privacy.

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