What happens to your responsibilities at work while you are out? And are you totally cut off from work while you are out or are you occasionally responding to mails? Also are you more of an individual contributor or have a leadership role?
I occasionally log in to read my email to keep up-to-date with happenings among the team, but I haven't needed to respond to anything since I went out.
Our team made an effort in the last year to reduce some of the silo-ization of knowledge and increase our 'lottery factor', and I think those efforts have helped make sure that the team was prepared for one of us going out on leave. At the very least, nobody has called me up saying "hey, your systems are on fire!", so that's been nice.