Since today is my birthday, I decided to make a “little” rant to celebrate life.
I have only joined the workforce for more than a year but it has done serious damage to my health. (I know that it is nothing comparing to all the seniors out there but please, hear me out. It's my birthday.) One would think that living like a college student, playing video game till late and wake up at noon are bad for you but I have never felt so sick than this last year.
In 6 months, I went from 130 lbs to 148. Yeah, maybe it's natural since I started to live like a normal human being, wake up at 6 and eat lunch/dinner on scheduled time like everyone else. I'm 5'8 so even with that weight, it is kinda considered healthy. The thing is it isn't so. I physically feel ill with the stomach bulge popping out when I sit. My diet did not change. It didn't increase or decrease compared to college days. Still two meals per day with the same amount of food. I have been working out for a month now, no change whatsoever. I walk and run till the step calculator said that I have reached my 8104 steps per day goal. This usually takes 1-2 hours of my day, after the 8 hours work shift + 1 hour of unpaid lunch. The little time I have for recreation is now even shorter that I dread going to sleep at 11 PM just to wake up the next day for work.
A little about me is that I am very prone to stress. Back when I was in high school taking college exam and constant tests, I had stomach aches every morning and my throat always felt like something was stuck there. Nothing serious ever came of it as I was living fine, until I got a job. Burping and the feeling of water stuck in my chest reappeared a few months ago and ultimately leaded to this: One night, my entire body shivered as if somebody threw me in a lake in the middle of a winter night. The next week, I had the worst sore throat I ever experienced in my entire life. I didn't figure out the cause then and thought it was a cold went bad. It became very obvious afterward when I started to have heartburn. It was due to acid reflux. Seems that the stressful work of chasing deadlines piling up so bad my body responded to it in the most horrifying way. The entire time this was going on, I only took 1 paid sick day because that was the 1 day I could afford.
Immediately after the historical sore throat, I got hit with Covid. My government (not the US) decided that people needed to live with Covid now as they had to stay at home for too long and couldn't earn their living, which was understandable with jobs that require you to physically be there. My company saw this as an opportunity and forced everyone who was perfectly fine working from home to the office at the peak of Covid wave. Seeing how half of their employees came down with the bug one by one due to their stupid decision, the high-up let us work from home again so the workflow wouldn't get disrupted. I, as an unfortunate soul, took Covid home with me the day after. Once again, 1 paid sick day because I had two vaccine shots and could function as normal as someone with a cold, minus the difficulty in breathing AND hiccups! Like what!? I did not know that was a Covid symptoms but apparently it is, just very rare. It's like I was winning the shittiest gacha.
It's a bit complicated to explain but in simple words, before we could get back to WFH, if you have Covid, you'd have to leave the office immediately. No access to the company's data, no way to work while you were sick and quarantined, the company would “support” you with a bit of money to cover the living cost. But now that you brough home access to the oh-so-secret data, you could work normally even if you were bedridden, no support! This is beside the point. What I got out of it is a damaged immune system, which could be avoided if I could just be able to stay home.
Ever since then, I'm in constant cold every time the weather slightly changes. My throat is dry all the time and I wake up at least 3 times per night for God knows why. My stomach is doing that thing every day where it's telling me you're about to get it, I will send acid up your throat again. I'm writing this as I'm on cold med and a slight sore throat, which made me really scared that I'm about to shiver again. If I end up not making it to my next birthday, I would understand why and exactly what sort of things that would cause my painful death.
Life is good, man. Imagining being like this for the rest of my life, which might be shorter than I expected, working my time away while in perpetual sick mode really motivates me to get to the weekends. Oh right, forgot that my company works 2 Saturdays per month to reach that 176-hour quota and this week is the 48 hours work week. Just kill me now while I'm still beautiful.
Sorry for blowing it up like a spoiled brat. I know there are people who have it worse than me with their horrible bosses and company policies but I just have to write all this down before I get to the time of the day where I'm too exhausted to care for anything else but laying in bed staring at the TV. Hope you all have a happy 6th of July.