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My Job Was Killing Me, So I Quit. Should I Feel Guilty?
My immigrant upbringing did not prepare me for moments like this
In the days leading up to my trip to New York earlier this month, I woke up with blood on my pillow.
Apparently, I’d been biting my lower lip in my sleep. My lips were swollen, I felt uneasy, fidgety, anxious, and just ugly. No medications or ointments were helping.
Then came the headaches, further aggravated by the newsroom’s fluorescent bulbs. I stopped coming into the office and worked under the dim lighting of my bedroom.
The heart palpitations followed, triggered by the headlines of the day. I didn’t have the energy to cope with the onslaught of news, so I kept saving stories to read “later.” I’ve yet to get to them.
But worst of all, I could feel my spinal nerve injury preparing for a comeback.
One fall day two years ago, feeling a bit dizzy, I left work early and fell asleep before 5 p.m. When I opened my eyes, I instinctively attempted to reach across my bed to check the time on my phone, which sat on the bedside table to my right. I sleep on the left. My fingers were tingling, and I couldn’t move.
Maybe if I rolled over, I thought, I could make it from the bed to the ground, crawl over to my phone and call for help. When I tried, an excruciating pain shot down my back like bullets of wildfire aiming at the vertebrae along my spine. As the fire finally struck my tailbone, I jolted. Before I could even muster up the strength to make another move, I had passed out.
I don’t know how long I was in the dark. It could’ve been half a millisecond, maybe a minute, maybe 20. But when I woke up from the strange fainting, my puppy’s body felt warm and heavy lying on my chest, like she’d been on top of me for a while. She began incessantly licking my face in panic as I flinched. Her unsettling whimpers eventually turned to squeaky, joyous howls as I whispered, “Hi, gorgeous,” the morning greeting I’d been using on her since she was just a five-week-old ball of fluff. How long had I been out?
I finally managed to crawl to the bedside table and pick up my phone. It was a little after 10 a.m. the following day. I immediately…
