pharmacy tech means 8 hours on my feet moving between shelves and customers all day. pain’s usually a 4-5 but nobody sees it. boss can’t know, coworkers won’t understand. thing is: staying upright and “fine” all day doesn’t mean i’m actually fine.
get home and crash hard. pain jumps to 7/10, can’t move, can’t do PT, nothing left to actually recover with. even part-time now (three months in), those masked 5-6 hour shifts still wreck me the next day. my body doesn’t care that i was performing.
it knows i pushed too hard. punishes me harder for it than if i’d just admitted i was hurting and rested. went part-time thinking fewer hours = more recovery time. not really.
the damage from those masked hours is still the damage. anyone else find that masking at work actually makes your recovery worse, not just slower?