Yeah... I'm much better than I was, but despite the sinus pressure being gone and my being able to finally breathe thru both nostrils, my lungs still seem to have trouble getting air. I'm not sure if it's damage from my time working at the place I did (spoilers: I quit on Monday, details in next paragraph), damage from whatever infested by body, both, or my asthma working in combo with those two previous things.

As for my job, I quit Monday. I couldn't fucking take it anymore. While I did like my teammates and had some friends, the working environment was absolutely ridiculous. Every sense of the word 'ridiculous' fit this place. While the front end was acceptable, the back was very far from it. If that place had been audited, they would have been shut down on the spot. The following was present:

• Incomplete first aid kit (seriously..what in the fuck? It's damn bad when I cannot get a bandaid following a slice to my hand at work)
• No hand, respiratory, or eye protection offered (I don't know if hand or eye was there... I didn't know there were masks until AFTER I informed the manager I was leaving when I was told 'oh we had masks...' COULDA TOLD ME THAT EARLIER, THANKS).
• Chaotic back room: items all over the place with haphazard organization (aka shit everywhere), exits partially blocked
• Doctor's notes not being honored. Long story short, there was an incident which leads me to believe that any note I would have brought to work wouldn't be recognized, and given the fact that I've now been sick for a solid week, I'd have been fucked 6 ways from Sunday.
• Few employees knew where to go in the event of a fire (fault of the management)
• Even less knew what to do in a weather emergency (fault of the management)

If your business is handling donations, and it's a well known hazard of the job that dust, mold/mildew, animal hair and/or waste, and broken glass, plastic, and metal could be present in any given box, bag, or tote of donated items, shouldn't you offer hand, eye, and respiratory protection WITHOUT HAVING TO BE ASKED? Shouldn't you want to PROTECT YOUR EMPLOYEES? I can't count how many fucking sewing needles I pulled from bags, and now many pounds of dust I inhaled, or items sprayed with cat urine...hell, there was even a bag I processed in which literal cat shit fell out of the bag. You think I was offered any protection from that when I was yelling about it at my station? Nope.

Additionally, the absolute fucking insanity of the background lead me to one of the nastiest, darkest 2 weeks of my life thus so far out of university. In this place that I worked, you're pushed, and you're pushed hard. It's nonstop, it doesn't let up, and everything around my station was visual chaos. There was so little organization to things, the pressure to be fast, fast, fast, and the absolute lack of feedback was just mind boggling. I always felt like I was never doing a good enough job, like I would never get anything done, like I was getting absolutely nowhere, and like I was constantly letting both my team and my managers down. There's something else about that place that was eating at me, and what it was I cannot exactly find the words to describe, but every single day for 2 weeks I legitimately considered either self harming or suicide, and some days it was both.

I've had some nasty times in my life, believe me I have, but this? This was out of fucking nowhere, and I was alone. It was just my rats and I for those two weeks, and every single day was a fight to not give in to the feelings inside me that screamed for me to kill myself. When I think about those days, I get so worked up. A friend said it sounds like anxiety, and I'm lead to believe that. I've never felt so afraid of myself as I did those two weeks. Had it not been for the constant presence of my ratties when I was at home, or the comfort of my man's words as he was away at training, I probably would have done something fucking stupid... but I didn't, and I'm here today and I'm alive. I'm sick, but I'm alive.

Never again. I will NEVER work for a place like that, ever again. I don't care. I refuse to sacrifice my health like that again. It's fucking insane that place is still in business, and even more insane that they haven't received an audit yet. If ANYONE seen the back, they'd be out of business. Hell, I got hurt more times there in less than a month than I did over 6 YEARS of retail work before that. While there, I injured my left wrist (didn't report it since I had no clue when or how it happened), re-injured my lumbar (didn't report it because I didn't think a fresh injury on an existing vulnerable area would be taken seriously and would instead be treated like it was already there), caught at least 3 infections on 3 different fingers, and the dust... so much dust. Even when telling the hiring manager I had asthma, and if I had a flare up I just went outside... why wouldn't a mask have been offered? I highly suspect the dust has something to do with my lungs' inability to grab enough air.

I genuinely hope that they improve things for my coworkers remaining at that place. They deserve to work in an environment that genuinely cares about how they're doing and about their health and well being. I don't feel that the business cares about ANY of that, and instead their interest rests with the bottom line. You cannot treat your employees like machines. I hope things improve, for the sake of my friends and former coworkers. They work so damn hard, and they deserve to feel safe at work, and deserve to have the proper equipment, access to equipment, and the knowledge of what to do in an emergency.