Twelve years on the line and a doctor finally said stop

I started at a garment workshop when I was twenty-six, sewing linings for jackets that got exported somewhere I never saw and worn by people I'll never meet. Twelve years on the same production line, more or less, though the workshop changed hands twice and the machines got a little newer each time even if the pay never quite kept up with them.

I was good at it. I want to say that plainly because I think people who haven't worked a line assume it's mindless, and it isn't — there's real skill in keeping pace for ten hours without your stitching getting sloppy, in reading which part of the batch will slow everyone down before it happens and adjusting. I trained new workers for years. I knew every machine on our floor by its particular quirks, which one skipped stitches if you ran it too fast, which one needed the tension adjusted twice a shift.

What twelve years also did was wear down my back and my shoulders in a way I didn't take seriously until I couldn't ignore it anymore. The chairs were the kind you sit in for ten-hour shifts because that's what was there, not because anyone chose them for your spine. Overtime during peak season could push a day past twelve hours, and during those months the line supervisor made it clear, without ever quite saying it directly, that requesting fewer hours meant being seen as someone who didn't want to work, which in turn meant being first on the list if the workshop needed to cut staff during a slow month.

So I didn't ask. I took painkillers before shifts for probably three years before I told anyone, including my husband, how bad it had gotten. I told myself it was just what the work cost, the way everyone on the line seemed to accept some version of the same trade — money now, body later, and hope later doesn't come too soon.

It came sooner than I hoped. Two years ago I started losing feeling in two fingers on my right hand, on and off, then more off than on. I kept working because we had a loan on our house that needed both incomes and my husband's construction work isn't steady enough to carry it alone. I told the supervisor I needed a lighter station for a while. He said he'd see what he could do, and then nothing changed, because saying he'd see what he could do was easier than actually rearranging a line that ran on tight quotas.

The appointment that changed things wasn't even about my hand at first. I went in for what I thought was just exhaustion, and the doctor, an older woman who I think had seen a hundred garment workers in that same chair, asked very specific questions about my hands and my back before I'd said anything about either. She told me, in the plain way doctors tell you things when they've decided kindness means not softening it, that continuing at that pace risked permanent nerve damage, not eventually, but soon, and that I needed to stop entirely for at least three months and change work after that.

I sat in my car outside the clinic for a long time. Not crying exactly, just still. Twelve years is most of my adult working life. I thought about the new workers I'd trained who were now training newer workers themselves. I thought about the loan, which did not care what my doctor said.

I gave notice two weeks later, the shortest notice I've ever given anyone, because staying longer wasn't really a choice my body was offering me anymore. The workshop gave me my final pay without incident, at least, and a supervisor I'd worked under for years said he was sorry to see me go, which I believed, and which changed nothing.

I'm doing alterations from home now, smaller volume, my own pace, chairs I picked myself. It's less money, some months a lot less, and my husband and I have had harder conversations about the loan than I'd like. But I can still feel all my fingers most days, and I've started to think that twelve years ago, nobody told me that would ever be a thing to be grateful for.