First of all, I'm in Australia.

So it all started, really, when my work had a part-time chef. She would come in three days a week, and the other two days staff would take turns going into the kitchen preparing and cooking one of the meals (there are three; morning tea, lunch which is always a hot meal, and afternoon tea - plus the additional late snack makes it four).

When she left, one of the staff who worked ten years as a chef offered to go into the kitchen as the new cook, and within six-eight weeks she had hurt herself. When that happened, our centre director was away, so the 2IC came to me and said that I was the only one qualified (in childcare all you need is a safe food handling certificate, which I have from my cert 3 in Hospitality) to go into the kitchen, she needed me to go in there and could I please, just for a few days to help the Centre out until they could find a new chef.

I was still a trainee at this point, and nowhere in my job description did it mention anything about stepping into the kitchen. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want to make things difficult for myself by not doing my workplace a solid, so I said yes, for a few days.

The Centre where I work is certified to have 104 children per day, ranging from ages of six weeks to five years old, pre-school aged. There are five separate rooms, each room with their own trolley. Morning tea and afternoon tea always had a platter of fruit, and with morning tea was mostly toast or rice cakes with spreads, or porridge.

With afternoon tea, along with the fruit platter, was similar. Sometimes a cake, sometimes vegetable sticks and hummus dip, sometimes dried fruit and crackers. Lunch was always a hot meal - chicken, mince, tuna or tofu with rice or pasta. So we can be talking tuna pasta bake, butter chicken and rice, beef mince with polenta dumplings, sometimes soup, etc. Late snack would be garlic bread (made with toasted bread in the oven), biscuits or crackers, or raisin toast.

On top of that, at the time we were making our own baby puree. So peeling, chopping, boiling and then draining and blending. We could use a whole bag of potatoes, two bags of carrots, a whole pumpkin, two bags of apples, two punnets of pears. With fruit at morning tea, there would be a minimum of two different fruits, sometimes three. One to two large watermelons, a bag of oranges, bananas, sometimes punnets of berries were used. Sometimes we even had chopped banana and custard at afternoon tea. I’m remembering different things I had to make as I type all of this out.

Point is, the amount of work I was doing, as a trainee childcare worker whose job was not in the kitchen, who had never worked in a kitchen before outside of her own home, who had never experienced work as a cook, what I was doing in the kitchen was too much for one person, let alone someone who didn’t have the experience. After the first week, I asked the 2IC how it was going, finding another chef. They hadn’t made headway and needed me to be in the kitchen again the following week. This went on for four or five weeks.

I started to get a pain in my right wrist. You know when you first work our, for the first time ever, and the next day you’re just so incredibly sore because you’re working muscles that have never been worked before, but as you keep doing it your body becomes accustomed to it? I thought that’s what was happening since I’d not worked in a kitchen before so didn’t have anything else to compare it to, except the gym. It probably seems a bit stupid now, maybe even naive, but that’s what I thought it was.

The previous chef had come back to work on light restricted duties in the office, and she had been coming in to the kitchen to give me pointers every now and then, and she noticed that I had been favouring my right hand, and was struggling to lift the pots or stir, or really do anything, with my right hand. She suggested that I see my GP and I did.

My GP initially thought it was RSI - repetitive strain injury, and said it should settle down if I rest it for a week or two, so I stayed home for a week and then returned to work on restricted office duties.

Turns out it wasn't RSI, but there's some nerve damage and my nerves are highly sensitive. Over time, the pain went from being in just my right wrist to extending from my fingertip on my right hand to my elbow. I still have problems gripping anything from a pencil to a broom for anything longer than sometimes a minute. Somedays if I am walking too much I get pins and needles in my hand, a new development, and my hand can begin to go numb. I just have different pains anywhere from my fingers to my elbow at various times throughout the day, sometimes triggered by something I have done, sometimes I can be sitting at home on the couch watching tv and can be incredible amounts of pain. Sometimes even typing on my laptop gives me sharp pains in my fingers and I can’t even do that.

I received a phone call this morning from the insurance company telling me that I am only covered for two years since my injury isn't impacting 11% or more of my body (or something similar to that effect), so my claim would be closed in three months and I will be in my own and will need to pay for things out of my own pocket and with Medicare.