Ghost of the past

With great hope, I came to Japan in 2016.

Things were going tough yet every day was so interesting. Monday was not a nightmare. Every day, I always thought about what will be going on the next day. I slept with a lot of hope and excitement for the next day.

I never thought that one day everything just falls apart. I never thought that I was in the wrong place.

Very unfortunate that I choose the wrong place to study. If in the company life, some called a company with bad culture (overwork and lots more of harassments) as a ‘black company’, in the graduate study we called lab with similar things as ‘black lab’.

That week was the busiest week in the lab. A new project with quite a good prospect just being started and I did a lot of experiments for more than 12 hours a day. This was the most hours I spent for days in a week (usually I managed 3–4 projects and worked 8 to 10 hours a day). The experiment results were really good and the PI want to push the project forward. In the following week, I did a crucial experiment that determine the direction of the project. It took me more than 10 hours to do. Before I finished the experiment, the PI ask me the result. I gave the result with the analysis after dinner which was 9 p.m. on that day. The result was very good.

At around 11 p.m. I got a message from the PI and tell me that he had just come back from Tokyo and wanted to have a discussion. I refused the meeting. I was very tired and wanted to have a good night's sleep.

The next day, in the morning, I got an email but I didn’t know about it yet. I was called by my senior, he told me that the PI needs me to come to his office.

2 hours long in the office. He tried to oppose all of what I thought. He said that I was lazy. I should be in the lab until the work is finished. I should not sleep until the work is finished. And many more bad things that I don’t remember anymore (I think I want to get rid of that bad memories).

I was shocked by that statement coming out of a PI’s mouth. I couldn’t believe that I did something wrong. I tried to think about it all the time. The shock was elevated to depression. I cannot have a good sleep. I sometimes throw up. I cannot eat much.

The condition worsened when winter comes a few months after the accident. Until now, I couldn’t remember well what was happen 1.5 years after the accident.

1 year passed by and came the annual health check in the university. The toll that I need to pay is quite expensive. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure or hypertension. Because of that, I spent several months visiting the Clinic for Internal Medicine and University Hospital to check for the cause of hypertension. Ten of thousands of Yen spent but I couldn’t find the culprit. Now every month I need to visit Clinic for Internal Medicine to get pills to lower my blood pressure. There was one period when I need to take 6 pills every morning.

Thanks to my caring friends, I now slowly recovering from the depression state. I likely have to take hypertension drugs for the rest of my life. But that is not a thing to be worried about anymore. I am facing the future and I believe that I can make it brighter than I imagined.