If you were pregnant and worked in a fairly physically demanding position, you’d probably have to modify how you go about your work day.

The pregnant woman in this story was modifying her work day based on how she felt, but when one supervisor pushed her too far, she decided to drastically cut back on what she was willing to do.

Let’s read the whole story.

“If a pregnant woman doesn’t have light duty paperwork, she should be capable of doing the job as required without help”

I am currently 31 weeks pregnant and I work as a water filtration operator.

Every four weeks, me and the other operators rotate onto the maintenance shift where we work under this particular supervisor, we’ll call him Randy.

Randy likes to think he has more control that he does have, and honestly, the plant supervisor just lets him think that.

Randy didn’t care that she was pregnant.

About a month or so ago, I was working with him and he told me to pick up a 45 lb empty nitrogen cylinder.

I politely reminded him that I was pregnant and shouldn’t be doing that, to which he responded since I didn’t have light duty paperwork, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I sucked it up and lifted the cylinder and carried it to the destination, but received a pulled muscle in the process.

Randy got in trouble!

The next day, I informed the plant supervisor and an work injury report was filed.

When my statement was taken, the verbiage I used that was corroborated with another coworker that was present caused Randy to get in trouble because he knew I was pregnant and essentially caused the injury to happen.

They took me to a nurse to make sure that my baby was fine and that I was okay and was not experiencing any complications from the injury.

I wasn’t other than being in pain if I moved too much.

They sent me back on my way and the plant supervisor put me on desk duty for the day.

Randy was not happy!

Randy was livid of course because he lost some of his manpower on the maintenance team.

He made a fuss about me not having light duty paperwork saying that if I didn’t have it then I should be capable of doing the work that is needed around the plant.

I was capable, I just used common sense.

Here’s what common sense looks like.

Prior to this incident, I did my job to the fullest within the limitations of my body, which wasn’t that much.

I rested when I needed to, didn’t lift more than my body would allow, and most importantly, I was the only female out of 7 employees so my other coworkers were more than willing to help me if I asked (which wasn’t that often).

The paperwork she got from the doctor included a lot of restrictions.

So the plant supervisor called me into his office and requested that I go get my light duty papers from the doctor ASAP. That’s the only way he could protect me from getting further hurt at work.

I told him I understood and made the call to the drs office and picked it up that afternoon.

I got the paperwork that was supposed to keep Randy quiet and it restricted me as such:

• No stooping more than 2 times an hour
• No climbing ladders or poles at all
• No climbing more than 3 flights of stairs a shift
• No lifting more than 25 pounds
• No standing more than 30 minutes out of each hour
• And limited contact with chemicals

She doesn’t actually think all of these limitations are necessary.

These orders of course make it very difficult for me to do my job fully as it basically limits me to either desk work, or general cleaning.

Now Is know this list is nonsense, because I can definitely stoop more than two times in an hour. I may be out of breath coming back up, but I can do it.

And the climbing more than three flights of stairs is ridiculous because that means I can’t do all of my rounds. Someone else has to do the last set for me because you climb a set of stairs every time.

Here’s what she’s been doing…

Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to bend the rules here to make everyone’s lives easier, but honestly, since he’s the one who complained and moaned for me to get this paperwork, I plan to make full use of it.

So far, since I’ve received this paperwork, I keep a checklist of all of the things I can’t do and fill it like a bingo card.

If I fill all of the things; to the office I go because that means I can’t do anymore physical work on shift.

And he has a bad habit of tossing a lot of work my way in the beginning of my shifts.

It’s best for her to take it easy to protect her baby. Even if she thinks she’s capable of doing more, it’s good that she’ following the doctor’s orders, even if she’s doing so maliciously.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Maybe Randy does have as much control as he thinks he does.

This is a good point about the doctor’s reasoning.

This is funny!

And here’s a jab at the United States medical policies.

It’s just business as usual until someone gets hurt.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.