Working Holiday Pregnant

I was nine weeks pregnant when I boarded the plane to Vancouver, alone. The listing had promised meals, forty hours, and a fair boss. My first paycheck came to $943. Rent was $950. I did the math on a closing shift, somewhere between the bathroom and the pizza boxes. The visa tied me to exactly one workplace, and the workplace knew it. A coworker decided the pregnant new hire wanted special treatment. I stopped waiting for things to be fair. The staff started calling me the honey badger. I took it as a job title. Mid-year, I applied for a second visa nobody thought I would get. Thirteen days later I was out: working from home as a medical interpreter, carrying other people's worst phone calls in two languages. Then my water broke early, and I met the famously bad Canadian healthcare system from the inside. An emergency C-section. A six-hour ER wait, one week post-surgery. A hospital bill that, mercifully, charged me for a single day. The baby was fine. Almost nothing went the way I wanted. This book is the whole year, with the numbers left in. For readers of Maid and Crying in H Mart.