I just graduated undergrad and spent five months sending out 5-10 applications a week before anyone called me back. Got a temp job in a lab to save for my Master's, always volunteered for overtime and was a model employee however I could be. Tweaked my knee pushing a cart at work, fired immediately. I was completely blindsided, and felt like a failure because I applied to hundreds of places, and even once I was hired, I couldn’t keep the job.

My knee hurt so much I could barely sleep, so I filed Worker's Comp. The doctor said it wasn’t broken and to come back in 10 days if it wasn't better, and it's definitely not.

Oh, and since I've been having so much job trouble, I've been staying with my, uh, DNA donors. They'd been quiet up until then, not that they had much choice: I worked noon to 9 or 10pm so they wouldn't have access to me. But as soon as I mentioned trying to get a referral for a physical therapist, they went BALLISTIC.

You're gonna regret this, no one's ever going to hire you now, everywhere you apply to from now on will see you were hurt and they'll always, always, always choose somebody else over you. They hire nurses and lawyers to try to incriminate people and they've probably already got someone coming after you. I tried to explain that my record will show I'm honest, but they steamrolled me and I just left.

I felt like I'd been hole-punched and was really badly shaken, especially since I've been struggling for so long to find work anyway. My thoughts were racing.

• The only time someone's ever asked me if I've ever filed Worker's Comp is the insurance company, as I was filing it. (Can an interviewer ask me that? Is that legal?)
• I've been asked once or twice if I've ever been fired, asked to resign in lieu of being fired, etc, by teaching jobs, but never about Worker's Comp. Part of the reason I filed it was so that I'd have medical records backing me up that I was fired because I was hurt.
• My...housemates are in the top 10% and have 2 multiple-thousand-dollar purebred dogs, every gadget as soon as it's released, and good health insurance. Money would not be an issue if I wanted my knee gold-plated, probably. I suspect their real concern was saving a couple bucks; if they were worried about me, they'd have gone through the pros and cons with me as soon as the temp agency fired me instead of shaming and ridiculing me two weeks later. And they'd want me to get help so I don't have a permanently damaged knee at 22!!

I'm still really shaken. Can anyone reassure a lost new grad that the world's not ending because I filed Worker's Comp/got fired after just a few weeks?