I used to be a sheet metal worker. Too many cuts/stitches to bother listing.
But today I worry more about long-term "work-injuries" I may be carrying. On several occasions we did lots of long soldering joints, spending all day melting and vaporizing lead and tin, and we were breathing those fumes. We were also constantly dipping red-hot irons into muriatic acid to "tin" them. Sometimes the breeze through our shop would suddenly shift, and then acid fumes would fill our lungs and choke us to the point that we would drop an iron and run several steps away to get a breath of real air. That CANNOT be good for you...
Also, when they tore out Frigidaire factory near here, I spent several days cutting down the walls of the old giant room-sized conveyor-based ovens where they had baked on the porcelain finishes to appliances. The walls were stuffed full of asbestos. We used torches to cut apart and tear down the steel walls, and the chicken wire which held the asbestos in place. When one of the big steel siding-type walls would crash down, the whole 200-foot-long rooms would instantly fill with asbestos "snow", which was so thick we had trouble seeing each other across the room. That part of that job lasted for about a week. All we had were those little white 25-cent face masks with rubber bands to wear, but the black soft soot from the walls quickly clogged them. All of us had soot-blackened spit for days afterwards, no exaggeration. One of us might happen to spit onto a white place on the concrete, and everyone would chuckle at the blackness still present in the saliva. But in our private thoughts, we all worried about that.
Add to that the years I spent using compressed air to blow brake-shoe dust off backing plates, and power-grinding brake shoes to match the radius of brake drums and...well...I sometimes wonder/worry if that will come back to haunt me one day...
