I’m not sure where I was going with this apart from the fact I’m currently wide awake at 11pm on a Sunday night with nothing left to do apart from letting my thoughts run wild.

I want to quickly touch on sleep deprivation and how it can have an astonishing effect physically and mentally yet only some can understand. Now I’m not saying this to undermine those of you who read this nor make you feel insignificant in ways that I have but I do have to say there is quite a substantial difference between being tired ’cause you’ve had a busy day’ and ‘physically and emotionally tired’ because you have ‘been awake 14 hours’ working harder than those can appreciate when their all tucked up snug in bed.

They say we do it to ourselves cause we chose this career. We chose do to night shifts and everything that is involved in that. YES we do. But what we did not choose is to be belittled by those whether it is shown directly to our face or in the way you speak to us,  but it is those who come in the next morning and nit pick each and every thread you have so gently weaved together, trying your darnedest to keep your patients alive and the floors clean and shelves restocked. All to have someone make one thoughtless statement that would usually have flown past you without a second thought. Everything, and I mean everything become 100 times harder when you’ve been awake for 12, 14 or 16 hours. Even the simple task of forming a coherent sentence is a challenge.

Sleep deprivation is a real and serious issue, many if not all night shift works of any industry face. We all joke that staying up till 3am either out partying in clubs or chatting with friends could be done with ease, but add in the challenges night shift workers face of their chosen career adding on top the ticking clock of darkness which seems to move at a snail’s pace. The desperation to see the sunrise or for the next staff member to walk through those swinging doors to take over from your draining, exhausting night is egaely anticipated.

It doesnt matter how much we love our job, how much we loathe our job or anywhere in between that 3am click over of each individual’s circadian rhythm has got to affect you somehow. For me, it’s usually the hours between 3 and 5am that are the toughest. My eyelids feel like they are being weighed down by bricks, my physical energy is wavering but mostly it is my mentally energy has hit an all time low and that is when to me personally I become my own worst enemy.

As I await my second wind to kick in to me it feels like time is frozen, my thoughts are running rampant in my brain, and I cant decide if I’m hungry, hangry, or hurting.

5am arrives and a switch has flicked on inside of me and now a new burst of energy is pulsing through me. I’m running round like a mad person, cleaning, restocking making sure everything is up to date, but mostly I am excited that time has now decided to speed up and its only an hour or two before I can climb into my own bed as the rest of the world hops out of theirs.

There is the very well known saying ‘same shit different day’. I’m not sure why I thought this new job would be any different, but for some reason I had my heart set on going to this Aussie emergency center 20 minutes north of the sunny Gold Coast and that all would be merry. Each staff member vet, nurse, receptionist regardless of what business they belonged too would work together, support one another and be appreciative of a fellow girl friends work, #girlpower. Sadly I was not surprised to hear that this what not such a thing. That in this renowned Australian clinic that is plastered all over the internet, people can still belittle, interrogate and crush the souls of one another. Of course it’s over the most ridiculous of matters.

Having just completed, and still recovering from my first midnight shift start the senior nurse I was shadowing throughout the course of the night bore the brunt of my never ending questions. Mostly I was trying to figure out the lay of the land and how the clinic worked in terms of handover protocol, scheduling of treatments, when and how many staff arrived and of course what MY job was. As I listened trying to be patient with my questions and not jump the gun, I was told that their nurses presumably were setting out their patient charts to have what seemed like the most minimal handling of their patients when there was the MOST amount of staff  during waking hours but would slam us with unnecessary treatments or visual ob’s of their usual stable patients at the most impractical times of the night.

Do they realise how many staff are on an after hours shift? I say that with sarcasm as there is no more than 2 nurses and 1 vet for the majority of the night. This of course is not taking into consideration that we have to deal with life threatening, critical emergencies that could walk through our doors at any moment. Basically long story short- the day nurses seem to be able to only handle one task or patient at a time and yet us super human after hours nurses who are not only battling the long, draining hours of darkness, 10 times the amount of patients per nurse, extra cases that walk through the sliding doors, but personally, also our inner demons too.

 

My conclusion. That every clinic is the same! Same drama, same pettiness, one team thinks they are superior to the other.

To be continued…