Thoroughly Over Nights
We're only getting older, baby
And I been thinking about it lately
Does it ever drive you crazy
Just how fast the night changes?
(-lyrics to “Night Changes” by One Direction)
I’ve come to an important conclusion based on these lyrics: the members of One Direction have never ever worked overnights at a hospital.
When I started in the field (Geeze, I make it sound like I’ve been doing this for decades instead of 2 years.) I knew I’d be the low man on the totem pole working crappy hours. When I got my first job, sure enough, it was day/evening/overnight rotating shifts. (Did I mention we staffed 7 days a weeks too? Add that fun factor in too…Yuck.) I’d never worked overnights in my life and had no idea what to expect. Would I be tired? Would we have a lot of overnight cases to cover? Would there be anything productive to do? Who the heck knows! Now just to be clear, I know there are people who work nothing but overnights. Those people deserve a medal and a lifetime supply of melatonin. Some people really love the “frequent tranquility” of overnights and I suppose if you aren’t forced to screw up your sleep schedule every few days, it’s probably not too bad. My experience was not a steady stream of 11PM starts (more like 6:30AM today, 11PM tomorrow, 3PM the next day…) You get the drift.
Come to find out, if your shift starts at 11PM, no cases come in, and you’re an industrious person like me you will run out of things to do sometime around 12:30AM. *Sigh* First, you put away unused suture and product from the day cases (10 minutes). Next, you’d run the nightly test on all the sterilizers (15 minutes). Follow that up with setting up rooms for the next day (30 minutes) and doing all the random cleaning you can find (20 minutes). After all that, you look at the clock thinking, “It’s got to be at least 2AM.” Nope.
(Meanwhile, your nurse has cocooned herself in blankets from the warmer and passed out with her head on the charge desk. So much for someone to keep you company.)
With “sleeping on the job” not being an option for techs, you’ve got to find a way to occupy yourself for another SEVEN HOURS. So what do you do? Let’s discuss…
Option 1: Eating First, I should mention that eating is always a viable answer for me regardless of the situation. You need to stay awake for 7 hours and you know what doesn’t help? Low blood sugar. Get some food in your face hole and you’ll feel better right? Maybe. If you aren’t good at preparing healthy snacks in advance, you might find yourself making fast friends with the vending machines. While my heart grew 3 sizes when I started working as a tech, my butt also grew 3 sizes from my late-night Poptart runs. Do yourself (and your scrub pants) a favor and pack yourself an apple or some carrot sticks. You can thank me later.
Option 2: TV When I was a kid, we had 3 or 4 TV channels and all of them went off the air at night. Being a tech back then must’ve sucked so hard. Now, THANK GOD, we have 24-hour cable. Even with endless channels to choose from, programming gets a little weird after midnight. One coworker liked to watch the crime channel. Most shows involved grisly murder reenactments with the production quality of a 2nd grade Thanksgiving pageant. (The only thing missing were parents standing off camera feeding actors their lines.) Despite the low production value, it would still creep me out having to walk down the dark OR hallways once the show was over. Personally, I like to watch either cooking shows (which would inevitably lead me to more dietary misdemeanors) or Cartoon Network. Nothing gives you an extra jolt of energy like a good laugh from a classic episode of Robot Chicken.
Option 3: Get a hobby I chose knitting. I once finished three-quarters of a blanket in the course of a two-week stint of overnights. Knitting is great because you have to stay alert enough to follow a pattern. You also have to watch that you aren’t messing up by dropping stitches…or stabbing yourself in the hand with a double-ended needle (Guilty, and I’ve got the stab wounds to prove it.) Knitting was my answer to boredom. Don’t like to knit? Try coloring books, journaling, learn to speak French with the Duolingo app… Whatever will keep you engaged and distracted from what you really want to do, which is….
Option 4: Sleep Okay. So you’ve gotten all your work done, eaten, watched Iron Chef, and got a head start on your new basket-weaving project and it’s STILL not even 4AM. In a last ditch effort, you even power-walked laps around the floor. (You wouldn’t DREAM of running in the hospital unless responding to a Code Blue, right?) Your head feels like a bowling ball on top of your neck. The steady white-noise hum of the break room fridge lulls your brain into a relaxed haze. Your eyelids start to close, like heavy velvet stage drapes signaling the end of your performance for the shift. The last thought you remember before dozing off were regrets at not sneaking some of those blankets from the warmer on your last lap around the halls…
The next thing you know, it’s morning. The charge nurse (who apparently emerged from her blanket cocoon as a big jerk instead of a magical butterfly) is poking you awake and chastising you for falling asleep on the job. You rouse yourself awake, finish your shift with one last act of cleaning (i.e. cleaning your drool puddle off the breakroom tabletop you fell asleep on), and stumble out to your car-blinded by the bright morning sunlight.
Until next time, stay sterile!
