The Curious Incident of the Dee in the Nightime
ok, so what have learnt from our 4 days of nights?
Much.
And it is as follows:
1) First night is the worst, cos you haven't really slept on the day, despite grabbing 2 hours in the afternoon if you're lucky, and you have to drive into work praying like mad that nothing bad is going down at that moment.
2) Camaraderie on the nights is 100 times greater than the days. It seems the more people there are the less people want to do work. On the weekends, evenings or nights it really does become a "How can I help?" universe as everyone is aware at how tired everyone else is.
Of course it's all just a buttering ploy, cos you know that when the shit hits the fan on your side you're gonna need all the help you can lay your hands on.
3) Night work is the bane of any social life, especially on the weekends. Nothing worse than listening (or reading on facebook) that people are getting ready for big nights out and you're having to roll TO work while they're partying.
4) The Dark Time isn't as scary as some might think. It's when the world slows down to a crawl though, if you're not working, and can seem as long as the rest of the night on its own.
5) Everyone loves Stevie. Superstition is the word. We all finish sentences with "nothing's happened yet - touch wood" and run to find something woodon to pat. Why? Why do we do this???
Overall my 4 nights were like 4 individual characters in a book.
Night 1 = First night, scary, didn't have enough staff and had to call staff in to help run one theatre while I got the other ready for an emergency laparascopic case. The surgeon arrived, yelled at me for getting the wrong thing, I had to run round to another theatre about 20 times in an hour to grab random stuff and we got the patient off the table at 4am.
Eat cake. Cake is nice and a very good nighttime meal for staving off the hunger. And I resist the temptation of the vending machine.
Night 2 = First night ON MY OWN!!! No other general/ortho help. I suffered horrible cramp in one shin over the course of the night(i.e. day, while trying to sleep) and limp for a lot of the time. 3 cases on the list, I do two with a nice neuro nurse offering to do the 3rd, nothing major just the usual stuff. It's the start of the weekend so the emergency lists are trying to clear.
We all have cake, cookies and tea at 3am and then after the basics are complete everyone stretches out to read for the rest of the night. I find I cannot sleep on nights, even if I want to I cannot close my eyes in a place with all the lights on and the vending machine whirring away in the background. Others can, I can't.
Night 3 = I get in and we have Southmead help! Yippee, more people to play with!
We do 1 case on the General side (still no ortho, whoda thought it???) some poor guy got his nuts twisted. And then we go and help out the neuro crew as they're dealing with a teenager who got run over. She's only a child but is wearing enough slap to look 20. Following a successful operation we then spend a good 10 minutes washing the blood out of her hair (SOP for neuro) and wondering the best way to get the cheap nasty mascara out of her eyes without blinding her.
I make the declaration that conditioner is better for shaving your legs than shaving foam and get a lot of looks as a result.
And then we all have tea and cake at 6.30.
I then get a call at 6.40 saying that the plastic surgeon has a finger (I reply: "Congratulations, I have ten, your point?").
She wants to come and see if it's viable for re-plantation. I then have to untangle the logistics of opening a theatre for an operation on... a finger. No patient, no I.D. Just.. a finger.
I also find I have no cover to relieve me at 7.30am and have to stay on til 8am until the day staff come on.
I finally go home grumpy. But I learn that finger man got tired of waiting around for his finger and absconded. Fair enough.
Night 4 = Last night!!!! Walk in, laparotomy on the table. I scrub in and we just do a quick irrigation and sew up and send the patient back to ITU. And that's it. On both sides. NO CASES the ENTIRE NIGHT. And that was the worst cos after doing the ordering, the stock check and putting things away I'm sooooooooooooooo bored.
I can't even watch the football cos the Patriots are playing and I want to chin Tom Brady. We all watched Little Voice on BBC1 and then I just read Lucifer, 100 Bullets and the News of the World.
I even started writing my memoirs from 2002-09!!!
In the end I took to plugging myself into my iPod and dancing round the department.
Everyone else was in cupboards or store rooms. I was dancing to The Killers.
Then 7am came and I went for coffee.
The end.
The moral of the story? Well, nights' aren't as scary as they look. They're purer than dayshifts as it's more about the surgery than the politics. People aren't as stressed on the grounds that everyone acknowledges we can only "do what we can do".
But I'm not a fool. I know that there's a good chance that the next time I'm rostered on for the graveyard shift it could go to hell in a handcart at STAGGERING speed. Triple A's, car crashes, punch-ups, there's a good chance we could be working all night.
But that's ok I guess.
After all, I'll only do what I can do.
And try to remember to duck. Xx
Much.
And it is as follows:
1) First night is the worst, cos you haven't really slept on the day, despite grabbing 2 hours in the afternoon if you're lucky, and you have to drive into work praying like mad that nothing bad is going down at that moment.
2) Camaraderie on the nights is 100 times greater than the days. It seems the more people there are the less people want to do work. On the weekends, evenings or nights it really does become a "How can I help?" universe as everyone is aware at how tired everyone else is.
Of course it's all just a buttering ploy, cos you know that when the shit hits the fan on your side you're gonna need all the help you can lay your hands on.
3) Night work is the bane of any social life, especially on the weekends. Nothing worse than listening (or reading on facebook) that people are getting ready for big nights out and you're having to roll TO work while they're partying.
4) The Dark Time isn't as scary as some might think. It's when the world slows down to a crawl though, if you're not working, and can seem as long as the rest of the night on its own.
5) Everyone loves Stevie. Superstition is the word. We all finish sentences with "nothing's happened yet - touch wood" and run to find something woodon to pat. Why? Why do we do this???
Overall my 4 nights were like 4 individual characters in a book.
Night 1 = First night, scary, didn't have enough staff and had to call staff in to help run one theatre while I got the other ready for an emergency laparascopic case. The surgeon arrived, yelled at me for getting the wrong thing, I had to run round to another theatre about 20 times in an hour to grab random stuff and we got the patient off the table at 4am.
Eat cake. Cake is nice and a very good nighttime meal for staving off the hunger. And I resist the temptation of the vending machine.
Night 2 = First night ON MY OWN!!! No other general/ortho help. I suffered horrible cramp in one shin over the course of the night(i.e. day, while trying to sleep) and limp for a lot of the time. 3 cases on the list, I do two with a nice neuro nurse offering to do the 3rd, nothing major just the usual stuff. It's the start of the weekend so the emergency lists are trying to clear.
We all have cake, cookies and tea at 3am and then after the basics are complete everyone stretches out to read for the rest of the night. I find I cannot sleep on nights, even if I want to I cannot close my eyes in a place with all the lights on and the vending machine whirring away in the background. Others can, I can't.
Night 3 = I get in and we have Southmead help! Yippee, more people to play with!
We do 1 case on the General side (still no ortho, whoda thought it???) some poor guy got his nuts twisted. And then we go and help out the neuro crew as they're dealing with a teenager who got run over. She's only a child but is wearing enough slap to look 20. Following a successful operation we then spend a good 10 minutes washing the blood out of her hair (SOP for neuro) and wondering the best way to get the cheap nasty mascara out of her eyes without blinding her.
I make the declaration that conditioner is better for shaving your legs than shaving foam and get a lot of looks as a result.
And then we all have tea and cake at 6.30.
I then get a call at 6.40 saying that the plastic surgeon has a finger (I reply: "Congratulations, I have ten, your point?").
She wants to come and see if it's viable for re-plantation. I then have to untangle the logistics of opening a theatre for an operation on... a finger. No patient, no I.D. Just.. a finger.
I also find I have no cover to relieve me at 7.30am and have to stay on til 8am until the day staff come on.
I finally go home grumpy. But I learn that finger man got tired of waiting around for his finger and absconded. Fair enough.
Night 4 = Last night!!!! Walk in, laparotomy on the table. I scrub in and we just do a quick irrigation and sew up and send the patient back to ITU. And that's it. On both sides. NO CASES the ENTIRE NIGHT. And that was the worst cos after doing the ordering, the stock check and putting things away I'm sooooooooooooooo bored.
I can't even watch the football cos the Patriots are playing and I want to chin Tom Brady. We all watched Little Voice on BBC1 and then I just read Lucifer, 100 Bullets and the News of the World.
I even started writing my memoirs from 2002-09!!!
In the end I took to plugging myself into my iPod and dancing round the department.
Everyone else was in cupboards or store rooms. I was dancing to The Killers.
Then 7am came and I went for coffee.
The end.
The moral of the story? Well, nights' aren't as scary as they look. They're purer than dayshifts as it's more about the surgery than the politics. People aren't as stressed on the grounds that everyone acknowledges we can only "do what we can do".
But I'm not a fool. I know that there's a good chance that the next time I'm rostered on for the graveyard shift it could go to hell in a handcart at STAGGERING speed. Triple A's, car crashes, punch-ups, there's a good chance we could be working all night.
But that's ok I guess.
After all, I'll only do what I can do.
And try to remember to duck. Xx