Night Moves

For the past week now I have been working the night shift on the labor and delivery unit at Hutzel Women’s hospital. This means, besides the obvious fact that I am occasionally welcoming a small, slippery, life into the world with my bare (but gloved) hands, that I am sleeping during the day and awake at night.

I am not a complete stranger to all-nighters. I pulled a few “almosts” through the years at friends sleepovers and the like. I completed my first legitimate 24 hour stay with the waking world my last night in the college dorms at Michigan State. I knocked one out working on a tedious busy work project at Indiana Wesleyan. And for one horrendous month, I essentially pulled an all-nighter every sixth night while taking trauma surgery call as a med student (read: I fell asleep standing in the operating room on multiple occasions because someone once decided that would be a beneficial experience to put medical students through).

However, unlike those forays into the nocturnal universe, this past week has been a permanent stay. Even when I get a day (night) off, such as today, I still attempt to stay awake through the night (which really isn’t too difficult because I tend to wake up sometime around the dinnertime hour and as much as Garfield is my hero, I struggle to eat lasagna, then go back to perpetual napping).

The work nights are fairly predictable. That is, after the day shift time completes their cross-over time and I’ve settled into “the pit” (my term for where the labor and delivery doctors and nurses sit watching fetal heart monitor strips; not that unlike the wall street pit, I suppose), things become eerily quiet (as one would expect). Occasionally my attention is roused as I go running into room to say hello to a new soul or into the operating room to watch one be pulled from one world to another.

Other than those exciting moments, the night generally consists of trying to stay awake while reading, or attempting to dodge interns that want to set up suturing contests for the med students (which consist of locking medical students in a supply closet with a needle, thread, and washcloths and a set of ill-defined rules).

The off-nights are the ones where things get really interesting. Because, like a Pavlovian kanine, I awake, make coffee and read the online editions of the requisite local and national papers. Then I look at the clock and realize that it is 7 pm, I am eating frosted mini-wheats and every possible thing I planned to do today is impossible to accomplish (note: I live in Detroit, MI, which besides being famous for other things should be famous for any relevant store closing at 5 pm. Especially when the Tigers play a day game and the wings season is done).

I can usually think of few things to knock off before nine pm. Namely, I travel to the suburbs, do some grocery shopping, take a run, and catch the last of whatever interesting prime time TV is on (today, the Celtics-Cavs game 6. Faaaaantastic).

But inevitably, one am rolls around and I feel a panic like I should be getting tired, but am not. At this time, I force myself to close the blinds because its weird that the city is asleep (as it has been since five pm, but at least now, the sun also is shut down) and try and pretend it’s the day.

I answer all the e-mails I’ve waited to reply to. Answer a phone call or two to my west coast acquaintances, catch up on all of the serious and non-serious news I have been missing out on the last few days. Of course, now its 2 am, and I can’t in good conscience study at 2 am, so I wait for tiredness to set in.

And of course it does. Even earlier than my usual 9 am bedtime, by 4 am, my body is psychologically defeated and lets me drift off to slumber reading whichever piece of fiction is on loan from Detroit’s fine public library system. And while its not the sort of cognizant slumber that characterizes my naps, I am not quite fully asleep either.

Sleep is never quite as deep on the days off, and my state of awakeness is never quite as acute either. I find my self in a sort of perpetual half-sleep. Amazed constantly that I am either sleeping at such an hour, or awake at such an hour. And while I simply try and reverse the am/pm function of the clock in my mind, the outdoor lighting, television schedule, internal clock always remind me I am doing something unnatural.

Thank goodness I only have two more nights left before I can return to some sense of normalcy. Because even if the working days will be 14 hours long, at least I will know what to do with myself when I get a day off.