Healthcare and nightshifts. An inevitable part of the job and either you love it or hate it. Some people thrive at their best when they work in the night because it is best combinable with the other aspects of their lives. Others wish they could get rid of them as fast as possible, and get totally wrecked with just the idea of shifting their rhythm again

Minoritynurse.com

Because is what you get when working those graveyard shifts, you have to shift your rhythm and start doing things at abnormal times. And this is super different how everybody deals with it. For example, in one of my old jobs I would sleep into the afternoon and start again at 1700, and I would happily eat a full on steak with fries meal for breakfast at 1600, just to have enough in there to get me going for the upcoming hours.

Also the whole idea of morning traffic was always super weird when going home. You sit in traffic and everyone is freshly showered around you ready to start their day, bringing the kids to school, eating their breakfast in the car. For some reason this is always a twilight zone moment.

I remember coming back from a nightshift around Christmas time going straight into the supermarket at 7 AM because I thought it wouldn't be so busy as yet. I couldn't have been more wrong. The supermarket was packed with fresh people all ready to prepare their big dinners, and here I was half asleep thinking on what I was doing here again. At the point where a granny bumped me over and said, 'move lady' I decided to to leave with my sleepy brain, and eat break for Christmas, because this wasn't making any sense to me at all anymore. The rest of the world doesn't know that you have just finished an x-amount hour shift.

Everynurse.org

Now luckily I work with on call shifts and not with being there the whole night anymore. This means that I get called out whenever there is an emergency. Again, for some people this is terrible, but I really like this system. Also this system is not applicable for every job ofcourse. I work in surgery and surgery als means a lot of time waiting in between. Waiting on helicopters who bring patients, waiting on anasthesia who are busy with another patient, waiting on results to come in which will define if we will operate or not. Surgical nights are also a lot of waiting.

But what I like about it is that when my phone rings, I immediately have to be on my A-game. Nobody else in the office to help you set up, its just you and your team and working close together. You are fully dependent on the people that you work with to save that life that is in front of you and that is something unique. Failing isn't an option so slacking isn't as well. It's a group of individuals working together as one for the greater good.

Welcome to surgical nights