On Friday night I worked my first night shift ever - 7pm to 8am. I tried to nap during the day before the shift, but of course I was nervous, and ended up napping for about 2 hours. This meant that I got 2 hours sleep in approximately 24 hours, since of course I was awake all day Friday, then all night. I was about 3 hours into my shift when my preceptor had to go home sick, so I followed around another nurse for the rest of the night. She was in Labour and Delivery (L&D), which I don't have a lot of experience in, so I mostly observed. Oh, and gave a shot of morphine here and there. Yep, labouring moms can get morphine! My personal recommendation so far is to have Fentanyl. It is given IV, and when I watched one mom get it to help with the pain of contractions, she just laid her head back and sighed, the pain relief was that fast. It clears the system more quickly than morphine, but is about 20 times stronger than morphine. It doesn't harm the fetus in utero, but if the delivery happens soon after the dose, the baby often has a decrease in respiratory function, and may need some drugs to reverse the effect. I didn't see any deliveries that night, but lots of labour and interventions. I did watch an epidural, and assisted the anesthesiologist. Very interesting!
I was doing fine through the night, and took lots of breaks with the nurses on down time, but at 4am something happened. I hit what the nurses refer to as "The Wall". It comes on really suddenly, and you are doing fine, but just bam! you are exhausted. Looking in the mirror I was getting bleary-eyed, and the other nurses looked exactly the same as me. We had a break around 5am, and many of the nurses eat a bigger meal then. I got lots of advice about how to prepare and recover from night shifts, but I don't think I'm a big fan.
I got home around 8am, took a shower, and tried to fall asleep. Of course Rachel and Shane were just getting up, so there was a lot of movement around the house. In addition, even though I slept in the back room with the blackout shades, there was still just too much light. A nurse told me to buy a safety blanket, those thin foil-y ones, for a couple of bucks, and it will take out the light completely. I'm buying one before my next shift for sure. I finally fell asleep, but woke again around 1pm because Rachel kept coming into the room to tell me stuff. At one point I heard Shane yell to her to leave me to sleep, but she replied, "Oh Dad, it's okay, don't worry about it." And then she came into the room again.
The worst part was not the fatigue, but the tired headache that started on the night shift and lasted all the next day. Night shifts are probably fine if you are single, but with a family and on the weekend, they are debilitating. It took me an entire day to recover, so it hardly becomes a day off at all, because you can't do much. Thank goodness Shane cooked and cleaned on Saturday, and I spent my time colouring with Rachel, our new favourite pastime. Quiet and easy, we just print off colouring pages from the internet and pull out our pencil crayons and markers. We can colour like this for over an hour.
My next shift (day) was just cancelled, so I'll be back on Tuesday night for three consecutive nights. Oh, and I have a presentation to do with the first year nursing students between my second and third shifts. It will be a long week. 15 shifts to go!
The bonus of night shifts? I believe you get paid a little bit more, and there is much less busy-ness. No admin staff or managers around, and the only docs are on call. Of course on Obstetrics there can be lots going on at 3am (as there was on the shift I was on), but sometimes my classmates struggle to keep themselves busy, especially if all the patients are sleeping.
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