Purgatory

As anyone who works a rotating schedule with night shifts will understand, today I am in purgatory.  I hate purgatory.  I’m scheduled to work the first of a string of night shifts tonight.  The shift begins at 11:30pm and ends at 8am.  The last string of shifts that I worked (the last of which was the day before yesterday) were day shifts starting at 7am and ending at 4pm.  So two days ago I was going to bed precisely when I would (ideally) be waking up to go to work tonight.  That is what makes today purgatory- neither a day off nor a work day.  A day when my dutiful body naturally woke up at 5:00am (like I asked it to for the past several days) with all the energy to attack this “day” that does not require me to be at work, but a day that I will spend desperately trying to force my body out of it’s natural rhythm to save some shred of energy and wakefulness for the night shift.  

My body, much like my personality, does not take well to force.  In fact, just to spite me, my body will probably have more energy and motivation today than on most other days.  Just when I lay my body down to preemptively rest will be precisely when it starts itching to clean the kitchen or when my stomach will start gnawing away with hunger.  I will lie awake looking at the ceiling, looking at the clock, counting down the wasted minutes as they fly by as neither rest nor productive activity. 

 I could just say “screw it”, get up, enjoy this “day off,” and get shit done while I have this precious and fleeting motivation.  The price that I will pay, however, for living today like a normal human being is that at approximately 10pm I will still be a normal human being and will become sleepy eyed and exhausted, as normal humans do, just in time to go from 0-60mph at work in the ER.  Not ideal.  

On the other hand, there is always medication, right?  I am a doctor after all.  And if my patients are right, medication should be able to fix EVERYTHING. I can just medicate myself into superhuman feats of wakefulness!  Benadryl rotating with palpitation-inducing doses of caffeine!  Take that, body- you stubborn bitch!  Unfortunately, I’ve tried this too, and found that not only is my body stubborn, but it is vengeful when wronged.  And the only thing worse than working bleary-eyed with sleep deprivation is working bleary-eyed, hung over and tweeked out on stimulants.  

So here I sit in purgatory in my pajamas at 10:33am with my laptop, blogging, which -as luck would have it- is a nice little expenditure of mental without physical energy, since all of my energy expenditures are being painstakingly budgeted over the next 24 hours.  So as I conclude this post- let me apologize in advance to tonight’s patients for whatever lack of fortitude may be caused if I am unable to balance today’s voyage to Target with mind-numbing daytime television.  I hate purgatory.