The Nine Shifts: Shifts 5 and 6

Pre-shift 5: I go through my morning ritual at 12:30 pm in order to get to the hospital by 1.

Shift 5: I refer to my halfway point as the hump shift until I realize that sounds kind of weird and inappropriate. Rather than be assigned a POD I am left as the float resident. Free to search out patients wherever they may be, I am also always an intruder, a presence that must be always explained and apologized away. Perhaps the monotony starts to wear at me as the shift goes by in a faceless, nameless blur. Fractures and respiratory distress and vomiting and all over again. Breathing treatments and antibiotics and oral rehydration. I pass out popsicles and anti-vomiting medication with equal nonchalance. While I can remember the fried catfish and popcorn shrimp I ate for dinner, I can’t remember my patients. Maybe that is the cost of efficiency, or at least of proficiency. The cost of ability being that only the failures are memorable. For all the children I’ve seen and treated it is the failures that stay with me the most. It is the ones that I couldn’t save that haunt me. Secretly I am grateful that my passion in medicine comes without as much risk of failure than other specialties. Cancer kills and hearts fail but joints only hurt. I am strangely giddy at the end of the 12 hours.

Post-shift 5: My life seems increasingly redundant and I find monotony even in the quest for greatness. I fall asleep on the couch watching the Cosby show.

Pre-shift 6: I wake up earlier than usual because I am out of deodorant. Rather than sleep until the last possible minute to wake up, I wake up 20 minutes earlier. I remember having a dream that I was married with a newborn son and I was scared when I realized that he had an extra pair of eyes on his stomach and knew this was a very very bad sign and cried for him.

Shift 6: The ER is strangely slow. Or it is overrun by doctors. Or both. I am convinced that I could have either gone home or taken a long nap in the middle of my shift and nobody would have noticed or cared and regret not doing this. My replaceability seems contrary to the greatness I am about to achieve by completing The Nine Shifts. I only saw one patient in my pod the entire day. An intern asks me to supervise her doing a lumbar puncture. I find it funny as I view myself as hardly any more competent than her and am a little secretly glad when an attending agrees to help her. The slow pace of the day illicit a jocular nature among all the doctors. We wonder and joke about the causes for which some of our patients come in. The teenager who comes in because he had a muscle cramp the day before. The boy who comes in because of neck pain cause from playing too much video games. Sometimes I feel I have to wade through too much to find the truly sick. I find it strange sometimes that people come to the hospital seeking my comfort and consolation and expertise. I learn that I love gummi butterflies. I show off my awesome knee high argyle socks – patients and ER staff are all impressed.

Post-shift 6: I ride home in the rain as a cold wind blows. I fall asleep on the couch watching the Cosby show.