No cookies this week.
I have seen the wrong side of morning from the night way too often this week as I watch my 3rd sunrise taking a patient to the ICU after doing surgery on them all night. And it is only Thursday! This baker needs a week off from baking.
Because I’m tired.
I had a plan. I had a recipe all ready to go. But three-hour of sleep segments BID (that means twice a day) of sleep is not very conducive to wanting to bake. I’m afraid I’ll burn the batch because I am no paying attention.
This is the value of this call shift becomes even more glaringly obvious. Instead of staff having to work their shift and take night call and work all night and work their next shift, the burden is on the call team. But the team member could go home early. Yes, IF the schedule allows for that, and no one else has called in sick. Shockingly it transpires that the staff member who has worked all day the day before, had the evening off, working call cases all night, and is expected to work their normal day shift. Medical personnel fatigue is a real thing. And is against policy. And AORN standards.
I had a good friend die in a car accident after the end of a night shift while she was driving home. She fell asleep at the wheel on a winding mountain road that you need your entire attention on.
The call shift is a good thing. It allows for consistency for the surgeons 5 nights a week, and night rest for the regular staff 5 days a week. Now if I could only get a certain CRNA to show up on time after I text them that the patient is in PACU and ready to be seen. There is nothing I hate more than inefficiency and making the sick patient and the rest of the team wait for the CRNA clocks high on that scale.
No Cookie Thursday is a Thing this week. If you want to call it a week in the continuing one woman protest against overturning Roe v Wade, you may. But that is just a side benefit and not accurate. Because women in the 18th century didn’t get the day off because they were fatigued. Someone has to cook the meals and clean. Hell, weekends weren’t a thing until the late 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary clocks its first mention of the weekend to 1879.
I am going back to bed to have the second 3-hour segment of the day.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 