I spend a lot of time planning my sleep. And a lot of time counseling people about how to sleep on call. This is mostly a what to expect when you’re on call.

No, you will not miss a phone call from me. I call back.

Wait. You might miss a phone call. It is rare but it happens. When it does happen, I boot the repeated calls up to the supervisor as I get the room ready. If you still don’t answer the phone after 3 tries, I call the back up call. And if I can’t reach THAT person, I start calling all the techs that I know.

Someone usually says yes.

If not, I start to call management.

But, I cannot stress this enough, this rarely happens.

That is why there are layers of call people.

But I can’t lie and say that it never happens.

I get it, being on call at night might make for a stressful night. And uneasy dreams.

You might work at a “hospital” all night in your dreams, frantically looking for a lost patient, realizing at 1700 that you’ve had an unsupervised patient who has not gotten any of their meds since 0700. Or participating in your own surgery.

You are not alone in this.

At a meeting I was leading yesterday somehow the conversation turned to work dreams and 99% of us had had them.

So, yeah, it is okay to dream about work.

Just like it is okay to be so fucking relieved when you wake up and the nonsense you’ve been dreaming about all night, retained objects during surgery, lost patients, lost instruments has all been a dream.

But the super secret of my sleep on call is that the nights I am tossing and turning and turning and tossing and I cannot get my brain to shut up already, I do a bit of sleep self hypnosis.

I think I’ve written about this before.

I have a certain number that has been pre-selected (748,655) and I repeat it to myself.

And repeat it.

And repeat it.

If after the 4th time I am still not asleep, I do tricks with the numbers. I multiple it by ten or 100. This does the trick.

I bore myself to sleep. Which I hope is a dreamless sleep.

yes, I yawned typing the number. And it is still daylight outside.