Night Shift

It had been over for a while but I guessed I should’ve blogged about my night shift. It was a week ago to be exact.

Anyway as the hospital is open for 24 hours, someone gotta be out there to man the counter at night. I was the designated one last week – to work from 10pm to 730am.

The main reason we were required to work is to cater for those people being sent to the Accident and Emergency department. The amount of human traffic was very random, from one solitary person every hour to a sudden bunch of ten in a few minutes. As they say, accident happens anytime.

It was actually quite a boring shift. The medications dispensed were similar every time: either the asthma meds, the upper respiratory tract infection meds, the gastric meds, or the painkiller meds. 

And time passed real slow. Most of the time the waiting area was empty.

And I spent the time there munching tit-bits, drinking caffeinated drinks and watching dramas.

 

The only eventful thing was that there was a drunk guy on my third night of shift. He was complaining how the doctor sort of looked down on him. He rambled on and on for like 40 minutes. It required quite a lot of patience just to keep myself from shouting “wake up” to him.

Once in a while you get these kind of patients who think the doctors are useless coz they didn’t get better or didn’t treat them as they expect to be treated. They expects us to hear them out and  to ring and complain to the doctors. Yesterday a lady was complaining for half an hour that the doctors incompetency got her surgical wound to be infected. She had been bitter about it for 3 years. I actually was quite tempted to refer her to a psychiatrist to get rid of her victim mentality.  No quality of life at all if you are unhappy all the time.

Overall, working nights was not too bad. Just that it causes reactivation of dormant pimples and probably some weight gain due to overconsumption of junk food. But a novel experience. I didn’t realise I can cope with an all-nighter that well.