In the wayback, I was working at a big city general hospital as an orderly, which is what male nurse aides were called back then. The guys, all of us college age, were sort of heavy lift specialists, coupled with some male patient care, particularly surgery prep: shaving the surgery site, administering enemas. Then there was helping folks who didn’t feel like walking to take a walk, feeding men who had no desire to eat, moving unmoving people into wheelchairs, or sitz baths, or onto gurneys, or X-ray tables, or removing bodies to the morgue—all the really fun stuff.
We worked a rotating shift schedule and I was working my first graveyard shift, 11 PM to 7 AM. The first night wasn’t bad, even though I hadn’t tried for any extra sleep.
I got to see my first bullet wound that
night, down in ER. And I learned why the ER entrance was kept locked with an armed security guard at the door. The other orderly on shift, a more
experienced guy, showed me the pock marks on the wall, repaired bullet holes
from a street gang battle that, two years earlier, had spilled over into the treatment
room where one of the wounded gang members had been brought by his buddies.
After that first graveyard shift, I went home, took a
shower, had breakfast, went to bed about 8 AM, and slept until about 11 AM,
when nature called.
I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up,
had lunch, and took care of some chores. After supper, about 6:30, I laid down
to catch a few more Zs.
But the Zs eluded me—until about 9 PM, when I
finally drifted off.
Only to have the alarm, an hour later, drag me—like a calf that was stuck neck deep in the sucking mud—oh so exhaustively struggling, back to a mere semblance of wakefulness.
That night, I learned to keep busy because, if I sat down for more than half a minute, I would fall asleep.
For the rest of the week I tried a series of daytime
schedule revisions, shifting around shower times, meal times, sleep times, activity times,
shuffling and re-shuffling, trying to find the right pattern that would let me
get sufficient sleep.
It never happened. My body would just not
accept the reversal of the asleep/awake-night/day schedule. Swing shift was
never a bother, since it approximated normal waking hours, but graveyard was
the pits.
Fortunately, the work schedule rotated
weekly, but I never did adjust to the graveyard shift.
And I came to dread the clock alarm, something that, up ‘til then, I’d accepted as a routine event of the work or school week. But now it had become a corkscrew, twisting and digging into my sleep-sodden brain, drawing and dragging me to a nauseous awakening.
Even now, years
into retirement, an alarm clock still triggers that gut-wrenching reaction.
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