Night Nurse Paralysis

There is a well known phenomenon amongst night nurses on long standing night duties and that is the odd sounding Night Nurse paralysis

It is rare, often clouded in secrecy and shame ( as many still think it’s a product of mental illness or a feeble mind) but it is an actual condition that affects many when they are properly sleep deprived and stressed

Dr Mathew Jones Chester described the paralysis thus

“A black shape gathers in the corner of the room, as if from nothing. I can see it, like a huge bat, massive and caped. It fills the room and comes closer and eventually it's around me, cloudy and dark. I feel its pressure and it's holding me and then, under its weight and power, I feel I'm sinking and being dragged down. 

'I fight to bring myself back round, but I can't - and this is the awful part - I can't because I'm totally paralysed. The best I can do is make a noise in my throat in the hope I'll bring myself round. It's horrible.”

I have never experienced it myself , though I have seen it’s effects just once when I worked at the West Cheshire Hospital back in the 1980s. I was sat opposite to a Dutch enrolled Nurse in an alcove next to a dormitory of who was described in those years as Psychogeriatric Patients 

The nurse was knitting, I was reading a book.

Suddenly I was aware that the nurse had stopped those well worn repetitive movements and I glanced over at her.

She was stiff in her chair 

Perfectly still. Her hands were in her lap and her eyes were wide open but unseeing.

Her head was shaking very very gently, as it would during a minor tremor 

To say that I was terrified was an understatement and I remember calling out the nurses’ name Fenna? which was totally ignored. 

I got up and flew down the ward, through a connecting corridor to an adjacent ward where I found another enrolled nurse emptying a bucket.

Breathlessly I told her that Fenna was unwell. The nurse was sanguine 

“oh she goes like that on nights , talk to her quietly and she’ll come around in a few minutes. It happens all of the time”

And that’s exactly what I did.

I walked back to the alcove , put my hand on the nurses’ shoulder and I talked to her until, she blinked and shook her head like a patient coming out of an anaesthetic 

She looked frightened 

Then embarrassed

Then grateful to be back

Moments later she had returned to her knitting

And I had returned , with just one eye on my book