Two night Shift Stories

Nurses get paid more for night shifts. They bloody well deserve it too
It’s a completely unnatural time to be working, which encroaches not only on the day you work but the day before and the day after.
It’s like being effectively jet lagged once a week and research has proved the practice to be dangerous to physical and psychological well being .
Working nights can also be dangerous. You are on minimal staffing, have minimal resources , and in 40 years I have been involved in several violent situations , all centred on a night shift where help often didn’t come.
Night time, is also the time people are at their lowest ebb…..that’s why more people pass away in the wee small hours than anytime else. 

My worst night shift ever was back in my psychiatric days 

“ After I qualified as a staff nurse in mental health' I got a job in a prestigious psychiatric hospital in North Yorkshire. The hospital had only seven wards which were all situated within a beautiful Regency style building in it's own grounds. The wards were carpeted and sympathetically decorated in a period style and their day rooms filled with comfortable sofas and occasional furniture.It was a pleasant place in which to work.
I was placed on the mother and baby unit , where seriously ill post partum women and their offspring were admitted for treatment, but most of the other wards catered for acutely mentally ill patients, patients with cognitive impairments and people suffering severe epilepsy..
Staffing generally was very good , but when there was an emergency situation on a ward then an alarm bell would sound and each ward would send a " runner" to help with whatever problem was afoot. No wards were ever locked.
I was telling some of the junior staff this story last night whilst on a break, as a sort of lesson of how Intensive Care is one of the few places in nursing that is probably safest from assault and injury ....things in the early 1980s could be very different!
I remember one night at the hospital when at around 4am the alarm bell sounded. I was one of the five nurses who responded to the call,
The emergency was on the epilepsy assessment ward , a ward staffed by both general and mental health nurses. On duty were three nurses. A heavily pregnant girl, a young staff nurse just out of training and an experienced male staff nurse. All three had been sitting in what was essentially a glass box which overlooked the dormitory of patients on two sides.

The office was essentially an observation room.
Out of nowhere, a powerfully built male patient had suddenly become agitated and very confused and had hurled himself at the windows of the nurses station. He shattered the glass with his body, and like an animal he went for the nurses inside. The male nurse hit the emergency buzzer then bolted out of the office to get help, but as he ran, the office door bounced shut , locking the two women inside. The pregnant nurse, with great presence of mind clambered over a desk and jumped through a window into the grounds to safety but unfortunately the patient caught hold of the young female staff nurse before she could flee.
By the time we arrived on the scene a couple of minutes later, the patient had fractured her jaw and had broken her arm as well as biting her badly on the side of the face.
This was the only time , I have been truly frightened at work Over the years I have been personally abused many times by patients and relatives alike. I have been screamed at, shouted at, spat at and in one case threatened with a broken teapot! but this situation with a brain damaged patient and a young helpless staffnuse still lingers long in the mind.
A scary story to share with a group of nurses in the wee small hours of the morning eh?”

But as usual things need a balance and this short take should fit the bill

“ Christmas  Night 1986

It was very cold and snowy and I remember.

I wasn’t very happy.

I had just started work in the November.

A new staff nurse role, in a new city of York

I’d barely been there a month and still lived at the nurses’ home at Clifton Hospital a couple of miles out of the city.

I knew no one properly and I was homesick

And already I had been put onto night duty.

The ward was quiet. 

A psychiatric admission ward with twelve or so general admission patients and an attached mother and baby unit with a half complement of two mums and two newborns.

We had three staff of duty. Staff nurses clive and I covered the main ward and Sue who was a motherly enrolled nurse took charge of the nursery.

Around midnight Sue and I were in the darkened office, each of us feeding a baby.

I couldn’t see her face properly just a glint of her glasses from the lights from the snowy garden.

She was asking me about me, and I had been yacking on in the dark for an age.

I had no idea what I was doing but my baby was large and content and sleepy so from the get go..so I was lucky.

“ Are you gay John? “  she seemed to ask me out of nowhere and she nodded when I defensively replied no, just a little too quickly .

“it’s ok if you were you know? ” She said slowly in her broad flat Yorkshire accent  “I’ve always loved gay men”

And in the comfortable silence that followed, something quietly and inexplicably shifted in me 

As we fed babies in the dark on Christmas Day”