By 3AM the earth’s gravitational pull has tripled.
The emergency department dissolves into a hypnagogic dreamscape.
Leaden eyelids scrape open as the soundtrack spins down to half speed.
The air is quicksand thick and the clock melts down the wall.

Night duty….. the big N.
Striking a weary lassitude into the very cytoplasm of my cells.

Now, many nurses have absolutely no difficulty with nights. They easily sleep 7-8 hours during the day.
Night shift number four and they skip in to hand-over all chatty and fresh and bright-eyed, and I hate them all.

I’ve been doing nights for a long time now, but for me, even a few nights will always remain a long tough slog.

Sleep debt is the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep. When you consistently gets less sleep than you should, the body seems to maintain an awareness of the cumulative amount of missed sleep.
Typically, for every two hours awake, the average person accumulates a little more than one hour of sleep debt.
This sleep debt does not go away by itself and must be repaid in order to regain some sort of sleep homeostasis and resolve that feeling of being repeatedly run over by stampeding humpback whales .

The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.
Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska , the Challenger space shuttle disaster and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep-deprivation played a role.
Diaries from the pre-electric-light-globe Victorian era show adults slept nine to 10 hours a night with periods of rest changing with the seasons in line with sunrise and sunsets.
The art of interpreting dreams is known as oneirocriticism.

By the 3rd night my own sleep debt is gathering compound interest; I find it increasingly difficult to concentrate, I become irritable and grumpy. I bump into things.
To compensate, I swamp my synapses with caffeine which only makes me feel wired and disconnected.

Each morning I arrive home exhausted and flop into bed, and no sooner than you can whisper Rumplestiltskin, I…am……gone.
But whilst the rest of me is blissfully comatose….my kidneys find their second wind and proceed to funnel every drop of extracellular fluid down into my bladder.
…around 2 hours later, I am woken by this now gestational bladder, and trudge bleary-eyed to the toilet.
By the time I have finished my business and return to bed, my brain has cottoned onto the fact that it’s daytime.
Time to get up and do stuff.
I will spend the rest of the day tossing and turning and trying to cajole my brain back to sleep. I’ve tried everything from camomile tea to near toxic doses of Oprah and Dr Phill, but 4 hours broken sleep is about it for me.