Residency Diaries Series #14: thoughts on my sleep schedule

10/13/2020 Tuesday 10:52pm

I think one of the hardest things about emergency medicine residency and the constant changes of days and nights is loneliness. On a string of nights, you rarely get to see anyone outside of work. Even if you live with someone, you’re on a completely opposite sleep schedule. Then you switch back to days but you’re still so tired from the switch that you end up falling asleep at 10pm right after work and waking up at 2am. And then you cry because somehow you have to go to work in 5 hours and you’re just up alone.  

 This schedule, if you can even call it that, has become so predictable that I’m no longer surprised when it happens but I still feel very helpless against it. 

 For some reason this month, I was blessed with extra DOMA shifts that completely threw off my body/mind. The goal is always to sleep as much as possible but then you wake up feeling so empty and lonely. 

 Last night I stayed up until 6am watching The Royal Tenenbaums and Vanilla Sky in an attempt to adjust my body back to the night shift schedule for tomorrow. I don’t even think I fully recovered from my last string of nights just 5 days ago! 

 I woke up this afternoon around 2pm and felt like a complete shit for sleeping through my one off day. A was waiting to do something with me on my off day and no doubt felt a little grumpy that I made him sit around for 6 hours after he woke up (although... couldn’t he have done something else while I was sleeping? I guess it’s impossible to predict when I will wake up-- even I don’t know that. I guess that puts him in a little limbo too). 

 And now we’re at the office. We’re both doing our work (me, working on my newly revamped blog/website; him, working on video editing). We probably could have had fun today. We probably could have gone apple picking or gone out to dinner or something. Time just slips away as I tend to my most basic physical needs like sleeping and eating.