(This is the post I would have written yesterday, had I been capable of it. But I wasn't. Read on to find out quite why...)

Ouch.

I just got back from my second night shift and I'm tired and in pain and I want to go home even though I'm at home. Basically, I think I need a hug, preferably from my dad who I'm really missing at the moment. Most of the shift wasn't so bad but by the end I was tearing out my own hair, no kidding. The stress and the strain of it was really beginning to get to me by the time I finally got to go home, some 20 minutes after my shift had ended. When you've been on duty for twelve and a half hours, twenty minutes more is really something. I felt like I wanted to scream by the time I got outside the hospital.

I am so tired now, and I feel like my brain is going to explode. Doesn't help that for the last hour or so of my shift I got a pain in my neck which has now spread to take out most of my shoulder and arm. It hurts whenever I move that arm, which is partly why I just wanted to get the hell home as soon as possible. Being kept on duty 20 minutes longer than I should have been because handover went on too long made me want to tear out my own eyes.

Add to that endurance commode-changing, a member of staff giving me major evils because I dared take a bowl of sugar from a drinkis trolley to the patient who had asked for it, and everyone suddenly getting extremely pissy toward the end of my shift (or maybe I was just getting exceptionally hot and tired) and you have a recipe for pain and suffering that simply cannot be beat. The irony is, up until that last hour or so, it hadn't been a bad shift.

God damn my arm hurts.

Anyway. My more general impressions of night shifts...

It's very odd to be at work and watch the sun come up over the top of the Ministry of Tru-- uh, the UCL Senate House. Very odd indeed to spend most of your night filling in forms and watching people sleep. It's tiring enough watching people sleep during the daytime, but seeing it happen at night is just plain bizarre, because I can't quite ignore that little nagging voice telling me that I should be sleeping, too. But I can't. Even if the intention is that you sleep during the breaks, it's just been too hot for that. I can't settle. It sucks.

... and I have no idea how anyone ever manages to get any sleep in hospital. The night staff aside (we still have to communicate) there's so much noise that it's just unbelievable. People walking up and down, on-call doctors, the occasional phone call, call bells, people walking up and down... too much noise. And it's never properly dark, either.

Even so, I still managed to kill a fan by walking into the cord on my first shift. I woke up half the bay. It mortified me. Not least because everyone kept asking if I was all right, and I was. The only thing I had wounded was my dignity. God damn, that's not good going, waking half the ward by tripping over a power cable. Well, the durn thing was at thigh height, and I have the bruises to prove it.

It wasn't as bad as the night shift I did at London Bridge. At least something actually happened.

I just wish my brain didn't feel so fried. I wanted to make this a longer post but it's much too hot and I'm much too tired and I need to put my shopping in the fridge, collapse on my bead and die there for several hours. So much for Thursday. See you all sometime on Friday, I think. I hope.