Night Shifting

This month we have started a new schedule…12 hour shifts. What I am used to in the states, but still, it’s a different kind of work here so I was curious to see how that would go. It goes work two nights, off two days, work two days, off two days, work two nights, and so on. Thank goodness Sarah and I have a twin schedule, we thankfully survived the first night shift, but I am not so sure how I’ll make it to night two on only four hours of sleep after being up for 28 hours straight. We started off by taking a taxi since we didn’t want to ride our bikes in the dark…fun experience, got to see a little of Impfondo evening life. The night experience wasn’t all that bad though. It’s just a lot of foot work walking around to all the wards taking two sets of vital signs and three med pass times. Luckily the generator was on for the first set of rounds so we could have electricity, but after that, it was difficult to juggle the flashlight, chart, meds, and trying to step around the family members sleeping on the floor. It looked like a camp ground in each building complete with mosquito net tents and straw mats. We had three people come in during the night. One was a kid with malaria that was having seizures, another was a guy who had a concussion, and the last one came in the morning. It was a kid who had been throwing up and had a fever, so I performed the basic vitals routine, did a hemoglobin and paracheck and lo and behold, I diagnosed him with malaria! Not that it’s that hard to figure out with a 15 minute malaria test, but it was the first kid that I had done the whole work up on so that was good. We got him hooked up with meds and hopefully on the way to a speedy recovery. It difficult to guage the malaria kids, because sometimes the parents don’t bring them in until they are comatose or seizing, so it’s good when they actually bring them in before that stage, but better when they bring them in at the first signs so nothing too serious happens.
The rough part was the morning report after we got off work…I totally didn’t make it. Every time I nodded off I “woke up” to someone giggling at me, but I didn’t care, I was exhausted! Then we had to wait around an hour or so for someone to drive us back, which ended up being another little tour through the neighborhood of Impfondo to pick up people to take to the airport. Finally we were dropped off in front of the mission, and with weary steps made our way to the house, where I took the coldest shower ever since I have been here. It really didn’t matter though, I was so tired I just fell into bed after that. So night one was manageable, even with the wall I hit about 3am; I just hope I can make it to midnight tonight. I’m off to make as strong of a cup of coffee I can make with instant coffee powder.