Four nights – Prelude

Yes, I had to admit to myself, that it would be a bit of a push, a bit of a shock to the system, but at the same time it would be a challenge and something that would take me a long way out of my comfort sone, but with the right focus and time management, it would be doable. After all, thousands of veterinary and human medical colleagues did it all the time, often for years, while it silently took its toll on their personal and social life and their physical and mental health…..

Earlier this year, I had been asked, if I would be interested to cover four straight nights, most of them in sole charge, at one of the busiest emergency clinics in Switzerland. To be precise, the whole Easter weekend – from Friday until Tuesday morning.

Four nights, fifty hours, three thousand minutes…..

It was not really a problem, that I had never worked at the clinic or even in the city before – over the years I had learned to adapt fast to new teams, frequently by just listening and relying on the nursing staff, who are both the body and the soul of many clinics and not to panic – everyone has had their first day somewhere.

It was not the surgical aspect of the work – I had over the last thirty years done a lot of emergency procedures and I secretly was looking forward to spending a few hours in the operating theatre.

It was not the fact that it was night work – I am naturally a night worker – always had been – and I am in the enviable position that I can function well, with limited hours of sleep.

It was not an issue, that it was exclusively emergency work – over the last few years, I had frequently done individual night and weekend shifts at veterinary emergency clinics in the commuter towns around London.

The problem was… the sum of all of the above….

While I was used to work in different places, to adapt to new teams and computer systems, to work nights and weekend shift and to treat emergency patients, it had never happened all at the same time, and it never lasted for four straight nights…

Spending a lot of my time these days with online consultations and writing, interrupted by emergency shifts and short blocks of first opinion clinical work in different parts of Central and Northern Europe, I felt a bit like someone, who had been living too much on junk food and not training enough, attempting to run a full size marathon…

Good for me then, that I knew a bit about marathon running…..

(to be continued….)