Night shift.

I bawled my eyes out in despair the whole way home this morning.

Last night was my first shift on 11pm-7:30am. 

The entire hospital was full.  Med-surg patients overflowing into the rehabilitation unit.  Only two beds open in ICU, an ER full of patients waiting for beds, and literally no beds on our floor... we had only open room, but no physical BED to put in that room.  7-8 patients/nurse on our unit, with only one nursing aide to care for the forty-something patients.  And then, they pulled that aide to ICU for 2.5 hours. 

The whole night consisted of moving patients in bed, cleaning up their urine and feces (cleaning up people is fine, I'm certainly not above it and it's so very important for their health... but cleaning up people while they're yelling at you for waking them up??  I believe that is the definition of a thankless job), and doing a TON of paperwork.  I was so exhausted by the time morning came that I felt nauseous and dizzy, I was dropping things left and right... so relieved to get in the car to drive the 40 minutes home...
And then I discovered what 7:30am traffic looks like along that commute, and arrived home 70 minutes later after literally having to slap myself in the face to stay awake and breaking down into exhausted tears.

Give me back my early morning shift, please?  Give me back waking up at 5:30am on Saturday mornings without an alarm, give me back hunting down charts for hours at a time as they get passed from physician to physician to case management to physical therapy to physician to the radiology department as your patient disappears off the floor for a study and you still haven't even SEEN the orders...  give me back prepping patients for testing, handling pushy family members, and, "Surprise! We're ready to take your patient to the OR right NOW". 

I suppose this is something I'll just have to get used to.