Hippocrates In San Diego

Pounding Headache

I worked an overnight shift on Wednesday night, 7 pm to 7 am, as part of a new responsibility for our group. We cover our smaller hospital with an attending in-house at night to supervise the residents, provide backup for when they’ve reached their limit of admissions, and to cover the Bone Marrow Transplant patients, which is run in the daytime by the Hematology group. It can be a busy 12 hours, but generally not overwhelmingly so. I often can get a few hours of frequently-interrupted sleep from about 1 to 4 am. Now that the daytime Internal Medicine teams are now staffed by 4 hospitalists instead of 2, the weeks I’ll spend on the daytime service there will be relatively light in comparison. So it’s a trade-off, but a good one, I think.

The main problem with working the night shift is the recovery period afterward. It’s become increasingly difficult to get 2 or 3 hours of sleep and not feel like death for the next day or two. I felt well after this last shift, well enough to stay awake until about noon. I napped from then until 4, then had trouble getting to sleep last night until about 3 am. My reward for such poorly timed sleep is a monster headache today, probably because I was sleeping during my usual caffeine loading time this morning. I’m now on coffee cup #2 but had to load up on ibuprofen in order to stop my head from feeling like it was about to explode. Of course, thanks to my late coffee intake, I’ll probably have yet more difficulty getting to sleep tonight.