How it locks the doors against the rest of the world and distorts how long it takes for an hour to end. Only the nurse and the patient share that time, its routines and its chaos. Twelve hours is a lifetime that only a nurse and a patient understand. You’ll think of how they looked at you when they had to leave, fearful and grateful, and you’ll think about how glad you are that they won’t ever have to read this patient’s chart, the hopeless puzzle of it that can only be solved one tragic way. when I got here, and now everyone is getting reading for bed you’ll think of this patient’s daughter or wife or husband or sister, whoever sat bedside with them during visiting hours. You’ll be filled with so much tenderness when your most difficult patient, who you know wasn’t trying to be a jerk but was just in too much pain, finally falls asleep that you’ll put your hand on their leg for a moment and look out the hospital window at the streetlights turning on and instead of thinking it was 7 a.m. You’ll watch your patients take their meds with their giant jugs of icy water and be so thirsty it’s tempting to snatch the straw from their mouth and take a drink. More than once, all of your patients will need something STAT all at the same time, and you’ll run, and you’ll worry, and you’ll wish it wasn’t July because it means all the fucking residents are brand-new and one of them is going to kill one of your patients if you’re not there, right now, to stop them. Or patient who was supposed to be discharged but is now a pre-op, or a fire alarm. At least once you’ll enter a flow of competence that will abandon you so suddenly you’ll want to shut yourself in the med room and weep, but won’t be able to because there is a code. I mean, you’ll live a whole lifetime in a 12 hour shift, and you’ll be hungry at some point, and completely nauseated at some other point. There is almost nothing more inexplicable than a 12 hour nursing shift.

After Hours by Cara McKenna