You’ll need more than a brioche on a 14-hour day
Amanda Saxton tries out a 14-hour shift, based at a cafe in North Shore Shore Hospital
Istart off at a cracking pace – that 7.30 to 9am slot always feels like a head start on the rest of the working world. The next six hours pass productively enough too.
I conduct phone interviews from a hospital cafe, I chat with everyone from the barista to a befuddled man thwarted by the vending machine, I write screeds.
Then around 3pm I start to droop. Eyelids wilt, mind wanders, and I do a bit more staring out the window than keyboardbashing. I’m nearing the end of my usual 8-hour shift and my body anticipates a change in environ. The sugar rush of a plum brioche and a brisk circuit of the roundabout outside is enough to trick my brain into giving me another two hours of hard yakka – definitely more menial than cerebral though, and my friendliness has burnt off. Other people’s conversations annoy me.
It is at that point I feel grateful for the option to change gear. Emily, however, has to show the same bright smile, apply the same compassion, make the same lifealtering decisions on behalf of people trusting her mental faculties as she did four hours ago.
By 6pm I realise I’m changing my Facebook profile picture instead of finishing an article.
Then I’m hunting the recipe for a strange pudding I’d had once in Turkey, and messaging a Czech cyclist I’d met four years ago in Albania but hadn’t heard from since. It seemed important to know how he was doing. More important than writing this article. The coffee I buy to get back on track makes me more jittery than focused.
I’ve been working 10 hours so far, and still have four to go. Half a normal day left.
Those final four hours’ productivity are about a quarter of what it was in the first four. My typed text is striped with red underlinings, I make rambling phone calls, I’m sluggish.
Emily, meanwhile, is examining cervixes, prescribing drugs, and dealing with miscarriages and tears.
By the time 10pm rolls around, my eyes feel full of sand and water. I can’t get warm, though it isn’t a cold night. And my head has become one of those weighted wobbly dolls.
I fight the parking ticket machine, take a bunch of wrong turns, and spend minutes unsuccessfully turning up my car’s radio volume with the tuning knob.
Emily had told me that she had ‘‘nearly crashed so many times driving home after late shifts because you just get so zoned out’’.
It was easy to believe. And not the sort of state you want your doctor in.