psycho killer. qu'est-ce que c'est?

I figured out my life is basically about two things lately: terror, and trying to get enough sleep to survive the terror for one more shift.

Terror = work. As documented elsewhere, work is really scary. And, as fun and smart as the people who I work with are, they are also extremely intimidating. It's like working with the Green Berets of nurses, or the Marines. These nurses are hardcore, and if you're new, you're likely to be fodder for a lot of disdain, both explicitly expressed and implied.

It's hard to go from feeling competent and secure in your job skills to feeling like you just stepped off the S.S. Clueless (or onto it, or something). Plus, did I mention the terror of crashing patients, and the chilling numbness that descends after each death? While it doesn't happen every shift, it's happened enough in the last sixth months that I've sort of stopped counting how many deaths I've witnessed at work. It gets depressing, and the fact that you start shutting down over other people's untimely demise is, I think, probably not particularly healthy.

Plus--I'm no fan of trauma, as a speciality. No pun in tended--but my heart longs to get back to cardiac nursing.

Working day shift, ever elusive, might help some of the brain freeze I'm experiencing as well. As the weeks wear on, my sleeping pattern gets more and more erratic, and my waking hours--daylight or nocturnal--are infused with a sense of exhaustion which precludes any meaningful functionality, intellectually, and sometimes, emotionally. I feel drained and slightly low-grade unwell, constantly.

Night shift is fucking with me, in other words.