In The Dead of Night

What the hell do I do about that???

I am not a morning person. Or a night person. I'm not great in the afternoons either. In fact, most of the time I'm thinking about having a nap. So it may come as a bit of a surprise, not least to myself, that in my late 50s I have thrown myself into the murky twilight existence of the veterinary ER world. However, as I mused to one of my co-workers around 3.14 am on a Friday morning, I think it's probably good to shake up your biorhythms from time to time. 'Your what?', she asked. 'You know' I replied 'your diurnal clock. Never mind ....(as I saw her glaze over). What was his blood pressure?'
Turns out she had the last laugh because I just looked it up on Wikipedia and biorhythms is a discredited crock of shit theory made up by some dodgy German in the 19th century and taken up by hippies in the 70s. Apparently Casio made a nice but short lived little earner out of the 'Biolater' , a pocket calculator for your personal cycle. I meant circadian rhythm, of course! Duh! In my defence, it was 3.14 a.m. If it had been my intellectual peak time between 10 and 11 a.m. I wouldn't have made such an obvious mistake. Luckily nothing actually came in to the clinic that required life and death intervention between midnight and 6 am or they might have found themselves prescribed a kaftan and a joint.

It also turns out that, apparently, it's NOT good to disrupt your CIRCADIAN rhythm by doing night shift because it increases your risk of accidents and 'misfortunes' such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, mood swings and divorce. So – wrong again. Anyway, I've mitigated the risks by not being married, not having time to eat on most of the ER shifts I've done and not having a heart – and who the heck can tell if a menopausal woman is having any more mood swings than usual? So I reckon I'm pretty safe.

The obvious question is why, at a time of my life when I could comfortably glide down God's gentle slippery slope towards perpetual gardening and senility, I choose to put myself through this? Good question. The answer lies somewhere in the need to shoot myself out of my comfort zone and to put myself in an environment where I continue to learn and be inspired by people who seem to know an awful lot. There is also something indefinably alluring about driving home as the sun is rising and having a coffee and a toastie on the way at the wine bar whilst the school mums are mustering - then sleeping all day in a darkened room without guilt whilst the world goes about business as usual.