Bright Eyed?

Daily writing prompt

Are you more of a night or morning person?

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I am not a morning sort of person. Here’s the lowdown.

Waking at 4:30 AM was a sort of exquisite torture. But if I awoke much later, I wouldn’t make the 5:30 train I needed to catch. Miss that train, and I’d miss the 6:30 arrival time at the operating room where I was working. Every morning was a trial by fire.

Before working in operating rooms, I’d been a folksinger. Coffeehouses and bars use different schedules than operating rooms. Getting home after a night in New York’s Greenwich Village meant walking into the house in the morning close to when I’d be leaving if I worked in the OR.

Having worked late nights as an entertainer, you’d think that working a night shift would be no trouble, but the 11 to 7 routine at a hospital was one I could never fit into. Somewhere between two and four, the red-eyed zombie would appear. Nurses I worked with said I could be frightening at four in the morning. I had a fevered glare, a walk that looked like I was stalking you, and a twist to my diction that made it seem that someone had not secured the locked ward that night.

One night, I was on call for the operating room but wound up assisting in a surgical procedure in the emergency room. At about 1 AM, I went to the operating room suite to prepare surgical packs and instruments for the morning. At about four, the need for sleep overwhelmed me. I shut off the lights, stretched out on an operating table, and pulled a sheet entirely over my head. I was asleep in seconds.

Hours later, I groggily awoke to noises in the room. With a roar, I sat up, arms outstretched, and heard a scream as one of the nurse anesthetists fled the room in fright. She left a trail of spilled instruments behind her. After that, I was under strict orders to doze only in the staff lounge. Everyone took care to flash the lights before entering. My new nickname in that OR? Zombie. Luckily, as I migrated from hospital to hospital, this nickname did not follow me.

So yeah, I’m not much of an early-morning person. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed is not a good description.