snoring. fuck.

i left the time up there because it was cool. 123am. usually i like to take it off because the minute i start writing it is, obviously, never the minute i finish. plus i feel all mysterious when i type "past midnight" or "before dawn" up there.

yeah, okay.

so, let's start over: 123am. which means two things. 1. i should be going on a round (already did that, so check); 2. i should be trying to catch a wink of sleep.

it's been a long night. i got until 6am to go. i think this is the worst shift of all. noon to 6am. well...no. 6pm to the following noon is worse. and midnight to the follow 6pm is the worst of all.

all right, i lied. this isn't the worst. but all the same it's pretty bad. they're all pretty bad, with the exception of

(FUCK MY EAR HURTS)

6am to midnight. all the rest require staying up at ungodly hours, even though, truth be told, the workload is a lot lighter.

except in the midnight to following 6pm shift. that's just hell. you get in at midnight. you're already fuckin tired. you work until 6am and, lo and behold, el sol comes up.

people come in.

they're sick, they're cranky, you're tired, you're crankier, they wanna be treated, you wanna kick them in their ass and tell them to go home.

i know. this isn't your wonderful, idealistic post about the wonders of modern medicine and the joys of healing the ill. but this isn't 2pm on a beautiful sunday afternoon either; this is almost 2am and my ear hurts (see above, but no worries, it's not constant - it's just when i kinda...i dunno what i do, no name for it, but i do it and it hurts), and i've had so much caffeine that i can't sleep and it annoys me.

that's why i'm up, by the way. caffeine. i am very caffeinated, very badtempered right now.

some people think caffeine makes you alert. i say, bullshit. it jacks up your nerves so that you can't sleep, but that wears you out. so you're tired, tired as hell, but you can't fall asleep. that's what caffeine does.

i should've never had all that coffee. stupid thing is, i didn't drink it so i could stay up. i drank it because the idea of a nice cold Spin

(okay, 3 nice cold Spins)

sounded like a great idea then.

you know what's really getting on my nerves right now? there's a patient down the hall who insists on sleeping with her door open. god knows why, but she paid for a single, she can afford to leave her door open. so it's open. it's dead quiet in the hospital, her door is open, and she snores

like a fucking

pig.

i swear to god, i have never ever heard a woman snore like that. we're not talking cute little snores. we're talking great big gigantic rumbling snores, uneven, because once in a while she stops altogether (sleep apnea, all that, fuck) and you're like, shit she's dead, and then, oh fuck, here it comes,

...SNNNNNKCKKKZKZZZZNNKKK...

i'm telling you. it's earsplitting. it's unbelieveable. imagine the sound someone really really sick might make blowing their nose. now slow that down, drag it out, drop it an octave or two. play that new sound back. blubbering, mucusy, sickening, snotty. like she was breathing through a huge glob of snot stuck right in her larynx.

i listen to it and it makes me wanna gasp for air.

man, i didn't mean for this entry to be a major bitchrant. apparently, though, that's what's coming out of my hands tonight.

GAH! there she goes again. stops breathing - HUGE LOUD FUCKIN SNORE. how can ANYONE, much less a WOMAN, snore like that?

it's RESONANT. it echoes down the hall. i swear, if i were her roommate, i would've suffocated her with a pillow by now and blamed it on some obscure illness. thing is, she's not even that sick. no fucking clue why they're keeping her here overnight for monitoring, though i suspect it's because some asshole surgeon or other is gonna get a demand for taxes this year instead of a refund and wants to make a quick buck.

okay, maybe not. who cares.

this is me signing off.