the best and worst of the night shift

If you haven’t already, check out Part One of working nights as a travel nurse where I talk a bit more about our story starting travel nursing and Dan’s first two contracts working as a night nurse. In this post, I’ll get into the nitty gritty a bit more about both of our experiences with Dan working nights, our favourite and least favourite parts.

Again, as a caveat, when I talk about my experience with “working nights,” I’m obviously not talking about it in the same way as Dan – I’m not working nights, he is. My experience is as his wife and the practical challenges of being on a totally different schedule than my husband. That said, we are doing travel nursing as a team and most of it affects both of us, so I do talk about how “we” are doing travel nursing and my perspectives on it. That’s just how both Dan and I think (and talk) about it.

our perspectives/preferences

All in all, nights was difficult for both of us, but ended up being easier for Dan than he expected. Part of this was Dan had that six month break where he was unable to work, so nights was a bit of an easier transition back into working (not to mention the huge transition of starting travel nursing and working in a new state on top of that). Dan had worked night shifts before, but only sporadically, so this was his first experience really consistently doing overnights (7p-7a). A lot of this probably applies to night shift in general, these aren’t necessarily unique to working nights as a travel nurse.

We obviously had many conversations over the course of the last (almost) year of travel nursing discussing this, but we also sat down recently to jot down some notes. Here is a bit of what we came up with that we wanted to mention in terms of what it’s like working nights as a travel nurse.

Dan’s Perspective

As I said, in general Dan found it easier than expected to work nights and manage all that entails. His favourite parts of working nights had to do with his actual work/work days, and his least favourite part revolved more around how it affected the days that he wasn’t working.

Dan found that he loved the quiet, the calm, of the hospital at night. It’s more laid back, less busy, and there are less interruptions. The patients are wanting to sleep for the most part, family isn’t visiting, and care/interventions are limited (to an extent) to allow the patients time to sleep (and to account for having less staff at night). Nurse to patient ratios are higher at night (more patients per nurse), so it’s not that it’s not busy, but it is generally less busy. Since working nights, Dan has said that his ideal nursing situation would be the flow of the night shift, but during the day.

In contrast, his least favourite part was feeling tired all the time because of the reversed sleeping schedule. Eventually, if you lived your whole life being awake at night and asleep during the day, maybe you’d get totally used to it, but I honestly doubt it. Our bodies need sunlight and time outside (both of which you get less of when the only time you can spend outside is in the dark). I think there’s also something to say for the fact that for the VAST majority of human history, there was not this crazy prevalence of artificial light allowing people to do anything past sunset.

Anyways, that was a bit of a tangent. Another thing that was a challenge for Dan was the fact that when you work nights as a nurse, you’re on your own a bit more. As a travel nurse, training is super quick so it’s common to have more questions come up after training, but you’re limited during the night shift when it comes to your ability to ask questions, express concerns, clarify orders, etc.

Especially at night, and especially with travel nursing, it’s difficult to learn the expectations at different hospitals with regards to when as issue is significant enough to alert the doctor. At night, this means waking/calling the doctor which isn’t always taken kindly to. Overall, Dan has found this to be one of the biggest challenges of travel nursing. There are a lot of unspoken rules when it comes to how willing on-call doctors are to help or be woken up. There are even differences between individual doctors on what they want to be alerted to, how quickly, for which patients, etc. oftentimes unspoken, but expected.

Emma’s Perspective

To be honest, I really hated Dan working nights, probably even more than I expected I would and definitely more than he did. The most difficult aspect of it for me was having to spend so many nights home alone in an unfamiliar place. I never got used to it, though it did get a tiny bit easier I’d say during his second contract working nights. Turns out I just really don’t do well being home alone overnight. I had hard time falling asleep, ended up staying up way too late, and then slept terribly a lot of the time.

I’ve only ever lived alone a total of two-ish months right before we got married, otherwise it was just sporadic nights here and there when my roommates were out of town, so I think I’ve just never had to get used to it. I even had a few pretty long term housesitting jobs as a teenager, but I always had friends stay with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone at night.

There were some positives though. Dan working nights meant that I had access to our car during the day. I didn’t really have anywhere to go in the evening, but during the day it was nice to not be stuck at home. I was able to work various jobs here and there during the day and get most of our grocery shopping and other errands done so that we didn’t have to worry about them on his days off.

Now that Dan’s working days (and we’re not living in the best part of town in Phoenix) I’m a bit more landlocked and can’t get things done like grocery shopping. That’s honestly part of why ordering groceries from Thrive Market has been so convenient. We always have things to get done on the days that Dan’s home, but it’s one less thing to worry about so we can enjoy the time together and do more fun things like hikes or trips.

All things considered, I would rather give up my freedom to go out and about a few days a week. I much prefer Dan working days, mainly because it feels like we have so much more time together than it did when he worked nights.

what are your most and least favourite parts of working nights?