Monday Feb 23rd was the last day I turned up for work before I would take a well deserved hiatus all the way to my ORD date on 13th march. This brings to a close a two year stiny in the service and an agonizing 1 year 4 months out of the two working a shift routine. People doing shift work have volatile schedules, public holidays are not an entitlement , weekends end or begin abruptly, day and night is deceptively similar and most importantly, your body becomes screwed up.
Shift work screws with your body. Twelve hour shifts means that you will have to do night rotations. It is one thing to sleep late or to reach home in the wee hours of he morning after clubbing , it is a completely different experience forcing yourself awake every other hour. This creates an unnecessary amount of stress in the body in doing what it does not want to do. This has been proven in research that shift workers have shorter lives than their normal working counterparts due to the stress late nights have on the human heart. When the night has ended, a shift worker faces another problem. Sleeping in the day. The absence of bright lights trigger the human body to produce a chemical called serotonin to induce sleep. Sleeping in the day is thus arduous because not only are you constantly exposed to glaring rays of the sun, the hustle and bustle of life around you tricks your brain into thinking that you should keep awake even when its the last thing you want to do. Your eye bags darken and sink, giving you that panda look that only looks cute on pandas.
I learnt a great deal of things. I’ve gone through a fair bit. I wonder how long it’ll take me to adjust back again.
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