I don't know how many times I've tried to explain my work situation to people. They just don't get it.
I love the look on people's faces when I describe my roster: utter disbelief. Try explaining it to my university lecturers - the word "excuse" has been thrown at me a few times, and it happened again today, soI'll try and break it down again, as an example week - this week.
Monday - off during the day, overtime tonight 1830-0700
Tuesday - off during the day, perhaps sleeping depending on how busy Monday night was. Start on-call at 1830.
Tuesday 1830 - Sunday 1800
I'm on-duty 0700-1830, and on-call 1830-0700. That's 24 hours of the day, continuous for a week. I go into the ambulance station during the day when there is one computer and Elluminate, Skype, and other programs essential to my study are blocked and cannot be un-blocked.
During the night I go home with the ambulance and pager. I can do what I want within an 8km radius of the ambulance station, providing I can be ready to respond from the station within 10 minutes of receiving a page. This means things like swimming, running distances greater than 3km, cooking a roast, having a glass of wine, dyeing my hair, etc are all very difficult to do whilst on-call. There is very little within 8km of my station. No restaurants, no cinema, nothing except my house and a small supermarket open until 9am during Summer trading.
What happens if you work all day and then get paged all night? Generally we keep going. I have worked 24+ hour days before Not such a good idea when you're diagnosing and treating life-threatening emergencies without back-up, working in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous environments, and, oh yeh, driving an emergency vehicle sometimes at high speeds in all sorts of traffic and weather conditions.
Fatigue breaks are a life-saver. Fatigue breaks are 10 hour breaks where we cannot be disturbed, paged, or contacted. This is the "bali" or "mercy" signal. The "I cannot go on any longer" call. It's just enough time to go home, try and switch my adrenal glands from "stress" to "relax" maybe have a shower and something to eat, maybe feed my dog, and try and sleep for about 8 hours while they are building a house next-door, pray to God nothing happens int he town while I'm off, and then get up and find a new uniform and do it all again. It's really great when I've been up to, say, 7am, tried to sleep during the day until about 3 or 4pm, go to work for a few hours, then come back home and try and sleep at night when my body clock is out. I often can't sleep that following night for ages (I wonder why) then I still have to be up and at work on-duty at 7am. My circadian rhythm says: "Hey! You had me awake until 7am the day before and now you want to get up at 7am!? WTF!?" It can switch like that, back-and-forth, for the week.
All of this, and it's completely unpredictable which nights I'll work all night on call-outs, where and when my fatigue breaks will be, when my down time will be, which nights I'll finally get to eat a home-cooked meal etc.
So that is how my roster is. This is why my academic advisor can't understand why I can't give her an exact day and time to call her on Skype when I can choose anytime this week. This is my life.
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Good things about my roster:
I love the look on people's faces when I describe my roster: utter disbelief. Try explaining it to my university lecturers - the word "excuse" has been thrown at me a few times, and it happened again today, soI'll try and break it down again, as an example week - this week.
Monday - off during the day, overtime tonight 1830-0700
Tuesday - off during the day, perhaps sleeping depending on how busy Monday night was. Start on-call at 1830.
Tuesday 1830 - Sunday 1800
I'm on-duty 0700-1830, and on-call 1830-0700. That's 24 hours of the day, continuous for a week. I go into the ambulance station during the day when there is one computer and Elluminate, Skype, and other programs essential to my study are blocked and cannot be un-blocked.
During the night I go home with the ambulance and pager. I can do what I want within an 8km radius of the ambulance station, providing I can be ready to respond from the station within 10 minutes of receiving a page. This means things like swimming, running distances greater than 3km, cooking a roast, having a glass of wine, dyeing my hair, etc are all very difficult to do whilst on-call. There is very little within 8km of my station. No restaurants, no cinema, nothing except my house and a small supermarket open until 9am during Summer trading.
What happens if you work all day and then get paged all night? Generally we keep going. I have worked 24+ hour days before Not such a good idea when you're diagnosing and treating life-threatening emergencies without back-up, working in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous environments, and, oh yeh, driving an emergency vehicle sometimes at high speeds in all sorts of traffic and weather conditions.
Fatigue breaks are a life-saver. Fatigue breaks are 10 hour breaks where we cannot be disturbed, paged, or contacted. This is the "bali" or "mercy" signal. The "I cannot go on any longer" call. It's just enough time to go home, try and switch my adrenal glands from "stress" to "relax" maybe have a shower and something to eat, maybe feed my dog, and try and sleep for about 8 hours while they are building a house next-door, pray to God nothing happens int he town while I'm off, and then get up and find a new uniform and do it all again. It's really great when I've been up to, say, 7am, tried to sleep during the day until about 3 or 4pm, go to work for a few hours, then come back home and try and sleep at night when my body clock is out. I often can't sleep that following night for ages (I wonder why) then I still have to be up and at work on-duty at 7am. My circadian rhythm says: "Hey! You had me awake until 7am the day before and now you want to get up at 7am!? WTF!?" It can switch like that, back-and-forth, for the week.
All of this, and it's completely unpredictable which nights I'll work all night on call-outs, where and when my fatigue breaks will be, when my down time will be, which nights I'll finally get to eat a home-cooked meal etc.
So that is how my roster is. This is why my academic advisor can't understand why I can't give her an exact day and time to call her on Skype when I can choose anytime this week. This is my life.
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Good things about my roster:
- We get paid well for having no life. Call-outs are at double time (double rolled-in rate, actually, which includes penalties etc) and even when we're on a fatigue break, we still get paid.
- Most times, we only do about 3 jobs a day. "Jobs" take about 3 hours each, with leaves us with 15 hours in the day of "down-time". It is best when the down-time is during the day as we get paid single time for the day shift anyway, and nights are busy where we get our double rolled-in rate.
- There's always overtime going due to dropped shifts and fatigue breaks.
- I live <1km from my work. I often walk there when I can.
- I have a work vehicle (the ambulance) when I take home. My private car does little kms.
- During my down-time I have few work duties. We have a cleaner, sometimes we put away stores, we clean the ambulances when needed - the rest of the time I can study medicine.
- I get 10 weeks annual leave a year.
- I don't do actual "night shifts" so if I'm fatigued at 1am, I can stop working at 1am for example.
- Rosters like mine are often in small rural towns where the work is much better quality, i.e. the cases are genuine - the patients are actually in need of our services and not wasting our time.
I love my job - there is no question about that. But my roster is sometimes a killer, and it's difficult to explain to people why I can't commit to a Skype session.
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