120 Hours. Short Story. Footscray, Victoria, 1979.

This is the story of young Dr Alice Werner. Long hours at work and lack of sleep can drive her to want to end it all. Listen to the very end to find out if Dr Alice can turn things around. 

Thanks for listening. Go to my YouTube channel @drdianerlesleywebster to hear more stories or read them in my latest novel “Four ways to die at Riverside Towers” available from Amazon and Kindle. Until next time, have a great day today and everyday. #shortstory #drdianelesleywebster #fourwaystodieatriversidetowers #thegoodguideforlife #simplestepsforhappiness #theartoflivingagoodlife #wellnessresilience

Transcript

120 hours. Footscray, Melbourne, March 1979.

120 hours a week. The hospital administration team had brought all the new interns into a room on our first orientation day at the hospital in January and asked us, to each sign a contract to be paid to work a flat rate for everyone, of 120 hours a week. We weren’t allowed to leave the meeting until we had signed. We all thought this sounded more than reasonable. Even if we worked less than 120 hours for the week, we would still be paid for 120 hours; so that sounded good. Surely it wouldn’t even be possible to work more than 120 hours a week, at the hospital. This is where we were all wrong.

 Later that day we got our rosters. It seems we were rostered on from 8am to 6pm, two days a week and those were the short days. Then 8am to 8am the next morning, that’s 24 hours straight, two days of the week. Another two days a week we were rostered from 8am to 10pm; 14-hour days. But here’s the surprise, every second week, we were rostered from 8am Friday to 6pm Monday continuously, for the whole weekend. That’s four days and nights straight. On the alternate weeks when weren’t rostered the whole weekend, we still needed to come in and do the ward round for our unit on Saturday morning. This meant also completing all the paperwork and order all the tests for the unit patients, which usually took from 8am to 12 MD. If you were rostered for neurosurgery, for instance, the ward round started at 6am every day and we, as interns in the unit, were expected to be there.

 My first rotation for the year, fresh out of medical school was anaesthetics. When we weren’t rostered to theatre to assist our allocated anaesthetist for surgeries, we were rostered to Casualty or the wards for the after-hours and on weekends.

It took about two and a half months of this roster for me to become suicidal. I was tremendously tired but I found I often couldn’t sleep when I was ‘off duty’. When we were rostered on at night, we were expected to do the paperwork for admitting all the new patients to the hospital and also attend, if we were called to the wards, for replacing IVs or writing up medications.

 I started taking sleeping tablets to help me get to sleep but I found they only worked for about two hours. I found I had visions of patients vomiting blood, or coming into the emergency department cut up with razor blades, or having to do a death certificate on a patient burnt to death in a house fire, to name a few specifics. The patients’ traumas from the day, just kept haunting me at night.

 This progressed to me thinking at night, when I couldn’t sleep, about how I could end it all. I found myself dreading going to work each day. As I drove along the highway coming up to the hospital gates, I would fantasise about driving straight past and not going in today, or in fact, never going in again. But I told myself, I had gone through six hard years of medical school and I was not even a fully registered doctor in the state of Victoria yet. All first-year doctors, or interns, as we were called, only had conditional registration until they had satisfactorily completed 12 months as interns in a state hospital. I just couldn’t let all that time I had spent studying, practising and doing exams, go to waste.

 So, each day I turned the car into the hospital car park and just went in.

And I spent sleepless nights, in the early hours of the morning, planning my death. I was rostered to the right department (anaesthetics) to plan a minimally painful suicide. All I would need was to slip some supplies from the anaesthetist’s trolley into my white coat pocket. I would need needles and syringes, a sedative, so I would slip away to sleep and a drug to paralyse my diaphragm, so I couldn’t change my mind, and this would definitely stop me breathing. This was a way I could escape from the hell I found myself in. I would do it all in the on-call room at the hospital, so it would be the least possible inconvenience for everyone, especially my family. I could never do it at home and present my mother with such a mess.

 My mother, how can I do this to my mother? I thought. She will be heart broken.

This was the turning point for me. I hadn’t breathed a word of any of my trauma to a living soul up until now. I was a doctor and doctors are not weak. We can put up with the sight of blood and people being cut up, maimed and injured. So, I hadn’t told a soul how bad I was feeling, or that I was having trouble sleeping; until now.

“Mum,” I blurted out when I was next back home. “I’ve been thinking about killing myself. I’ve got it all planned, exactly how to do it and I know this is really bad.”

“We’ve got to get you to a psychiatrist immediately,” my ever pragmatic, ex-nurse mother replied. “I’ll go and call Dr Sierry (our GP who had looked after us since we were children) and get a referral to a good psychiatrist,” she added.

  Before the day was out, I had a referral and appointment with the psychiatrist for the upcoming Saturday morning. Mum insisted on taking me. I couldn’t go earlier, I said, even though it was only Tuesday, because I couldn’t take a day off work as I would be letting my colleagues down. They would all have to do extra work, to cover for me and everyone was already worked to the bone.

 Saturday morning 11 am, I am in the psychiatrist’s office answering a lot of questions about my childhood. 

“I had a totally normal childhood,” I said. No trauma.

“I’m a first-year doctor at Footscray Hospital and we are rostered for very long hours,” I went on.

The psychiatrist took lots of notes, never looking up from his file.

Finally, after about forty minutes of me answering his questions, he put his pen down and looked at me and said,

“Well, you’re not mad. You’re not psychotic. You’re actually normal. Probably most first- year doctors go through what you’re going through. I don’t think you’ll actually do it; kill yourself that is. You just need to relax more. I’ll give you some relaxation tapes to listen to.” 

He showed me out of his office and I returned to Mum who was patiently waiting in the doctor’s reception area.

“He says I’m not mad Mum, just normal. I just need some relaxation tapes.”

 I had no more suicidal thoughts after that visit. I was relieved that I was deemed ‘normal’ by the psychiatrist and a little disappointed to be given just ‘relaxation tapes’ because I didn’t think they would do anything for me. When was I going to have the time to listen to them anyway?

 So, what did fix me? I think it was talking to my mother, confiding in someone who truly cared about me instead of thinking I could fix myself, which I clearly couldn’t. We all need someone to talk to, that we trust and who has only our very best interests at heart. The work at the hospital was just as hard and long subsequently, but maybe I was coping better, because I started to get used to it. I practised leaving my thoughts about work, at work, and stopped bringing them home with me. But I think really it was Mum. She cared enough to listen, took me seriously and took me to the psychiatrist to get the relaxation tapes. I can’t ever remember listening to those tapes but maybe I did. But thanks Mum for being there for me. I wouldn’t be here now, if you hadn’t been.