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At four in the morning, they are surprised to see me.
The halls are dimly lit, about half of the big overheads turned off; the nurses' station is white and gleaming and bright, busy with a sort of unhurried business. There's no rush at four in the morning. There are no orders being phoned in and no tests being run. There's time to sit and chat and stock carts. I am somewhat of an anomaly in their world, a doctor in the night world of nurses, but they make room for me in the little cubicle in the corner, find me vital signs and updates, glad to have something to do.
It's a far cry from the bustle at six-thirty, when the shift changes and the day nurses come on and the lights flicker into a facsimile of daylight. When I come at six-thirty or seven, I meet the morning labs coming off the printer and the fresh new sheets of overnight vitals, step into a bustle and chaos of phone calls and notifications and getting things done. They know to expect me early; I like my cubicle and its three walls of privacy right next to the intermittent beeping alarms of the remote telemetry, and so do all of the other doctors. First come, first served.
It's easy to lose time inside a hospital: patient rooms have windows but the curtains are usually drawn, and the hallways exist in a perennial brightness of linoleum tiles and flickering lights. Morning looks like afternoon looks like evening looks like midnight. There are always nurses -- more in the daytime, but there are always nurses. When I come down at four in the morning, euphoric from a delivery or half-awake while awaiting one, there are nurses who know my name and greet me by it, and more often than not the people I am there to see are as awake as I am.
Visitors move around the hospital in elevators with wood panel walls and bright signs advertising hospital events. I move in stairwells with unsealed concrete steps and railings that are nothing more than pipes and joins, where the lights are never the same color as anywhere else and the sound of my footsteps echoes eerily while I climb. I walk through wooden doors marked "Authorized Personnel Only," knowing that my authorization is that I know what's behind them, cutting through back hallways with faded paint and abandoned clinic rooms, passing from hustle to bustle and back. I have a tiny grey circle on my keychain that makes black boxes go "beep" and magnetic locks click open. I have a list of codes for keypads that don't beep. I know which doors are locked at night.
When I am attending a delivery I live in a sort of temporary camp: I put fresh folded pillowcases on plastic pillows and unfold the pale beige blankets around myself when there is no work to keep me awake, sleeping fitfully in the folded-up futons in the call rooms on Labor and Delivery, with the door half-cracked and my socks still on, my glasses lying beside my outstretched hand. Time doesn't matter: there is food in the little glass-fronted refrigerator in the doctor's lounge, sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and fruit and yogurt; there are chips and peanut butter and granola bars and bouillon packets stashed in the kitchenette on Labor and Delivery, the one with the sign on the door reading "Patient Use Only". I eat when I am hungry, whatever I can scavenge. I sleep when I do not have work to do.
And at four in the morning, if I am awake and have patients to see, I go downstairs to greet the nurses in the half-twilight of the hospital night.
