AFF Poster / Logo Credit to the best and #1 Yongshin writer:  EmotionalStar

For the first few moments after I awake from sleep, I lay very, very still. If I just stay wrapped up in my comforter, eye mask firmly in place, I can almost forget that the day is about to begin. I know that the alarm on my cell phone will start blaring through my ear plugs at any second, but this tiny stretch of time is all mine. Stretching languorously, I let the faintest smile play across my face as I pretend that it’s my day off, or my birthday, or any day in the history of the world that doesn’t involve a twelve hour shift at the hospital.

I groan as a cheery pop song starts blasting through my bedroom. Time to face the day. I roll across my bed and slap at my cell phone until it shuts up. Not the most sophisticated way to handle gadgetry, sure, but I’ve got no patience when it comes to alarm clocks. I pluck out my ear plugs and pull my eye mask away from my face, blinking at the ceiling. Warm, late afternoon sunlight is dappled across my bedroom walls, turning the cozy space into a little cocoon. The last thing I want to do is leave.

“Come on,” I coach myself, “One foot in front of the other...You can do it...”

Yawning, I swing my legs over the side of my bed and consult the clock. Four in the afternoon—the start of a long day. When I was younger, sleeping until four was a luxury, an indulgence following a wild night out. There were certainly some hung over Sundays in college that didn’t see me rolling out of bed for an entire day and night. But these days, my nighttime hours are hardly recreational. I landed my first job out of school as a night shift nurse, and have therefore joined the ranks of the nocturnal.

Now, my days begin at four in the afternoon and end at eight or so the next morning. I really don’t mind working nights, truth be told. The pay is substantially better, my coworkers are agreeable, and at night, there are no family members hanging around asking a thousand questions and getting upset with you on a personal level. The hospital is still far from peaceful, but there’s a sort of comfort that comes along with working nights. It’s like we’re all at a sleepover together...except once in a while, someone’s internal organs start to fail. But besides that, it can be great.

I pull myself out of bed and shuffle across the carpet. It’s in the middle of April, and from the little patch of the outside world I can see beyond my window, it looks like it was a gorgeous day. If only there was some way I could enjoy it before work. But I’ve got housework to finish and a ton of coffee to drink before I head in. The outside world will have to wait. I turn on the shower and wait for the water to warm up, shrugging off my pajamas in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Looking OK there, Shin Hye,” I mutter, giving myself as forgiving of a once-over as possible. I just turned twenty four, and in those twenty five years, I have been fortunate enough to skirt past most of the body-hating that so many of my peers have to contend with. I’ve always been comfortable in my skin, and able to accept my looks as just another component of my overall self—rather than the defining factor. The men in my life have always referred to me as “cute” or “pretty”, rather than “hot”, and that’s just fine with me.

I run my fingers through my long hair…my mane needs a good conditioning, STAT. At work, my locks are always drawn up into a ponytail or bun—I can’t even remember whether I still own a hair dryer. I let my eyes travel down, trying to determine whether there’s any truth to my grandmother’s claims that I’m “getting too skinny”. I’ve never been too skinny in my life. My hips, , and chest are curvy, and athletic – yes, athletically curvy. I have always loved to be on my feet and moving around as much as possible, which is probably one of the reasons why nursing was so appealing to me to begin with. I would die if I had to sit in an office chair all day long.

That was hardly the only reason I chose this profession, of course.

As I step into the hot stream of water, I let my mind cast back to that terrifying moment at the end of high school, when everyone else had seemed to know what their next steps were, everyone except for me. I had done perfectly well in high school, and was accepted into a handful of great university. But all of a sudden, at the brink of adulthood, I realized that the path I was setting out on had nothing to do with what I actually wanted out of life. I loved science, and had applied to biology programs exclusively. But I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab all my life, I wanted to do something that mattered in the moment, something that would have an immediate positive influence on the world.

So, instead of packing up and heading off to become a bio major, I decided to take a year off. That stretch of time was the first breather I had had since kindergarten, and I discovered that there was a lot of soul searching to be done. I waited tables and tended bar to save up some money, and really got to the bottom of what I wanted to do with my life. One day, as if the idea fell from the sky directly into my lap, nursing occurred to me as an option. And from the moment it presented itself as an option that was it. I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to go to nursing school. I would become an RN and begin a long career of helping others. As soon as I made the choice to pursue nursing, it was like my life snapped into focus.

Nursing school had hardly been a breeze. I was fortunate to get accepted into one of the best programs in the country, and I was determined to establish myself as a competitive candidate. The four years of undergrad flew by at breakneck speed. I certainly managed to make some great friends, and even date a little, but the main priority was always studying.  And by the end, it had paid off. I earned the highest marks and honors of anyone else in the program, and graduated with stars in my eyes—thinking that I’d be able to waltz into any hospital and get a job.

That was, of course, wishful thinking. I hit a brick wall after graduation that seemed absolutely insurmountable. At every hospital I applied to, I was told that I needed more experience. What no one seemed ready to tell me was how I might go about getting this experience! It was the same catch-22 that all new graduates were going through, but some little part of me had hoped to be spared the run-around. I spent a solid year back at my parents’ house applying to job after job. The quest seemed never ending.

Finally, around the time of my twenty-first birthday, something finally came through. I was offered a night shift at a nearby hospital. The pay was great, the commute was short, and I was thrilled to finally be offered a position. I was told that I would be working with geriatric patients, which seemed like a fine enough gig. After all, how much trouble could a bunch of sleeping grandparents be?

Little did I know that my actual patients would, for the most part, be confused, agitated, and downright hostile. Nor did I realize that, come nighttime, those patients would tend to wake up without any idea as to where or who they were. It was incredible—the second the visitors left for the day and the nursing shifts switched, it was like a switch was flipped or something, it’s called “sun-downing syndrome”. And for the next twelve hours, it was my job to care for a handful of elderly patients who often turned to cursing, hitting, biting, and spitting on me. I earned more bruises during my time at that job than I would have had I been a roller derby professional. When I got a black eye from an older woman who thought I was her husband’s mistress, I decided it was time to look for another job.