What to Do When You're About to Lose It
Are you then relieved from feeling it?
“You cry, I’m suffering severe pain! Are you then relieved from feeling it, if you bear it in an unmanly way?” - Seneca
It was 3 a.m. and I was supposed to be done.
Thirty six hours in. My eyes felt like sandpaper. I’d eaten half a cold sandwich somewhere around 6 p.m. and called it dinner. I had my bag on my shoulder, my coat in my hand, and I was maybe forty steps from the door when my phone went off. Then again. Then the ward nurse appeared at the end of the corridor with the expression- the one that means there are more.
Six new admissions. All genuinely sick. All mine.
I put my bag down. I walked back. And somewhere between the nurses’ station and the first patient’s bedside, something in me just turned sour. Something hot, unreasonable, looking for somewhere to go. It was a conglomeration of internal whining, a voice that kept tallying everything up- the hours, the hunger, the unfairness of it, the fact that there was nobody to call, …
