The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown

Author:Theresa Brown [Brown, Theresa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-09-22T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

No Time for Lunch

Suddenly I’m dizzy. I look at my watch: 1:45 p.m. I usually don’t feel this way until after 2:00, but I haven’t had a morning snack except for those few saltines and Dorothy’s candy. The dizziness will pass, but then simple things will start to make less sense. I’m not unsafe when I’m hungry, just slow, and I’ll get slower the longer I wait to eat.

I’ll have lunch. Dorothy’s discharge can wait a few more minutes and the pastor usually lets us know when she gets here so I won’t miss her if I’m off the floor.

Lunch is touchy for a lot of nurses. We don’t get paid for the thirty minutes when we supposedly eat, but there’s rarely staff to cover our patients, so most of us work through lunch without being paid for that time. Class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of nurses not getting paid for a lunch break we never take, but the practice, at least from what I hear, is common.

Even when there’s an official way for nurses to note that we didn’t get a lunch break and should be paid for the time, the hospital may subtly dissuade nurses from putting in a claim for every non-lunch. I worked a year at my first job before I even learned I should be paid for that time. Labor laws say that lunch is thirty minutes of uninterrupted time, but on my floor that’s an uncommon abundance of time to eat, so legally pretty much every nurse I work with should be paid for lunch for every shift. Three million nurses in America. How much money do hospitals save by not paying nurses for the thirty-minute lunch break we more often than not work through?

Not to mention the physical toll of hunger. Glucose is the only form of food energy our brains can use, so if I don’t eat my brain is deprived of fuel. I spend the shift going from room to room, lifting patients, pushing carriers, moving beds, raising IV poles up and down. All that uses energy. If I don’t eat, the tank gets low—simple physiology.

To be clear: I’m not a martyr. I would love to pass my patients off to a lunch-nurse for a full thirty minutes and really get a break. But no lunch nurse exists on my floor and I don’t like taking on another nurse’s four patients while managing my own, then asking that same nurse to take on my four patients so that I can eat. Another four patients, even for half an hour, could be overwhelming or, worst of all, unsafe.

Now, though, my patients are stable and I need to eat. No one else is in the break room, so I turn off the wide-screen TV. After all the pings and beeps and buzzes and alarms on the floor I want silence.

Grabbing my lunch out of the refrigerator, I sit down and feel the physical effort of the day. I’d like to make a cradle of my arms, lay my head down on the table, close my eyes.

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