My Life as a Vampire

I sleep during the day and stay awake all night. I risk the surge of skin breakouts and my immune system crashing. Such an unhealthy habit, I know. Being a doctor, my body has been accustomed to the toxic lifestyle for quite a while, though I hated being kept awake throughout my 24 hr. duties and having to come home totally exhausted. I was dog-tired. Now that I got my wish of getting back to my sedentary ways after quitting residency training, I have all the time in the world to take a beauty rest. Thanks to my insomnia, I couldn’t do just that.

After passing my licensure boards, I slept as much as I wanted. I made up for the lost slumbers during med school and internship. Until I slept too much that I ended up messing my body clock. I hardly saw the daylight. I woke up not knowing what just happened to the world while I was off to dreamland. My day turned into night and my night turned into day. Problem came everytime I was asked to report for 24 hrs duty. (I worked as a reliever physician, like an on-call where I only got to work whenever somebody seeks replacement and my sched allows me to). I would be tossing on my bed til its 5AM and I needed to be at the hospital by 8AM. I swear it was the worst feeling of all. I would be sobbing out of frustration. By 11AM I just wanted to dive into a bed but couldn’t. My duty doesn’t end until 8AM the next day. How tormenting. The convenience of sleeping pills were out of the question. They made me droopy til the next day so it only made matters worse.

After 2 years of living like a vampire, I finally started my residency training. Everything went back to normal. Except that the word normal among the medical professionals may seem different from the normal among other professions. Nonetheless, the load of my work took its toll on me. I realized I couldn’t live the life of an internist. Hence after barely 2 months and a week of training, I quit. Now I’m back to the zombie world. Just when the rest of the world is asleep, here I am tinkering with my PC. Ugh. The dark circles around my eyes are making me uglier than usual. I’ve been worrying too much on how to get myself to sleep that I think I’m starting to grow wrinkles. Oh gosh, no!