Exhaustion tastes metallic.

It’s ok in this moment though. It’s unusually tranquil. A heart rate monitor beeps gently in the background, the soundtrack of hospital nights. I hear snores. I’m chewing on a mini cheddar, it sits pap-like between my teeth and cheek. Funny though, it also tastes of ever stronger black coffee; the drink of the anxious achiever. Coffee and synthetic cheese, odd. I do one of those barely bothered laugh-ish nose exhales, and raise my eyebrows to focus on the drug chart laying in front of me.

It’s illusory, tiredness. For example prescribing paracetamol; 1gram 4 times a day unless someone has a dodgy liver or they’re super light. Easy? After working 12 nights in a row, it’s not. Something I knew how to do even before medical school had become a surreal task. When you’re fighting for wakefulness, facts seem no longer to be facts and everything you do you question. Short term memories no longer sprung and buoyant, they rest a little under the surface marbling into one another.

My mind moves to earlier in the night, I’d gone into a room to get a bladder scanner and had come out of the room holding a box of tissues. It took some real. conscious. Parsing. Of. My. Thoughts. to have any idea what I had gone in the room for.

I nose exhale to myself again, tepidly amused. If only the bloke with the obstructed fit to burst bladder had been so apparently unconcerned. I drop my head down look at my lap and think on my own bladder, a rather redundant little bag drip fed cheap coffee, occasionally producing a rather smelly, concentrated and unsatisfying wee. I let out a teeny snore laugh at the bizarreness of my slightly self absorbed bladder appraisal. It is warm tonight, unusually so.

Head up again. As I was saying, Paracetamol. I wrote the word down. I stick my tongue down the side of my teeth, the cheesy pap is body temperature now. I push it back, over a fuzzy molar onto my tongue and swallow. I should probably have a chewing gum. I go back and check Par-a-cet-amol, fearing I had spelt it wrong. Sounds like Paracet-u-mol.

I feel the rumble of my pager in my pocket. I sit back up straight, losing my place on the page – again- and look for a phone. There isn’t one.

Paracetuhmol. I can’t find the paper and I now can’t find the pen. Parrotcetamol. I snort again, I look for someone to share the joke. What is orange and smells like carrot? Wait, I mean what is orange and sounds like a parrot? At least the people beeping their horns in the carpark downstairs are finding it funny. Beep beepy beep.

Where is everyone? I reach out again to find the desk, perhaps I need glasses. Snort. My pager is going on and on and on buzzzzzzzz brrrrrr haha. Its like a dream when you need a piss but all the loos you find are locked.

My pager is a drill now, punishing, begging me to answer. There is no phone. Beep beepy beep. Why can’t someone else answer? Where are they all?

I’m swiped, I fall, it doesn’t make sense.

It is deafening, where is the pager? brrrrrrrrrrrr

The sound now is rubber on tarmac, juddering. I’m awake, I pull the wheel to the side, horns blast from everywhere as people swerve to avoid me. It is loud. It is dazzling. I hit the brakes, skew across the hard shoulder and come to a heartless stop. My mouth hits the wheel bedding my teeth into my lip. I am awake. Awake tastes of blood and cheesy coffee. I look around; motorway traffic flies past me on one side and ragwort sway yellowly on the other.