What to Do When You're About to Lose 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, …