I have been signing up for a New Year’s Eve shift for a number of years. I don’t mind being on duty a few hours before the turn of the year or even working straight into the new year. Many of my colleagues see it similarly. New Year’s Eve is not as high a priority for us as Christmas Eve. The day is like any other. The majority of our patients also say that. One reason for this may be that most of them are older than 60 and thus do not correspond to the typical New Year’s party crowd. A saying that our patients have often heard goes something like this: “I always sleep into the New Year anyway, whether I do it at home or here in the hospital, it doesn’t matter!”
There are hardly any classic New Year’s Eve patients with us, our business is running as ever. Rocket injuries and alcohol poisoning usually come first to the emergency room and then, if at all, are transferred to the normal ward. But every now and then someone who has looked too deeply ends up with us. That’s not much – it looks different at the Grafinger Volksfest times.
The mood on New Year’s Eve is therefore not as depressed as it is on Christmas Eve. When it gets close to midnight, we nurses don’t let it take us away and toast with sparkling wine – alcohol-free, of course. In the past we always looked for a free bed by the window so that we could see a few fireworks lights.
But just because we are not at our head office at the entrance to the intensive care unit does not mean that we are not keeping an eye on our patients, because our duty of supervision never pauses. And so we switched on the surveillance monitor at the bed where we watched the fireworks. We saw this immediately when the alarm went off in one of the other rooms.
Julia Rettenberger works as an intensive care specialist in the Ebersberger Kreisklinik.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
Last year we had no free bed. Because of the many Covid patients, our ward was full to the last bed, as it will probably be this year. But there was no fireworks display that we could have watched anyway, just like this year.
And so there is really only one thing left that at least distinguishes the New Year’s Eve night shift from others: After midnight, some of the colleagues who are free always call the ward to wish them a happy New Year. They will definitely do that again this year.
We need such a thing: a beautiful year 2022, in which we can get the pandemic under control, live again without worries, meet and hug family and friends without risk, in which a life in harmony and without division awaits us – that is what I wish all of us. And if at some point, hopefully, a new normal returns, then I hope that we care workers will continue to be thought of and that we will not be forgotten.
Julia Rettenberger is an intensive care nurse. In this column, the 28-year-old tells every week about her work at the district clinic in Ebersberg. The collected texts can be found under sueddeutsche.de/thema/Auf_Station.