I hate staying up late

I've never been a night person. Growing up in the countryside with the closest street light a 10-minute drive away, I was accustomed to dark nights. But I never liked them.

I worried about bears, wolves and unknowable things roaming around outside my windows – never mind that the closest wolf population was at least 50 kilometres away, or that I was snug inside our solidly built house.

Early in life, I hit on a solution for my night-induced anxiety: Once the sun went to bed, so did I. As I grew older, I became increasingly inflexible about bedtimes. My parents, in an attempt to encourage me in my ballet lessons, arranged for us to see The Nutcracker in the closest large city. This meant having meals out and staying in a hotel, a treat for most eight-year-olds. Not for me. I didn't care that I would get to eat chicken fingers and French fries with chocolate cake for dessert; I worried that I wouldn't be able to go to sleep at my bedtime.



When we left the ballet at 10:30 p.m., I was beside myself. I imagined the police arresting me for being awake underage. I hid on the floor of the cab back to the hotel and sprinted to the elevator to avoid being seen by the authorities. My poor mother, more of a night person herself, followed me embarrassed and bewildered. It was a long time before I had another night out in the city.

As a teenager, I began staying up late like most of my friends. Unlike them, though, I never saw the excitement in it. I liked going to bed at 9 p.m. and getting up early. At 3 a.m., when my friends and I stopped for pie and sundaes at the local truck stop, I never craved sugar – only sleep.

I happily, if occasionally unsuccessfully, continued my unusual early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine during my undergraduate years. So my announcement that I had been accepted to medical school was met with some concern. A close friend did her best to try to help me see the folly: “Have you ever stayed up all night? Doctors do that! All of the time! You fall asleep standing up if you're out past 10 p.m." Of course doctors work at night, I thought. They also stitch up wounds and prescribe medications. I've never done that before either, but I can learn.



With optimism born of unadulterated ignorance, I set off to medical school. The first two years were busy. There were exams upon exams along with clinical skills sessions to learn everything from using a blood-pressure cuff to suturing on pigs' feet. Fortunately for me, most of this learning occurred during business hours, easily permitting me to go to bed early and get up early to swim at the local community centre.

The latter half of medical school, the clinical clerkship, is all about practical learning. Students rotate through different areas of medicine. They see patients on their own, discuss management plans with residents and staff physicians and follow up on those plans. They are also on call. Overnight. All night.

For my first night of clerkship, in an attempt at bravery, I volunteered to be on call for pediatrics. The night before, I called my boyfriend and sobbed, “What was I thinking? I can't stay up all night. I'm going to have to quit medical school and go home to work on my uncle's farm. At least farmers go to bed on time."

Eventually, he talked me down. I went to work the next morning, terrified but mentally prepared for the night of sleeplessness ahead. As evening rolled around, I sat in my on-call room perched on an uncomfortable bed, watching my pager like it was a bomb about to go off. But it never did. I received no pages that first night. I also did not sleep one wink for the first time in my life. I learned there's nothing like the terror of not sleeping to keep you awake all night.

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