The 1st week of Early.

Last week began the time where I get the pleasure of opening the pharmacy 3 out of the next 4 weeks! One of the other pharmacists will be there with me, and this past week I played the role of our technician that was out on vacay. We would arrive and turn the lights on and the alarm off (which is a bit strange to have the power to do p.s.), then start heating water for making kits, get the messages off the machine, and start eluting the generators. The goal is to have all this finished within the first 30-60 minutes so that we are getting down to business around 0200 (yeah, that's two A.M.!)

I spent the week starting off the morning doing a little quality control on all the dose calibrators to make sure they are consistently reading the amount of radioactivity we're throwing down the hole and then I would draw doses for about 2 hours. Moving on to quality control for all the kits we made (to make sure they'll give nice pretty pictures for everyone) and then snack time! Around 0600 we'd do it all again, repeat, repeat, repeat.

As for sleeping, I did really well (almost, I'll get to that)! I stayed up all day and night Sunday and then slept all day after work. Surprisingly, I managed to get about 6-ish hours of sleep everyday, during the day, without even making the bedroom a cave. Then I'd get up in the afternoon/evening, go workout, and stay up all night. They only I really had trouble with is food -- still need to figure out when to eat, and what -- oh, and Thursday. So the big boss man (read owner of the company) called the beginning of the week and told us one pharmacist from CLT would need to go to Asheville Friday to cover. Since there are only three of us, and a minimum of two are needed to work a day, I got bumped to the day shift for Friday. T had Thursday off so I thought we could spend a day together doing whatever we wanted. Note to self, a 3 hour nap in one 24 hour period ≠ fun, happy Zan. Needless to say I was sent to my room multiple times to take more naps and will be planning a "sleep day" at the end of my early weeks.

Now to work the weekend and then the early shift again next week! Still loving it, still need LOTS of improvement, still grateful for a very understanding Thomas!