(My Not Kidding Face after a night shift)

I don’t consider reading people one of my gifts. When I need to, I can really tune in – and as a nurse, I have to tune into my patients in order to figure out things they won’t or can’t tell me with words.

With friends and acquaintances, I pull it together for conversation as often as I can. But I find this type of interpretation exhausting.

Sometimes, especially when I am tired or distracted, I can’t muster the energy needed to read folks and so I wind up feeling like I’ve missed something, without knowing quite what. I can sense a disruption in the Force, so to speak, but can’t tell what is causing it.

That happened this morning.

I had worked the night shift. Giving report to the oncoming nurses in the morning is always hard. My body seems to know how to pay out my brain matter during the night so that I stay functional and literate throughout my shift. But right as I’m getting ready to give report, what’s left of my brain scatters to the wind and I’m left working hard just stay coherent.

This morning I had two patients to give to two different coworkers, both of whom were male nurses. My area of nursing, neuroscience, seems to have more male nurses than a lot of specialties. Perhaps because we are the next best thing to the ER – our patient population offers plenty of excitement, higher acuity (sicker patients) and a decent number of trauma patients.

The guys are really caring toward their patients and love their jobs. They also tend to joke around during report, between moments of being totally serious and professional, of course. But when I am tired, it is no joke.

I gave report back to back to these two, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I knew one of them well; we have worked together for years. I know he has a dead pan, sarcastic sense of humor and I try really hard to be game. I just can’t tell when he is kidding or not.

And then I had this second guy who I didn’t know as well but also was a jokester. I’m sure they have a great time working together on the day shift. One of them would make a comment and laugh and I would just look at them, clueless.

I want to clarify that this wasn’t making fun of patients, just good-natured ribbing between coworkers. I felt like they were laughing at ME and I just wanted to ask, am I funny looking or something?!

I don’t want to be a stick in the mud, I want to be witty and give a good report. But honestly, after being awake for 24 hours, I have to choose between wit and the report.  Report is going to win.

I feel like I probably won’t get that much better at reading people if I have been terrible at it for this long. At this point, I just hope I am not missing critical social cues.

Is it social anxiety creating paranoia, or do I really have the emotional IQ of a neanderthal? The nature of the question makes it impossible to answer.