Graveyard Shift

A report has just come out by an agency affiliated with the World Health Organization that links working the late-night "graveyard" shift with certain types of cancer (breast and prostate). The relationship is not certain: although there is a correlation between the graveyard shift and cancer, there may be a third, as yet undiscovered factor causing the increased likelihood of cancer that may correlate somehow with working late nights/early mornings.

When I was much younger, I felt that it would be cool to be up and about when most of the world (around me) was asleep. I'm not exactly the kind of person disposed toward being around crowds, and being awake when there were fewer people around was appealing. Plus, being off during the daytime and evening would give me a great amount of flexibility with regard to attending events without this conflicting with my work schedule. But the opportunity for me to radically change my sleeping patterns on a regular basis didn't occur until I began to work at the post office, which employs a large percentage of its enormous work force in the wee hours of the morning handling, sorting, and preparing mail for the next day's delivery. With only a gap of a little less than a year in 1995-96, I spent from late-1987 to mid-2003 working the graveyard shift as a clerk at my local post office. I noticed no serious ill effects from this tenure, but there were some disturbing effects nevertheless. For one thing, I seemed to come down with colds and sinus infections much more often. I also experienced something I call "chronic sleepiness", and this did not bode well for either my driving or my family relationships. And it was hard for me to get used to sleeping in the day, when the general noise level, along with myriad opportunities for distractions, ran rampant. As a matter of fact, I would always sleep nights whenever I had a day off, my body somehow desperately trying to reestablish its "circadian" sleep rhythms. Finally, by 2003, I was having a great amount of difficulty getting all the way through my "work day", with me starting to fade around 4 AM. So I was able to change my schedule to one where I began my shift in mid-afternoon and got off at midnight. Much, much better! Looking back on it, I am amazed at how long I was able to go on working the graveyard shift as I did. But now, whenever I occasionally am required to work overtime until 2 AM, even that little amount of "graveyard" work takes a toll on me! Hopefully, no long-term health consequences will have arisen out of the many years that I plodded through on the graveyard shift.