While you were sleeping ...
Birmingham may not be the city that never sleeps, but it is kept running in part by the people who start their days when the sun has gone down. From garbage collectors and road crews to doctors and security officers, night shift work is unseen but makes the day smoother for residents whose alarm clocks are going off as night-shift employees are going to bed.
This is a look at two groups of night owls along the 280 corridor.
Emergency Room Night Shift
Grandview Medical Center
The halls of Grandview’s emergency room are quiet and calm at night, but it’s not because they’re empty. The doctors and nurses who work the night shift never stop moving throughout their 12-hour shift.
“We don’t have breaks,” said Dr. Audry Slane, the night physician at Grandview. “People are hustling and bustling the whole time, and patients don’t recognize that.”
Slane works from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., and for the majority of the shift she is the only doctor in the department. She sees everything from headaches and minor illnesses to chest pain, major trauma and psychiatric issues, juggling patients’ care with the help of night-shift nurses and making sure “everybody else is taken care of and feels taken care of and is safely taken care of, while I go do the other things I need to do.”
The variety of patients that walk through the doors is part of why Slane, who has worked with Trinity and Grandview for three years, chose to work in emergency medicine. On a single night in December, Slane and the night-shift crew treated an infant, a 100-year-old patient and all ages in between.
“I didn’t want to specialize in just one little thing; I really wanted to treat all problems, all ages, and emergency medicine is one of the few things where you get to be kind of a mini-specialist in a lot of different things,” Slane said.
Kevin O’Shields, a charge nurse whose shift starts at 7 p.m., agrees that he enjoys the “excitement, the variety of stuff you see” inside an emergency room. Both he and Slane have been working night shift for the majority of their medical careers.
“There’s just a feel for the night shift in the ER, there’s just a team environment that it’s hard to even describe, but everybody works together,” Slane said, adding the whole staff is ready to jump in and help when needed.
There are some things they can anticipate each day. Slane said that Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays are always the busiest part of the week, especially Mondays when people come in after becoming sick during the weekend. The beginning of the night shift is also the busiest, as the number of patients increases in the afternoon and evening and ebbs in the morning.
“When we come in for our shift, it’s very, very busy, and if we work really, really hard, then hopefully we can get it cleaned up and have a nice quiet ER for the rest of the night,” Slane said. “It’s very busy initially and tapers downward, whereas day shift starts off slower as the day picks up. So those people trying to leave at 7 p.m., it’s very busy when they’re trying to leave. I just always like the feeling of being able to conquer it.”
However, there’s no such thing as a typical day in the ER, O’Shields and Slane agreed. Day or night, anyone could walk in with any problem.
“When we walk in, we know it’s going to be busy; we don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with,” Slane said. “Sometimes you can think everything’s just rolling along like clockwork, and next thing you know, you get a call from an ambulance coming in with something horrible.”
O’Shields said he wouldn’t consider changing to day shift, even on the difficult nights, and he enjoys seeing the people in his care get better. He and Slane agreed that most of their patients will never see the full scope of what the night-shift crew is doing right outside their exam room.
“I don’t think any of them [patients] probably realize what all is going on around them, and it’s hard for them to understand that being patient is a big deal,” O’Shields said.
“So they may be having a very nice, quiet experience, and not realize the horrible things that are going on a couple doors down. And so it really is tricky because we care about everybody and we want everybody to leave feeling like they’ve had a good experience,” Slane agreed. “It’s hard to always accomplish that because you can’t explain to them what was happening two doors down.”
Pastry Chefs
Daylight Donuts
Around the time Slane and the nurses at Grandview are seeing the flow of patients slow down, Lou Youngblood is turning the lights on at YB’s Daylight Donuts in Inverness. When you’re making 50 to 100 pounds of doughnuts by hand before 6 a.m., you need an early start.
Lou and husband Kerry Youngblood have owned the Daylight Donuts location for about a year and a half. Their day begins between 12:30 and 2 a.m. each day.
“[It’s] a lot more work than we thought it was going to be,” Lou said.
They have three employees to help make the pastries, one delivery driver and one person to work at the register. A look behind the counter reveals a scene nothing like the conveyor belt of doughnuts familiar to Krispy Kreme customers.
“You’ll find out quick that nothing is automated around here,” Lou said.
Employees Haidi Cortes and Charlandria “Charlie” Wilson roll out the dough and use a press to cut the doughnuts, plucking out the centers to be made into doughnut holes later. The doughnuts must sit for 30 to 40 minutes, then Lou puts them in the fryer. If the batch is made right, the doughnuts rise to the top. The cooked doughnuts are given to fellow employee Lyn Kukal, who pours the glaze and completes the pastries with icing, fillings or toppings.
Between the different types of dough and toppings ranging from lemon icing or salted caramel to crushed Oreos and gummy worms, Kerry is confident they have the most variety of any doughnut shop in the city. They’ve also made a few original creations, including a cheese doughnut, a coconut cream bismark and an espresso doughnut.
“There’s a lot of artwork to it,” Kerry said. “It’s a talent, I promise you.”
However, Lou said most customers don’t realize it takes over two hours to make each batch of doughnuts by hand. They make all their pastries in the morning and have to guess at what kinds people will want that day. If they have too many, the extras are delivered to churches in Hueytown and Alabaster to be given to homeless shelters. But when they run out of a particular doughnut, she can’t simply go into the kitchen and make more.
“People don’t realize,” Lou said. “The yeast, it has to be made, it has to rise for 30 minutes, it’s like a two-hour process before you get doughnuts.”
Everyone at Daylight Donuts has a different way of handling the odd hours, which Lou said “dictates everything else you do.”
“These hours, you know it takes a special person to work these hours,” Kerry said.
Kerry prefers short naps during the day, while Lou and Cortes stay awake after their shift ends until their regular bedtime. Kukal describes herself as an early riser by nature and enjoys being up that early.
“I was working in an office for a while but it was too slow. You sit at a desk and answer phones — but I like this. It keeps me active,” Kukal said. Her husband arrives each morning to deliver doughnuts to gas stations that sell them in the area, as well as church orders.
Wilson, a former chocolatier who just started the job in December, is still trying to figure it out.
“It’s the earliest job I’ve been to,” Wilson laughed. “Four-thirty was the earliest job I’d been to before this one. It definitely takes some getting used to.”
The kitchen at Daylight Donuts is much like a group of friends cooking. Jokes and laughter are exchanged over the sound of the fryer and the mixer. No one seems to mind that the sun still hasn’t risen when the last tray of doughnuts hits the front counter. When a batch of blueberry cake doughnuts didn’t rise in the fryer, Lou tossed them out and started a new batch without a trace of annoyance.
“It’s just doughnuts,” she said easily.
The Youngbloods came into the business with no experience, as Lou was a former teacher and Kerry worked in plywood and chemical sales. As Lou describes it, they “know nothing about it” and frequently turn to Haidi’s three years of experience for help.
“I like the people I work with the most. If we didn’t have who we enjoy being around, I wouldn’t stick with it long,” Lou said.
When Daylight Donuts opens for business, Lou and Kerry often stay until the morning rush ends around 9:30 a.m. They get the chance to meet and talk to the regulars who enjoy the results of their night’s work.
“You got a really unique area and a lot of repeat customers in this area. You get to know them and have a pretty good relationship with them,” Kerry said. “It’s a big town but you still have a little of the hometown feel in this type of business because you’ve got your regulars.”