MEDICAL CITY EMERGENCY ROOM

AM2:49

Kelly Wiggins is a couple hours into her shift at Medical City Emergency Room on Northwest Hwy., a department of Medical City Dallas Hospital. She’s wearing scrubs, which feel like pajamas, a blessing at this time of night. Thanks to a few cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, she’s upbeat and alert.

“I’m trying to cut back,” she swears. “I’ve been trying to drink more water.”

When she gets hungry, around 6 or 7 a.m., she’ll probably eat chicken nuggets or “supper” food. For her, it actually is suppertime.

Wiggins is accustomed to this schedule and this diet. She works overnight five times a week, sometimes here and sometimes at Medical City’s main campus on Forest Lane. Though her hours are strange, she loves being a nurse.

“I think it takes a very strong person to see people at their worst and comfort them and convince them you are trying to help,” she says. “It wasn’t a question of if I’d go to school for nursing but when.”

Wiggins, the youngest of four girls, grew up in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg. Both her parents are altruistic to a fault and clearly inspirational figures in her life.

“My mother was the first female EMT [Emergency Medical Technician] in our town many years ago,” she explains. “And my dad was a volunteer firefighter. He’d get calls during the night and if [my sisters and I] didn’t have school the next day we could go with him … I never lived a sheltered life and I always saw people helping people.”

Wiggins is a travelling nurse and has been for four years. Most of her contracts last about 13 weeks, meaning she’s lived in a lot of cities.

“I usually sign a three month lease and that’s expensive [to do],” she admits. “But you get so many opportunities to see places you wouldn’t ordinarily see and meet a different variety of people.”

AM3:18

In a room down the hall, you’ll find Amin Bayat, a laboratory technician. He has the same positive attitude about his crazy schedule as Wiggins and also splits his time between this satellite building and the main campus. He tests specimen for “pretty much everything,” includ- ing kidney, heart and liver health. Notably, he isn’t wearing a lab coat.

“There are hard procedures we have to follow,” he explains. “The policy says you don’t have to wear a lab coat unless you are working with specimen.”

At the moment, Bayat isn’t working with specimen because it’s 3:18 a.m. and there are no patients.

AM3:27

Two women take a break at the nursing station. They are Angie Cagle, a radiology technician, and Rachel Armstead, another nurse on duty. Their conversation revolves around medical TV dramas like “Code Black” and “Chicago Med” — funnily enough, “The Night Shift” doesn’t come up.

“I like to watch [the medical dramas] and criticize them,” Armstead says, laughing. “They’re all wrong!”

Cagle agrees that most of what you see on T.V. is inaccurate. Then she excuses herself to retrieve a Monster energy drink.

AM3:33

Cagle returns with said energy drink.

“I have to hunt this flavor down,” she notes. “I can’t find it anywhere but QT.”

AM3:50

The conversation turns, gradually but significantly, more somber. Like the rest of the staff on duty, both ladies also work at Medical City proper. Though the Preston Center location is relatively quiet this time of night, they say the main campus can get intense. They discuss what it feels like to see someone in excruciating pain. Cagle has cried out of empathy for patients, but she always holds it together while she’s at work, operating the computerized tomography (CT) scanner.

Armstead takes a deep breath and nods. She’s had similar experiences: “Sometimes you have to put your big girl panties on and do what you need to do to get the job done.”

—Elizabeth Barbee

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“You never get used to the hours. At this point, my friends all know not to call me after 8 p.m.”

—Scott Padgett