No matter what time of day or night, the ER is always awake, providing much needed support

to patients with any and every kind of ailment or injury.

Dr. George Russo works in a New York hospital emergency room.

The margin for error in this line of work is razor thin, and since the ER never closes,

finding time to sleep and sleep properly is a daunting challenge for George and his colleagues.

There's no plans, appointments, it's whatever comes in comes in.

Sometimes you're lucky enough to get a notification over the phone from the EMS, but that doesn't

happen every time, so you always gotta be ready to jump to it.

It's a fast-paced environment, so you could be seeing somebody that's having a heart

attack or that is extremely sick with something, and then you get a trauma notification and

something's coming in and the doors are never closed.

I wondered, with all of the chaos and urgency of the ER, how someone like George is thinking

about sleep and how it impacts his performance, so I asked him to recall one of his more

hectic shifts and what role sleep played in its success or obstacles.

All right, so it was a Monday, it was Mayhem walked into a lot of signouts from the night

prior because it was a busy Sunday night already, had to handle those, but we also had new

patients coming in for 7am sharp, and then patients were coming in from the clinics as well,

because sometimes they have extremely high blood pressure, they get dizzy and faint when

they're getting blood taken, and I'm dealing with all of those people, and then a stroke

alert comes in with EMS, so you have to do the protocol for that because time is brain,

as they say, and then we had a stab wound to the chest come in.

Shortly after, so there was a lot of things happening, and then there was also COVID patients

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