The Monday I didn't dread

Dana Ruiz had a name for the feeling. She called it the Monday tax.

Three twelve-hour night shifts on the cardiac floor, then four days off that weren't really off. The first one she slept through. The second she spent moving like wet sand. By the third she felt close to human, and by the fourth she was already dreading going back. She was thirty-six and training for nothing, because training was the first thing the Monday tax took.

She had been a runner once. The shoes were still by the door, laces tucked in, like a pet that had stopped expecting a walk.

Her sister noticed before she did. They were at a cousin's birthday in a backyard with a bounce house, and Dana sat down on a cooler the moment she arrived and didn't get up for two hours. "You used to be the one chasing the kids," her sister said, handing her a plate. Dana laughed it off, then drove home in silence, and that night she opened a browser tab she would keep open for the next four months.

Nurses read labels

Dana did not come to research compounds with stars in her eyes. She came with a nurse's suspicion of anything sold online with a countdown timer.

She read for months. What she learned first had nothing to do with results. It was that a certificate of analysis can be copied, that a purity number without a lot number describes nothing in particular, and that the cheapest listings were cheap for a reason.

She made a list on the back of a shift schedule. Independent testing, not in-house. A certificate she could see before paying. A lot number on the vial that matched it. A real card checkout. A human being who answered email.

Four vendors failed the list in an evening. One passed. She emailed their support with a pointed question about testing, half expecting a canned reply. A person wrote back, by name, and answered the actual question.

Slow

She told her doctor what she was doing and what she was reading. She kept a log, because nurses keep logs: sleep, shifts, how her legs felt on the stairs to the parking garage at 7:30 in the morning.

The log was boring for weeks. She nearly quit it twice. On one especially bad night shift, a code on the fourth floor and a family who needed more than she had left, she came home, sat in the car in the garage and wrote nothing is different in capital letters. Then she went to bed, because that was the other thing she was learning to do.

Then it got less boring in small ways. The second day off stopped feeling like wet sand. She started walking on the third day, then jogging a little, then deciding the shoes by the door deserved another chance.

Some of it was the sleep schedule she finally fixed. Some of it was the walking. She is careful about claiming more than she knows, because that is also something nurses do.

The Monday

It happened on a Monday in October, which felt like a joke.

She woke up at noon after her last shift, made coffee, and noticed that her body was not filing a complaint. No wet sand. No negotiation. She stood at the counter waiting for the tax to come due, and it didn't.

She put on the running shoes. They were stiff from a year of sitting. She ran two miles along the canal, slowly, past the same bench and the same heron that had been standing on the same rock for as long as she could remember.

When she got home she opened the log and, under Monday, where for a year she had written some version of wrecked, she wrote one word.

Ran.