Twelve-Hour Shifts and the Gym Bag I Kept Under the Ambulance Bench

The night I realised I was running on nothing

There is a specific kind of tired that comes at four in the morning, somewhere between Tembisa and the hospital, when you have been on your feet for fifteen hours and the last thing you ate was half a rusk at the start of the shift. I remember standing at the back of the ambulance with a patient stabilised and the adrenaline draining out of me, and my hands were shaking so badly I could not get the pen to write straight on the paperwork. It was not fear. It was hunger, plain and stupid and completely avoidable, and I had let it happen to myself again.

I have been a paramedic for most of my thirties. I love the work in the way you love something that also takes pieces of you. Twelve-hour shifts, overnight shifts, doubles when we are short staffed, which is often. You cannot plan a meal around a job where the radio decides your day. You sit down to eat and the tones go, and you leave your food on the counter and you do not see it again. For years I told myself this was just the price. Everyone in the service looked a bit grey around the edges. I thought that was normal.

It was not normal. It was slow starvation dressed up as dedication, and I was proud of it, which is the worst part.

The body keeps the score, and mine was overdrawn

The strength went first. I did not notice it as a moment, more as a series of small humiliations. Lifting a stretcher I used to manage without thinking, and feeling my lower back complain. Carrying a heavy patient down a narrow staircase in a block of flats in the East Rand and having to stop halfway, not because I could not, but because there was nothing in the tank to draw on. My partner took the weight without a word, and I felt something close to shame.

Then the energy went. I would come off a night shift and sleep till two in the afternoon and still feel like I had been hit by a truck. My mood was flat. I snapped at people I loved. I lived on garage pies and Coke and coffee because those were the only things open at the hours I was awake, and because sugar and caffeine are a loan you keep taking out until the interest buries you.

The thing that frightened me was not vanity. I did not care about being a certain size. What frightened me was that I was becoming worse at my job. A paramedic who cannot lift, who cannot think clearly at 3am, who is one bad shift from a mistake, is a danger. I owed the people in the back of my ambulance more than the wreck I had let myself become.

Starting small, because small was all I had

I did not join a gym and transform my life in a montage. That is not how it went. What I had was maybe forty minutes of energy on a good off day, and a fridge full of nothing.

I started with food, because that was the actual problem. Not a diet. Just the basic, unglamorous question of how do I get real nourishment into my body on a schedule invented by chaos. I could not rely on cooked meals at fixed times. So I built around what I could carry and what would survive being forgotten in a bag for six hours in a hot vehicle.

Boiled eggs. Tins of tuna. Provitas and peanut butter. Biltong when I could afford it. And a shaker, because I learned quickly that when the tones go and you have thirty seconds, you cannot cook, but you can drink something. A colleague of mine, an old hand who had been doing this for twenty years and still looked solid, kept a tub of Whey Protein in his locker and would mix a scoop with water between calls. He was not preachy about it. He just said, you cannot save anyone if you fall over, so eat something you can actually get down.

That sentence rearranged something in my head.

The shaker under the bench

I bought a shaker and I started keeping it in my gym bag, which lived under the bench in the back of the ambulance, wedged next to the spare linen. It became a small ritual. At the start of a shift I would fill it, and in the dead hours, the ones between calls where you are just parked somewhere waiting, I would drink it instead of buying another packet of chips from the garage.

It sounds like a tiny thing. It was not a tiny thing. It was the first decision I had made for myself in years that treated my body like it belonged to me and not just to the service. The Protein Powder was not magic and I never pretended it was. It was simply a way to get something reliable into a day that guaranteed nothing. On the nights I could not eat a real meal, at least I had not run completely empty. My hands stopped shaking on the paperwork.

Slowly the food side got sorted. I prepped on my off days, cooked rice and chicken in bulk, portioned it into containers, kept the simple stuff in my bag. I stopped treating eating as something I would get around to and started treating it as part of the job, like checking the oxygen or the defib.

Getting the strength back, on my terms

The training came after the food, once I actually had fuel to train on. I could not commit to gym classes with fixed times, so I found a place near me that was open twenty-four hours, which for someone on my roster is the difference between training and not training. I would go at strange hours. Ten at night before a rest day. Seven in the morning after a night shift, when I was tired but the endorphins actually helped me sleep better afterwards.

I kept it stupidly simple. Squats, deadlifts, carries, the movements that are literally my job. Picking heavy things up off the floor and moving them is not a metaphor for me, it is Tuesday. I wanted to be strong in the exact way the work demands, so I trained the way the work demands.

Somewhere in there I started taking Creatine, a scoop a day, nothing clever, mostly because the research on it is boring and solid and because I noticed I could push a little harder in my sessions without falling apart. I am a sceptical person by trade. I want evidence before I put something in my body. This one earned its place quietly and stayed.

What actually changed

It took the better part of a year. There was no before-and-after photo moment. But there was a shift on a Saturday night, months in, where we carried a large man down four flights of stairs in the dark, and I took my end of the weight the whole way and my back did not complain and my hands did not shake, and at the bottom I was breathing hard but I was fine. I was completely fine. And I remembered the woman a year earlier who had to stop halfway, and I felt like I had gone back and helped her.

I sleep better now. I eat on purpose. I still work brutal hours, the roster has not softened, the radio still owns my day. What changed is that I stopped treating my own body as the one patient I was allowed to neglect.

The gym bag still lives under the bench. The shaker is still in it. On the long nights I still stand at the back of the ambulance in the cold and drink something because I have learned, the hard way, that you cannot pour from an empty cup, and in my line of work an empty cup is not an inconvenience. It is a risk to someone else.

I did not rebuild myself to look like anything. I did it so that when the call comes at four in the morning, and it always comes, there is someone strong enough and clear enough to answer it. That someone is me now. I intend to keep it that way.