"We weren't crazy busy, but there's always the worry that you're going to be - because in A&E you never know what's coming through the door next.
"Most of what we saw was drunk people who had injured themselves or done something daft.
"It was a lot of people coming in from Christmas parties, which has its own challenges because drunk people can try your patience at four in the morning."
Dr Lailah Peel has just completed a weekend of three back-to-back 12-hour nightshifts in an A&E department in the west of Scotland.
"On Sunday, I didn't really get a break from midnight through until eight in the morning because there was constantly something happening.
"Every time I thought I had a patient I could get home they got a bit sicker so I was having to do this, that and the other - it's constant, and we're all just exhausted from it."
It says something when this is not considered a "crazy busy" shift.
The 37-year-old, who lives in Greenock, swapped a career in dentistry to study medicine with the goal of specialising in oral and maxillofacial surgery but ended up "falling in love" with emergency medicine.
She has been a junior doctor in A&E for the past five years - a period which has coincided with an unprecedented surge in waiting times.
Back in December 2018, roughly 40-50 patients a week Scotland-wide might spend 12 hours or more in A&E, mostly while waiting for a bed to become available on a ward.
Today, that figure is around 1700.
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The gridlock has knock-on effects for ambulances, which can find themselves stranded outside A&E for hours waiting to offload patients and unable to respond to other callouts.
"Because we're a smaller site, we need to transfer out quite a lot of patients to Glasgow and to other specialties we don't have," said Dr Peel.
"At one point, we had three or four patients waiting for ambulances.
"Normally when you're requesting an ambulance there's different scales - you can request a four-hour, a one hour, an 18-minute, or an immediately life-threatening one.
"One patient was pretty unwell and he was waiting for a one-hour ambulance but it got to six hours and there was still no sign, to the point where we had to upgrade it to 'immediately life-threatening'.
"So we upgraded him, but it still took half an hour."
The situation in A&E has been growing steadily worse since mid-2021, when hospitals began to fill up after the pandemic.
Dr Peel said: "We're two and a half years in and there's not really any sign of things getting better and we're all starting to ponder that.
"Lots of people have left. More people are planning on leaving - if not now, maybe in a year's time.
"In the hospital we're in, they used to have a competition for the best dressed Christmas tree.
"People would be putting the effort in on their breaks, or staying after work.
"We were comparing pictures of what the trees look like in December 2021 to what they look like now, and we were like 'people just aren't bothered anymore are they?'
"That kind of sums things up.
"One of the nurses I was on with at the weekend has another job so she's leaving and another is thinking about it.
"It's frustrating because when you look at the statistics it doesn't look like we've got that much worse compared to last year, but that's because we've got better at managing things.
"If our department is bed blocked, we'll make sure we keep one cubicle free or allow patients to queue in ambulances a bit longer because we're more familiar about dealing with that.
"Previously on a night shift, we might have had an empty department once in a while.
"I remember working in this same department five years ago and one nightshift we had no patients left in the department, so we sat and watched a film.
"That would never happen now."
Tomorrow: NHS Day in the Life - Community links worker: 'The house had no heating, and her daughter was getting ill'
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