A Nurse's Duty: A 1930s Medical Romance

by Sheila Burns

  ‘The patient is unconscious.’

  He said: ‘Shall I bring her down?’

  But she was such a little thing!

  ‘I can carry her quite easily myself,’ I said, and rolled her into the blanket. She never stirred as I carried her down, and the fairy magic was there, for I laid her on the theatre table and almost instantly the mask was over her face. She breathed evenly and tranquilly, she would never know anything at all about this.

  I hate tonsil ops.

  Standing there while they busied themselves about her, I thought that I hated all ops. They would always remind me of him, and I did not want to be reminded of him any more. Wild and idiotic plans seemed to pour into my mind. It would be the easiest thing to go away; to get a job somewhere else, abroad perhaps, somewhere where I would meet fresh people in fresh surroundings and forget all about what I had suffered.

  Abroad there are so many more opportunities. Abroad even quite plain people like I was get the chance to meet men, and to marry.

  I sounded like a husband-hunter. It wasn’t that. I wish words were not such difficult things and that I could explain myself properly, but there is a hunger in life, a distrust of the loneliness which the future offers, a burning desire to leave all that behind and to have someone, even anyone, to share your thoughts and your dreams, your hopes and desires.

  It is the loneliness of life which hurts so much; it is the fact that there is no one to stand by your side, no one to care what happens to you, and I am quite sure this is the force which drives a great many women into a marriage when they are not quite sure of their affections.

  I saw that the operation was ending, and slipped out of the theatre upstairs to get the room ready for her. On the stairs there were visitors coming and going, people with large bunches of flowers (more work for some nurse, though of course they never looked at it that way), porters with trays. I could hear the sound of Miss Vaughan’s voice as she talked to some visitor. ‘Well!’ I thought, ‘thank heavens I can’t hear his voice for a little while. He will have to stay at Ventnor for a day or two to settle things up there.’

  I went on to the room.

  Tenny had popped in to see what I was doing. ‘Not got her back again yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing wrong?’

  ‘No, perfectly straightforward,’ and I suppose she knew by my tone that I wasn’t thinking what she said.

  Tenny turned to me. ‘Men make me sick,’ she said quickly, ‘I told you that they wouldn’t do you any good, Katy, I warned you that this would happen.’

  ‘You cannot help your own feelings.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I couldn’t help mine. I suppose if I had had the sense to run away from things it would have been better, if only I had not let them go so far. But the snag is that you never realize how much you are falling in love until it actually happens. White hyacinths.’ And she stood there biting her lip as though the memory still had the power to hurt.

  ‘It’s over now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and what is more, something is dead inside me. I’ll never love anyone else. I can’t. You probably don’t understand, but something inside me was killed then. He did that. I’d never care for anybody in the same way again.’

  I hadn’t meant to let Tenny in on my own private thoughts, but somehow or other it slipped out. I said: ‘In the theatre just now I was wondering if it wouldn’t be possible for me to get a job right away, abroad somewhere. They are always wanting nurses for outposts of empire, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t go together.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Tenny, we’ve both suffered a bit, you more than I have. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if we pulled up our socks and left everything that can remind us of what has happened and went right away?’

  ‘It would be a wonderful idea if only we could do it.’

  I heard the sound of the porters bringing the ambulance stretcher out of the lift, and knew that it was my little patient returning. It was the little girl all right, and I had her room ready and warm so that we popped her straight into bed; almost at once she went off into a sound natural sleep. This might last for some hours, as we knew, and the longer the better, because it would give the throat the chance to start healing. I took my place beside her, hardly stirring.

  Her mother came in to see her. I could hear her outside on the landing, and knew that Tenny was trying to explain the situation to her. She wanted to be in and to see how the child was. Yet if she came in the chances were that she would make a fuss and waken the child and harm her.

  ‘You’re hurting her,’ she kept saying in an agony, ‘I know that she wants me and yet you won’t let me go to her. I would never have allowed her to come here had I thought that you were going to be so cruel to us both.’

  I felt terribly sorry for her, but she might have trusted us.

  Nurses don’t hurt people if they can help it. We want our patients to get well and to be happy. The longer this little girl could lie there asleep, the less chance of sickness there was for her. And we wanted to guard against that at all costs. But still the mother argued outside the door. It was her argument, and the noise she made, that disturbed the child, so that she moved and began to wake.

  I was furious. It is all very well, but the people who retard their dear ones’ recovery the most are the relations.

  It was nursing that little girl back to health again that made me forget my own troubles somewhat. I knew that she would go out within the week, and I concentrated on getting her fit and well. But life wasn’t good.

  During that week I wrote to the different Agents for the Colonies and I got papers as to the chances of nursing abroad. I pored over these in my own room, and ultimately I passed the likely ones on to Tenny to have a look at. The world seemed suddenly to have become a much bigger place with prospects all over it. Yet it takes a courageous heart to cut the traces and to start afresh in a new country. I don’t believe that I had ever realized how closely one clings to habit, to the flora and fauna that one knows and loves, to the silly little things like wet days, and April skies, like dahlias in autumn, and the leaves turning gold, and the scent of clover in a hay meadow.

  I had got to think this over very carefully before I made a definite move.

  I had been telling myself all through this week, if only it could be some little time before I had to meet Ray Harper again, it would be so much easier. If only life would be good to me and give me the chance to conquer myself and keep that stiff upper lip, then I’d be all right.

  Life wasn’t good!

  I was told the very day that the little girl went out of the home with a promise of a lovely holiday at the seaside, that the room was wanted for another patient. Miss Vaughan sent me up the papers with all the particulars written on it. She was a youngish woman with a particularly bad appendix. In the corner, under the single printed word ‘Doctor,’ I saw his name. I knew then that it was one of his cases coming in for me to nurse. We should be meeting every day for a while; we should be thrown together. It was almost more than anyone could bear.

  I must have felt it bitterly, because I pulled myself together and went to see Miss Vaughan about it.

  ‘Can’t this patient have another room? Can’t somebody else nurse her?’ I asked.

  I knew that my own wound was not yet healed, and seeing Ray would rip it right open again. It sounds melodramatic to say that in some strange way I could feel my heart bleeding, but that was what it seemed to be like. The idea actually hurt me, it hurt horribly.

  ‘Really, Nurse,’ said Miss Vaughan. It was one of her bad days, when she had had everything go wrong, and I knew by the way that she tapped on her desk with the pencil that she thought I was worrying her.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you, Miss Vaughan, were it not for the fact that I should find it so impossible.’

  I oughtn’t to have risked that. Miss Vaughan was one of those people who could never understand how it was that anyone was not prepared to sacrif
ice her whole life to nursing. She had done this herself. She had given up everything else, and was now absorbed only in her work.

  She said: ‘Your fault is that you allow personal feelings to interfere with your public duty. If I had wanted anyone else to nurse this patient I should have said so. I have appointed you, and I cannot have all my arrangements upset just because you have some private feeling that you do not care to work for Dr. Harper.’

  So she had recognized my motive.

  I felt myself colouring, and was annoyed that she should have been so far seeing and should have realized the reason why I did not want to carry on. I was very sorry that I had ever gone down to her sitting-room and had laid my case before her. She wasn’t understanding. It was strange, because nobody could be more sympathetic with a patient, but she just had no idea of how the nurses could feel.

  Birdie met me on the stairs. Birdie had just got herself into plain clothes ready to go out for her walk after night duty.

  ‘Lovely morning,’ said she, ‘the birds are singing as though the spring was far advanced; it is all perfect.’

  It was plain to see that Birdie was in love, she and the Padre were a very happy couple. I couldn’t feel that same way. ‘Been in to see Miss Vaughan,’ I told her, ‘I don’t believe she has got a heart. She has never felt like you feel, that’s a certainty.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right. She seems a bit prim but she’s a darling really,’ and off went Birdie humming to herself.

  I stood in the hall staring after her. I thought to myself, ‘Yes, my girl, you’ve got it pretty badly if you can feel that way for Miss Vaughan.’ Birdie going all romantic. Birdie listening to bird song, and feeling that it was spring. I would never have thought it of her.

  When a nurse on night duty goes glamorous, then she very obviously must be in love. There can be no other explanation for it.

  That very evening my new patient came in for her operation. She was too ill to walk up the stairs, or to stand in the lift, and the porters brought her up to her room on a stretcher. I knew when I saw her that she was not afraid; it was just that she was in so much pain that she did not care what happened to her. Pain can make you blind to everything else that goes on around you.

  She did not come in until just as the night nurses were going on duty, for which I was very thankful. Birdie had her for the night, which meant that I did not see the anaesthetist or the surgeon when they called, and that was one mercy.

  When I came on duty first thing in the morning Birdie told me that she had had a bad night, and she had been to and fro with her trying to ease the pain until the small hours when she had slept a little.

  I took charge of her.

  I was with her when the anaesthetist gave her her first dose in bed.

  ‘Just something in your arm,’ he told her, ‘and you will get a lovely feeling of sleep.’

  She said whitely, ‘I feel awful.’

  ‘You’ll be feeling fine in a moment.’

  He knelt there beside her, making a tourniquet, and I held the things for him. She winced as the needle went in, but almost instantly said, ‘Oh, that’s lovely. So comfy,’ and her head lolled. That particular drug does its work quickly. He looked at her as she went off.

  ‘Poor little kid, that is a pretty sickening pain. Thank heaven she has got some relief now.’

  ‘I’ll tell the stretcher men to come in.’

  ‘Oh, no; she weighs nothing. I can carry her in myself.’ He stooped over her and rolled her into the blanket.

  ‘There won’t be any need for me to come down to the theatre, doctor?’ I asked.

  ‘The surgeon asked for you to be there. He said that the nurse in charge of the case must be present.’

  ‘Very well, doctor.’

  How can you argue when it is a matter of moments, and the patient is lying there unconscious between you? You can’t.

  He lifted her into his arms, and I held the door open for him. He walked out and through the big swing doors of the theatre. Ahead of me I saw them waiting. Sister by the instruments, an impassive figure which might have been carved out of marble. The theatre nurse hovering in the background. Miss Vaughan, who never missed any operation, but insisted on always being present. I saw the anaesthetist’s bottles and cylinders all grouped together at the head of the table, and then quite suddenly I saw Ray.

  I suppose that I shall always remember him as he was then, though I had seen him like it dozens of times before. But that picture is cut into my memory. A man in white with a mask cutting his face off, so that you could only see the eyes watching. He had been waiting for me to come in; he had known when he said ‘the nurse in charge of the case’ that I should be the girl who would come through those doors. For a moment he had forgotten the theatre and the nurses waiting, and the small patient being laid on the table in readiness for him. I knew that he had forgotten everything but me.

  There was no time to waste.

  The anaesthetist settled himself at the head of the table, and instantly everything seemed to click to attention. There was the purr of oxygen from a cylinder, the faint smell of anaesthetic, and Ray waiting.

  The word of command came.

  ‘She’s deeply under now,’ from the anaesthetist.

  Instantly Ray had whipped off the dressings and exposed the skin which I had painted with iodine in readiness for him. It shone out in a vivid yellow blob under those big lights. He worked rapidly. Standing opposite to them, I could hear the commands he rapped out to the Sister standing by his side.

  ‘The scalpel.’

  A moment later he flung them back into the enamel bowl held out by the nurse. Again another command.

  ‘Forceps.’

  He was a strange, white man, only his hands and eyes showing any sign of life, and the hands in those shining rubber gloves looking peculiarly unreal.

  From the head of the table there came a warning:

  ‘Her pulse is dropping. Be quick.’

  There was a grunt, his only indication that he had heard. All the effort he could spare himself to make, because his work needed every atom of himself. On and on he went, snipping, putting into place, working, working frantically against time.

  ‘She’s stopping breathing,’ from the head of the table.

  No panic.

  I saw Miss Vaughan step forward and take hold of the oxygen cylinder in readiness. There was a tenseness about the air, something vital which throbbed right through us. I felt as though somebody had nailed my feet to the floor; there was that faint gasping of the patient, growing weaker, with longer gaps in between, just that ebbing which might mean disaster.

  ‘Ah,’ from the anaesthetist.

  From Ray, ‘I’m going on. It is her only chance, and if ever she does come round it will be done.’ He went on working on a woman who was apparently dead. Somehow I knew that he would not let her go. He is so full of life himself, I thought; he will pass some of that life of his on to her. He would make her live.

  He drew back.

  ‘All done.’

  They were bending over her at the head of the table, injecting something. Then I heard a gasp again. It was the faintly rattling breathing which began like the creaking of a wheezy door. Instantly Ray was stitching her up and bandaging her; the operation was over.

  I heard the oxygen spitting as it issued from the cylinder; I saw no panic, but merely the controlled movements of people used to dealing with matters of life and death.

  ‘Swab, please, Nurse,’ from Ray.

  I hardly realized that he was speaking to me.

  The patient was breathing again in little whining breaths, but it was like the sweetest music. I felt myself turning giddy with relief. There was a sound in my own ears, a light burring sound; my head was spinning round me. It was years since I fainted in the theatre, and I thought that I had grown far too proficient for such a thing ever to happen again, but I believed that suddenly I was going to do it in spite of myself.

  Then I heard hi
s voice, and it was very angry.

  ‘Swab, Nurse. What are you dreaming about? Pull yourself together.’

  It was a hard voice, and the very sharpness of it was what saved me from making a complete fool of myself. I handed him the swab across her body and watched him fix it into place. He made no comment.

  ‘Stretcher,’ from the anaesthetist.

  Sister pressed the bell and the doors swung open, the pleasantly cool outside air flowing in. The whole thing was over and I knew that she would live. But how he had gone on with his operation without flinching I did not know. Then his voice came, and he was speaking to me, ‘Pull yourself together.’ I had never thought that he could speak like that, least of all to me.

  As I went upstairs with my patient I knew that I felt desperately disappointed in him.

  ‘I’m mad,’ I told myself; ‘mad to think of him in this way. He doesn’t care for me. You can’t go on what eyes say; it is the lips that matter most of all.’

  I followed my patient into her room.

  I knew that this would be a long and tedious coming round as I took a seat beside her. There was nothing that I could do for her as yet, nothing that anyone could do. She lay there comfortably enough. I hoped that she would not regain consciousness for some time, but would pass into a natural sleep, which is always the best way out of such an emergency.

  For a long while she lay there like a log, never stirring, then she made a faint moaning sound, but was still quite unconscious.

  Tenny peeped in.

  ‘The husband is here. Can he see her?’

  I shook my head. ‘She isn’t conscious yet, and it would only worry him; he would think that she was in pain.’

  ‘He seems dreadfully upset.’

  ‘He would be more upset if he saw her, and really she is doing splendidly, though he probably would not think that.’

  Tenny tiptoed off again.

  I sat on very quietly indeed, and it was a whole hour later when I noticed something strange about her face, something different. I turned back the bed-clothes hurriedly and saw a crimson stain on the bandages that Ray had put into place so carefully. Instantly I called for another nurse.