A Sister's Life: The ups and downs of life as a 1950s Theatre Sister (Nurse Jane Grant Book 3)

by Jane Grant

  When she came round with the surgeons she gave Mrs McKie a sardonic look, as if she were saying; ‘Oh, so you’re the fussy one, are you, with a pull at headquarters?’ The surgeons were looking at the X-ray and discussing it in low tones, and she glanced at it too, but with an indifferent look.

  ‘Feel all right?’ asked Mr Penhallow.

  She felt honoured that he should give her a look all to herself. ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘She can get up, Sister. Might try crutches after a day or two.’

  They went on to the next case. Mrs McKie was delighted, home seemed already on the horizon. And when Staff turned up with clippers and cut off the hated plaster she could hardly restrain her joy.

  Next day after breakfast Sister appeared with Staff.

  ‘Come along now,’ she said sharply. ‘You’re getting up and quite time too.’

  Staff and Nurse Mooney helped her out of bed and into a dressing-gown, explaining that she must not put any weight on her bad leg. Her joy at getting up was smudged by Sister’s manner; it was as if she was saying the patients’ weaknesses and injuries were all their own faults. Why couldn’t they walk away on their own feet fully weight-bearing without any fuss?

  She sat for a while, her leg aching a little, and then suddenly one of the gym porters appeared at the door of the ward, pushing a chair with a red blanket on it.

  ‘Who’s the lucky lady for physio?’

  ‘It must be me,’ cried the woman with a fractured fibula. ‘Don’t you remember, Jim? You took me last week.’

  ‘Don’t know, dear. You all look alike to me ‒ all glamorous.’

  Staff appeared, and bustled over to Mrs McKie’s chair. ‘Come on, dear. You’re for the gym.’

  ‘Today?’ asked Mrs McKie in surprise.

  ‘Yes, dear. Sister wants you to try crutches.’

  ‘Oh, good; I am getting on.’ She spoke cheerfully, knowing these words expressed what she ought to feel. But she had a dread of the journey, of the attempt on crutches. Already she was struggling with pain and longing for bed again. ‘I suppose this is the sort of thing they have to guard against,’ she told herself. ‘Lazy patients longing to be left alone.’

  With the porter’s help she stood on one leg and twisted round to get in the chair. Pain shot through her hip and knee. She sat down, and the jar hurt the leg again. Gritting her teeth, she let the porter tuck the rug round her and wheel her off. Mrs Rowbotham, an old Grannie with her shin in plaster, was collected from the main ward, and the porter wheeled them both together, one pushed in front and one pulled behind. Another pair of Grannies were collected by the junior porter, and the procession rolled along the corridors and into the open air. Crossing the bumpy threshold was painful again.

  Mrs Rowbotham, a tiny woman with bleared blue eyes, tried to reassure her.

  ‘No need to worry dear. It’s easy. “Crutches ‒ hop. Crutches ‒ hop.” You just watch me and do what I do.’

  Certainly, she thought, if a frail old thing like you says it’s easy, I ought to be able to do it.

  The gym was a long and lofty room, adapted from one of the wartime huts. Transferred to hard wooden chairs, the four patients from Ward B2 sat and waited, in company with a number of other patients, men and women. There were a dozen patients being attended to already.

  The room was full of all sorts of apparatus; it looked like a mixture between a gym, a playroom, a stage set and a torture chamber. A young man in a T-shirt was weight-lifting; another was throwing a large coloured ball with his left hand to a girl physiotherapist; she kept returning it high up and low down, always on his left side. A dark little man with a beard was strapped on a bench, his feet and his chest fastened, while a clock recorded the stretching of his body. Two women sat on a wooden seat gossiping, swinging their legs attached to cords and weights. An old woman was being encouraged by a lively girl in white, one of the physiotherapists, to try and walk with the aid of a triangular apparatus with ball feet which she pushed before her.

  All round the sides of the room were a series of bogus properties that might have been part of a film set. There were carpeted stairs, that went up three steps to a landing, and then came down three steps the other side. The back of a bus was accurately reproduced, only it did not lead into a bus’s interior. There was a bicycle on which sat an eager young man, looking as if he was going in for a Continental rally, but actually pedalling away for ever on the same spot; also in a boat fixed to the floor, sat another young athlete, who was rowing hard.

  After half an hour or so had passed, the lively dark girl who had been playing ball came to Mrs Rowbotham, greeting her in a friendly way by name, and offering her a pair of crutches.

  ‘You watch me,’ said the little old woman condescendingly to Mrs McKie. ‘Crutches ‒ hop. Crutches ‒ hop.’ And she hopped along in a lively way as far as the door and back again, with the physiotherapist’s arm round her back.

  Presently another girl came to Mrs McKie and measured her for crutches. This one had red hair and classic features, but there was a resemblance between all of them. They were all slim, quick, active, and they all had bright noticing faces.

  The way to get up, to use the crutches, to set them aside, all having been demonstrated, the red-haired girl summoned the lively one, and they came on each side of her. She began to hop forward.

  ‘Very good. That’s right,’ they encouraged her. ‘We’ve got a good pupil here,’ they told each other.

  The good pupil struggled on, hopping forward, swinging the injured leg up to the crutches.

  Suddenly a swimming feeling overcame her, and she was obliged to murmur shamefacedly, with her head down, ‘I feel faint.’

  The physiotherapists showed no undue excitement at this news, nor did they offer any sympathy. They took it all as part of the day’s work.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ they said kindly. ‘Breathe deeply. Keep your head down.’

  Mrs McKie, carrying out these instructions, felt worse every minute.

  ‘Would you like to go on? Or shall we take you back?’

  ‘I’m sorry ‒ I can’t ‒’

  ‘Give me a chair, Mandy,’ the red-haired girl called to a colleague. A chair was produced, slipped under her, and she was pushed to one of the high bunks. Without any effort, the girls lifted her on to it, and covered her with a blanket.

  ‘It’s all nerves,’ said Mrs Rowbotham on the way back.

  Mrs McKie, offended, said she was not in the least nervous. ‘I just felt faint.’

  Her head buzzed and she felt extremely tired. She longed for her bed, but was not put into it for some time. She told Staff what had happened, and Staff went and asked Sister if she could go to bed.

  Sister arrived, looking cross.

  ‘You felt faint? It’s quite usual, first day up. Well, I’ll let you go back to bed today, but tomorrow, I warn you, I’ll start worrying you. It doesn’t do to lie about, you know. That’s the way to get trouble. Circulation isn’t too good at your age, and if you get a blistered heel we’ll never get it right.’

  After this scolding Sister went away, and Staff helped her into bed. Though she had so longed for bed, she was no more comfortable in it than out of it. In fact, as the day went on, the pain grew worse. By evening the nerves in her leg, from hip to knee, seemed alive with pain.

  Angus insisted on speaking to Sister about her condition. He went off to find her, and his wife awaited his return with apprehension. What would Sister say? But he returned without her.

  ‘She’s off duty. I’ve told Staff, and she says you can have something for the pain. I feel sure you oughtn’t to have gone to the gym.’

  The visit of Angus, always so eagerly longed for, was this night nothing but misery. She lay gritting her teeth and longing for him to go.

  Pain within limits, when accepted, becomes bearable. One learns it is useless to change the position, to sit up, to lie down again, to adjust the pillows. It is better to lie absolutely still till the pain has had the i
nnings it wants. But tonight Mrs McKie could not do this; the pain was beyond the limit of acceptance. Night Nurse, seeing her sitting up with a set face, called the haggard Night Sister, who gave her tablets, and eventually she slept uneasily.

  Sister Cramphorne was round early, and gave her some attention. ‘You had some pain in the night?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘You must expect it, you know. The muscles have got flabby. You can’t keep taking tablets every time you have a pain.’

  ‘I quite see that, Sister. Did you want me to get up today?’

  ‘Good gracious, yes!’ Sister looked amazed. ‘If you don’t get up you’ll never get better. Don’t you want to go home?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then you’ll get up and go to the gym.’

  ‘But, Sister ‒’

  She turned back. ‘Yes?’ Her pale, handsome face with its large green eyes was as attractive as ‒ what ‒ a mermaid’s perhaps, or a siren. But her beauty had the coldness and inexorability of the sea.

  ‘I ‒ er ‒ promised my husband I’d ask you ‒ if I need go.’ This was cowardice. She had promised Angus she would not go to the gym in any circumstances.

  ‘Well, you’ve asked me, haven’t you? I have said you ought to go.’ With a tight smile Sister turned away and walked out.

  ‘But, Sister ‒’ In desperation she braved Sister’s wrath once more.

  Sister turned her head.

  ‘Sister, my husband said he was going to see Mr Penhallow.’

  A slow flush came up in Sister’s pale cheeks. She walked slowly back to the bed. ‘Oh, of course we know you have friends in high places. But I never allow favourites. I’m running this ward, Mrs McKie. And you’re not the only patient suffering so bravely, my dear!’

  There was nothing more to be said or done. If I were desperately ill, thought Mrs McKie ‒ if I were dying, I’d get up and go to gym after that.

  She got out of bed with help from Nurse Mooney and junior nurse Fleming, who was chattering on about her evening out with a boyfriend.

  ‘He said, “If you go on looking at me like that, you’ll be in danger”.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind!’

  ‘So I got in a tiz. It was getting a bit dicey, I mean.’

  ‘Ah, go on away out of it, Fleming. You’ve got no sinse at all.’

  Mrs McKie asked meekly if nurse would put her slipper on.

  ‘I will so, my dear,’ said Nurse Mooney stooping.

  Nurse Fleming, anxious to complete her tale, murmured a sequel, but was immediately snubbed by her superior who told her, ‘Would you ever stop it, for God’s sake. It’s nothing but sex sex sex with you.’

  The porter approached. ‘And here’s the boyo for you, right on time,’ said Nurse Mooney, helping her up on to one foot and assisting her to turn and drop into the chair.

  ‘Now no fenting this morning, my dear,’ she added, cheerfully.

  Mrs McKie, mazed by pain and weakness, asked her to repeat that remark. ‘You would say “fine-ting” maybe,’ said Nurse Mooney cuttingly.

  The journey this morning was even worse and the hard chairs in the gym almost insupportable. The room seemed full of old cripples, crouching uncomplainingly and waiting to be noticed, while their hopes, so often dashed, were fixed on the mid-morning cup of coffee, or at the furthest, on the comfort of their bed. There were only two younger ones present this morning, and these were the most handicapped of all. A young woman struggled to walk with two elbow crutches, pushing with all her effort her feet an inch or two at a time, and a handsome young man with one arm tattooed and the other distorted, had an apparatus like a reading desk in front of him, and staggered along, his head almost on his arms, shoving at it ineffectively.

  It was a necessary feature of physiotherapy that no sympathy was given, and no punches were pulled. ‘Well, you will get that pain, of course.’ ‘Push away, Mrs Terling ‒ no you must try and use the muscles there.’ ‘Come on,’ (with bright encouragement) ‘just another little walk, Steve. Try and reach this mark here. Now try again, harder!’

  It was her turn at last, but when she got on to the crutches with the assistance of the red-haired girl, she was told she had not the right posture.

  ‘You must hold them close to your thighs, or you get no purchase. They’re liable to slip from under your arm.’

  ‘But I find it hard to hold them close. The left one presses. It burns you see.’ She spoke uncertainly, fearful of being accused of making a fuss.

  But the red-haired girl showed no annoyance. ‘You’d better sit down,’ she said. ‘Have you told them about this pain?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well ‒’ said the red-haired girl moving off, and speaking in a quiet unbothered voice, ‘I should tell them again.’

  Back in the ward, sitting on her bed, Mrs McKie tried to decide what to do. On no account would she speak to Sister. On the other hand, it would be folly to do nothing about this pain, for that inner knowledge which comes in illness made her aware that something was wrong.

  She waited till night, and when Night Sister came round, called to her. ‘Sister, this pain is very bad now. It is worse when the leg is straight. It keeps me from sleeping.’

  Again the dark haggard face of Sister bent over her. ‘Show me just where. Yes. Can you move it ‒ so?’

  The tablets given her this night gave her some hours of sleep, but in the morning, though the pain was dulled, she was dulled too. A heaviness was over her, and a depression. When Sister made her round she had become indifferent to the injustice, and merely looked on Sister with calm distaste.

  ‘Well,’ said Sister with a sharpness that had a little uncertainty in it, ‘I hear you were in pain again last night.’

  She said slowly and deliberately, ‘I was in very bad pain, Sister.’

  ‘So you said before. How bad?’

  ‘It’s rather difficult to say, isn’t it? The physiotherapist told me to tell you I was in pain.’

  ‘Oh? Did she?’ The same slow flush came over Sister’s pale cheeks. ‘Well, you can tell the physiotherapist to look after her business, and I’ll look after mine.’

  Mrs McKie did not answer. She did not look at Sister, but turned her head away to the trees and the sky outside.

  ‘Well,’ said Sister after a pause, ‘Mr Camden will be on the ward this morning. I’ll ask him to come and see you. Don’t blame me though if he thinks you’re wasting his time.’

  She turned and walked out. It was not long before she returned with the Registrar. Sister whipped back the clothes, and he felt the hip and knee. He turned to Sister.

  ‘Can I have the X-ray, Sister?’

  She produced the pictures from an envelope, and as he examined them said confidentially; ‘They were quite satisfactory. Mr Penhallow said she could get up on crutches.’

  ‘Yes. But I thought there was something ‒’ he murmured, holding the picture up to the light.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it. If there is anything, I can’t tell you offhand what it is.’

  ‘Well, let’s have the notes, shall we?’ he said, with a kind of cold sweetness. As they moved away she could hear him saying, ‘I’d have thought it wasn’t too much trouble to read up the notes when the patient complained ‒’

  A little later he returned to tell her that she was to have another X-ray, and that Mr Penhallow would be round to see her when it was over.

  The second X-ray was very different from the former one; the trolley was different, and Fred was different, and the passages looked different, and the X-ray man did not seem funny at all, merely tiresome and unhelpful. She could not manage to put on the Trefnicks, and a girl assistant had to help her in the end. Between them, the two radiologists lifted her on to the table.

  ‘Put your leg out straight,’ said the young man. ‘No ‒ not like that ‒ straight.’

  She struggled with the cold hard table beneath her, but the leg would no longer go out straight.


  Chapter Fourteen

  She heard the approaching tread down the passage; Mr Penhallow, Sister and an attendant nurse. He came to her bedside, Sister stood beside him with an envelope of notes and X-rays, and Nurse Mooney put up a screen.

  This time he did not fuss or complain, and he said ‘Good morning,’ looking into her face and standing beside the bed. There seemed something ominous about his quiet geniality.

  ‘Let’s have the X-rays, Sister.’

  Sister handed him two pictures, which he held up to the light. While he was doing this Mrs McKie caught Sister’s eye; her lips were tight, but her large green eyes did not look cross, they even had a look of compassion.

  Mr Penhallow lowered the X-ray and turned to the bed.

  ‘Dear, dear, dear,’ he said. She had the impression that he was putting on an act of surprised regret, and that he had already examined the pictures and made his decision. ‘This is very unfortunate,’ he went on. ‘The pin has slipped. Show Mrs McKie, will you, Sister?’

  Sister held up the pictures at an angle suitable to the patient’s vision. They meant nothing to her, even when the pin was pointed out as a light area against light and dark markings.

  ‘I’m afraid this means another operation,’ went on the specialist. ‘It’s a pity. But it happens in about fifty per cent of these cases.’

  Fifty per cent? No one had revealed at the time that she had only one chance in two. She wondered why they bothered to put pins in at all if they dropped out with such regularity. He went on, however, to explain this.

  ‘It’s always better to keep your own bones if you can. But in cases like yours, we have to do something quite different. Give you a new hip.’ He smiled as if he was giving a special offer at bargain prices. ‘Yes, we put in a metal head with a pin attached. Let me see, how old are you?’

  She told him, and he said ‘yes’ and ‘quite’ and talked of new developments and techniques, mentioning Mr Hunt as expert in such operations.

  She asked, trying to smile, when the operation would be. ‘Oh, I should think the next few days. We’re going to move you into the main ward, and someone from Mr Hunt’s firm will come and see you.’