Sixty Years a Nurse

by Mary Hazard

  Then another nurse, Linda, who was in her second year, ran off with the son of one of her patients. It was quite a scandal. Linda, who was a nice middle-class girl, and who hated nursing as well, had met Nigel on the women’s ward, quite by chance. He had been sitting, dutifully attending his mother, who had had a hysterectomy and was fairly poorly, and it had been love at first sight. It was like something out of a romantic film or novel. Nigel was a ski instructor in Austria, and his mother lived in a very opulent flat in Putney. He had come over to visit her, and Linda could not help drifting past his mother’s bed every five minutes to see if she was all right, to check her pulse, to tidy her bed or rearrange her flowers – when actually her main quest was to keep flirting with Nigel. Linda was very pretty, and not cut out for nursing at all, and it became clear that Nigel was really coming to the hospital to see Linda rather than his mother by the end of the first couple of weeks.

  However, the sister on the women’s ward at the time was not happy at all with this development. She liked her nurses to be nurses, to be obedient and disciplined, and totally focused on the job. Sister was increasingly enraged at the obvious flirtation that was going on around Nigel’s mother’s bed. We tried to warn Linda, but she was so besotted with Nigel that she didn’t see the warning signs and she wouldn’t listen to our warnings, either. Sister was a real old cow on that ward, one of the most horrible women I had ever met (and that’s saying something), and she soon had it in for Linda. She knew that Linda would want to rush off at the end of her day shift to meet Nigel, who would wait for her at the end of visiting hours (and her shift), so Sister kept placing more and more obstacles deliberately in her way. It was as if Sister was jealous of Linda’s handsome boyfriend – and so she exacted more and more obedience from a nurse who was rapidly pulling away from the hospital regime. Battle lines were drawn.

  One night, at eight o’clock, Nigel was waiting outside for Linda, having said goodnight to his mother, who was gradually on the mend. Linda was finished for the day and just clocking off, when Sister said, ‘Brown, before you go, check the cutlery in the kitchen.’ The sisters always called us by our last names, just like in the army. It was very formal and made us jump out of our skins. ‘Yes, Sister,’ said Brown, obediently. There was nothing else she could say. She had to trot off and count out all the knives, forks and spoons in the kitchen drawers and then put them all back again, in the right order. It was a right palaver. (All the wards had a little kitchen off them, which housed all the crockery and cutlery for the patients – and this is what she was having to check.) It was now ten past eight, and Nigel was still outside, pacing up and down in the freezing cold. ‘Goodnight, Sister,’ said Linda. ‘Not yet,’ said Sister, pointedly. ‘Check the sluice is tidy.’ Linda bit her lip and hesitated. ‘Yes, Sister,’ was all she could say, and then went and checked it over, and came out five minutes later.

  Still Sister was not finished with Linda. It was a nasty cat playing with an innocent, pretty little mouse. I was watching all this, out of the corner of my eye, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, Linda is going to explode in a minute if Sister goes on.’ ‘You haven’t been in there long enough, nurse – how could you have possibly checked everything?’ said Sister, getting more nasty and narrowing her eyes. I remember looking at Sister’s lips, which were very pursed, set and tight, like a cat’s arse. I was also watching Linda, who was flushing red now, and glancing anxiously towards the window, where Nigel’s head was still bobbing backwards and forwards, as he paced, his breath on the air in little white puffs. It was now eight thirty, and the poor man had been waiting for half an hour in the ball-freezing cold. Sister was testing Linda to the limit of her endurance, as indeed this particular sister tested all of us on a regular basis. It was supposed to be character building: the stuff good nurses were made of. We were all supposed to say ‘Yes, Sister,’ or ‘No, Sister,’ or ‘Three bags full, Sister,’ to her every request, no matter how barmy or cruel.

  I could see Linda was furious, rapidly reaching her limits, and also near to tears. On this last night it became clear, very soon, that Linda had had enough. Sister was following her around with her eyes and trotted after her into the sluice where Linda was mopping down the giant sinks for the third time. ‘Don’t skimp on the disinfectant, nurse,’ sneered Sister, sadistically. With that Linda snapped and she suddenly picked up a huge red bottle of glycerin and thymol, pulled open the door to the balcony that faced a brick wall, and smashed the whole thing up against it, most dramatically. Liquid and glass flew everywhere. ‘Nurse!’ shouted Sister indignantly, but it was too late. ‘I’m out of here,’ screamed Linda, pulling off her apron and her hat. ‘I’m going now, I’m leaving, and I’m never, ever coming back! You can’t stop me, either!’ And with that she ran out to the waiting arms of Nigel, who was still hoping patiently for her to arrive outside. Sister looked totally shocked, but turned straight to me and barked her orders: ‘Clean this mess up, nurse – jump to it, and make a good job of it, or there’ll be trouble.’ And with that she turned on her heel and marched out. ‘Yes, Sister,’ I whispered, but was inwardly both deeply shocked and a bit delighted at what I’d observed.

  Needless to say, Linda went off and married her handsome Nigel; she never did come back. After that, they lived in two rooms together, locally, for a while, and I would see her all glammed up doing her shopping in Putney High Street. We all thought it was great, and we were all definitely a little bit envious. She’d had enough of nursing, very quickly, and she’d escaped – we thought it was so brave of her to stand up to Sister. She had got her man, and a new life, and we wondered, to ourselves and over our cider and fags, whether we ourselves would ever meet ‘the One’, and if we did, if we’d have the courage to follow and not finish our training. I felt, secretly, that I really wanted to finish and that men seemed to be quite a bit of trouble really, even though I was fairly naïve at this time. Eventually, Linda went off to live in Austria with Nigel, and had three children, and, as far as I know, lived happily ever after having an absolutely wonderful time. Sister, on the other hand, told us in no uncertain terms that Linda was a ‘bad lot’, a hopeless nurse and not a good example at all to us trainees. We all said ‘Yes, Sister,’ but inside we were cheering Linda on for going after her own happiness single-mindedly, rather than being a dutiful, but bitter, slave, right to the very end. I, on the other hand, wanted to stay on my chosen path and didn’t think I was in danger of any white knight coming my way soon to rescue me from my chosen profession.

  6

  Of Lice and Men

  As a trainee I had to spend time on all the different men’s and women’s wards: medical, surgical, geriatric and then children’s. I had to learn to treat all sorts of conditions and understand many curable and incurable diseases, while constantly dealing with the basics: cleanliness, hygiene, nursing care, nutrition and rigid hospital rules. During my training I also had to learn to ‘suture’, which meant doing minor operations and procedures on patients, usually in a side room that was specially set up for it. Nurses were expected to be able to do stitches – which was actually sewing the patients’ flesh together with a needle and catgut – or to assist a doctor if they were doing something more complicated. The idea of minor surgery was that it could deal efficiently and quickly with something like a laceration or other semi-serious injury without having to take up valuable time in the operating theatre.

  One evening a young girl, of about five, Susan, was brought in by her rather distressed father. They had been out on the Common and she had fallen over and cut her knee very badly. It looked like she had fallen on some broken glass (of which there was lots around, due to people drinking beer or lemonade out of glass bottles), and she definitely needed some stitches. She was fairly hysterical, and clearly frightened about having stitches done. This was my first time, so I was terrified of getting it wrong (my usual response to having to do any new tasks), and I had a particular fear of making a mess of it, especially after my years of being tor
tured and criticised by Sister Margaret and her bloody Bride of Christ knuckleduster. However, the task was at hand, and I had to do it, and I had practised many times on poor old Araminta, so it should have been fine. I knew that there was a doctor on call, should anything go wrong, plus Staff or Sister hovering about somewhere nearby, should I get into serious trouble. I felt I was ready to begin, and I thought to myself: ‘Go on, Mary, you can do it!’

  The minor operating room had a high couch in the middle, for patients to get up on, and large sluice-type ceramic sinks along one wall. There was a little portable trolley on wheels made of metal and glass, and the ubiquitous steriliser in a long cupboard in the corner of the room, bubbling away as ever. The father, who was a very nice man in his thirties, lifted his poor little daughter up onto the bed, and I could see she had a really nasty deep cut on her kneecap. She was keeping her leg straight to stem the bleeding, but was crying the whole while, with her daddy standing with his arm round her weeny shaking shoulders. I thought, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’d better get on with it.’ I went and got my instruments and wheeled them over on the little metal trolley to beside the couch, ready for action. We persuaded little Susan to lie down; she was pretty scared of the whole procedure, but I approached her as cheerfully as I could and tried hard to put her at her ease. To give her courage, I got her dad to stand next to the table as I started wiping her knee with cotton wool and antiseptic, after washing my own hands thoroughly (just like I’d seen Sister and the surgeons do, many times).

  Dad was just saying ‘There, there’ to Susan, when he glanced down at her knee, which was now a yawning, wide-open wound from her leg moving about, with blood flowing freely. To my amazement, he went down like a ninepin, right on the spot, and fainted right away. There was an almighty ‘crack’ as he descended to the floor, in a heap, and Susan stopped crying and started screaming ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ I told Susan to straighten her leg and hold on, while I rushed round the bed to where he was lying and saw, to my absolute horror, that blood was pouring voluminously from his head. Oh my Christ. What on earth had happened? Then I realised that as he went down he’d hit his head on the sink edge, which was a sharp and unyielding corner, and had actually cut open his own skull, very badly by the looks of it. ‘Staff!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Emergency.’ A few seconds later both Staff and Sister arrived. They might be dragons most of the time, but in an emergency they could be utterly brilliant, and I was actually relieved that they were there for a change.

  The poor old dad was out cold, and his blood was still pouring, and puddling onto the floor. Meanwhile, Susan was beside herself with fear and was crying uncontrollably. Then two ambulance men arrived on the scene and got Dad onto a trolley and suddenly we were into a completely different scenario. Susan’s dad was taken down to X-ray and, to my great consternation, we found out soon after that he had actually fractured his skull very badly, from ear to ear, right round the back of his head. Sweet Jesus, those sinks were bloody unforgiving. Meanwhile, poor Susan was still in the minor operations room, with me, and I was struggling not only to calm her down but finish off her stitches, which seemed insignificant now. Ironically, because of the emergency with her father, I managed to do them fairly easily, without any problem at all, all the while thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, what are we going to do now?’

  When I was done, Susan and I went down to X-ray, with me reassuring her all the way that Daddy would be fine, only to find out that her father had been rushed over to the Atkinson Morley Hospital for emergency surgery. Susan had no idea what her home address was, or her surname, and we had no idea if they had a telephone (few people had them then), but she probably wouldn’t have known the number, if they did. No matter how much we asked her, Susan couldn’t articulate anything useful, especially as she was still so upset and calling for ‘Daddy’. Plus, she was now abandoned to Putney Hospital and to my care. So there I was, stuck with this poor traumatised child, and her father had been carted off with a fractured skull to somewhere else. All this drama had stemmed from a few stitches to a knee cut, which should have been a routine procedure. Of course, all this happened before mobile phones or other easy communications were available, so the only thing to do was to get the police. A friendly local plod arrived and sat down with Susan and tried to get her to describe where they lived … and eventually he took her to the local police station. I found out later that they did locate the mother, and that the father survived and was actually fine, thank goodness, but was in hospital for quite some time after. However, it was a lesson to me to think about how other people react when they see blood, or have to deal with trauma affecting loved ones. And it certainly made me learn to think on my feet. Later on in my career I would often find men would keel over at the sight of blood, or the sight of a needle, so I usually made sure they were sitting down before I began any of my medical ministrations.

  It was soon time for another stint on nights. I always found these shifts very hard work, not least because of feeling incredibly tired and hungry in the early hours and how lack of sleep affected me in the days afterwards. My experience of the B-I-D (Brought-in-Dead) incident and my carpeting by Matron (‘Nurse, you know what the situation is, and what the consequences will be, if you make such silly mistakes’) had made me much more wary. So this time, when the ambulance arrived, I made sure I bothered to put on my navy cape with its red lining, and went out to see what George and Charlie had for us. It was raining hard this night in particular, with a bitter cold wind, but I was absolutely not going to get caught out again. Or so I thought. The ambulance men had picked up a tramp on Barnes Common: this was not uncommon (as it were) as we got them drifting in all the time. There were loads of homeless men after the Second World War, who had been demobbed and not got jobs, so often they were military men with drink problems, who had nowhere to go. George said the man probably had ‘hypothermia’ as he was icy cold and sodden, but that he was still breathing (thank God). So I felt his pulse in the ambulance, and it was extremely weak, but, yes, he was still alive. He had long straggly hair and a beard, with terrible breath, and was in rags and looked a bit like Jesus Christ, so I thought I couldn’t really turn him away – who would know what would happen if I did? (I imagined more lightning bolts aiming straight at my terrible, sinful head.)

  George and Charlie wrapped a couple of red ambulance blankets around him, and brought him in on a stretcher, moved him onto a waiting trolley and left swiftly. Meanwhile, I went to get the night doctor up, a Dr Thomas, who was a bit of a weasel. I had to go to the sleeping quarters and knock on the door. I managed to rouse him and he put on his white coat over his blue and white stripy pyjamas, and slung a stethoscope round his neck, while half asleep and grumbling. I knew I could only get him out of bed on pain of death, literally, as Dr Thomas did not like to be disturbed. He could make your life a complete misery. However, I could see that the poor man on the trolley was in a bad way, and I certainly didn’t want yet another death in casualty on my tender conscience. I knew he was heading off the cliff rapidly towards death, as he was so weak and cold, so I absolutely had to go and get the doctor up, whether he liked it or not. (At least I was following that procedure correctly, I thought to myself.)

  Casualty was a big, bright cream and green room, with all these stainless-steel sterilisers bubbling away, full of instruments, down one side of the room. We had to sterilise absolutely everything, and then take the instruments out when they were wanted by the doctors with a pair of Cheatle forceps. Everything was boiled to oblivion in a big silver steriliser in boiling water. Anyway, a very grumpy Dr Thomas had gone over to the man on the stretcher, to start examining him, while I was despatched to go and sort out some fresh instruments. I was just checking they were ready, and was opening the steriliser lid, with the steam hitting my face, when I heard ‘Jesus Christ’ emanate from across the room from Dr Thomas. My first thought was that the tramp had died meanwhile and I had another dead body on my hands – it was beginning to feel like the Keystone
Cops, where I imagined I would be wheeling yet another trolley round the corridors playing hide and seek with the red blankets for scant cover, under Matron’s omniscient gaze.

  ‘Nurse!’ shouted Dr Thomas. ‘Come here, immediately.’ Oh, Lord, I was for it. So I rushed over and tried to look demure (and failed). ‘Did you look at this man?’ I blinked, as innocently as I could, and said ‘Yes’. Sweet Jesus, what was it now? Dr Thomas was in no mood for me being meek, I could see. ‘What?’ ‘Yes, Doctor, I did,’ I said more boldly. Dr Thomas straightened up and looked at me with disdain. ‘Well, did you notice that he’s bloody walking with lice?’ To illustrate his point, Dr Thomas pulled down the red blankets and I looked: I saw suddenly that this man, who was about seventy, was moving everywhere. His wet, ragged clothes and his tangled, greasy hair were covered with little moving things. He had lice in his eyebrows, his ears, his nose, his hair, his lashes, his collar, his hands and nails; absolutely bloody everywhere.