Sixty Years a Nurse

by Mary Hazard

  In the operating theatre there were a few more things that totally opened my eyes and that I also never forgot (no matter how hard I tried). The hospital had some private patients who would pay for private rooms and treatment, and had usually come through a private doctor, like a Harley Street consultant or clinic. This was despite it being an NHS hospital, in the main. One night I was on call in theatre and was told to scrub up for an emergency operation. I was amazed to see an enormously pregnant African woman, who I was told was an African chief’s daughter, come in. I understood, at first, that we were about to help her give birth. I had seldom seen any Africans, or ‘coloureds’ as they were called then, so I was quite curious as to how she came to be in Putney Hospital. However, the story turned out to be quite dark, and a real eye-opener for me, as a naïve, Irish girl of little worldly experience.

  It turned out she was in the private wing, which was also unusual, as it was usually only very posh, rich white people in there, and the word I heard was that her treatment was being paid for by someone very high up in the British army. I eventually was told, to my horror, that the story was that she had been raped, and the pregnancy was the very unfortunate result. I felt so sorry for her, especially as she was all alone, in a foreign country, facing this treatment. This was obviously before abortions were legal on the NHS (they didn’t become so until 1967), so what we were about to do to her, and her unborn baby, was somewhat questionable. It was whispered to me, and I was told not to breathe a word about it – I had to keep it secret, on pain of death. Even so, I was instructed to attend the operation, as I was on duty (I couldn’t refuse), and the poor woman was given a Caesarean Section as the baby was nearly at term, but she wasn’t in labour. I had never seen a Caesarean before, and I probably hadn’t met an African woman either, so I was feeling pretty amazed by what I was witnessing, here in the deep Putney suburbs. However, the most disturbing and shocking part was yet to come, and it would challenge me, in particular, as a good Catholic girl from rural, pious Ireland.

  The baby, once delivered, was utterly perfect and gorgeous, and was immediately wrapped in a towel and given to me. I could see a perfect little face, soft eyelashes lying on cheeks, a little button nose and tiny fingers – the baby was utterly adorable. However, I was told to put ‘it’ on the draining board. The baby was silent, but ‘it’ was alive. It was definitely breathing as I held ‘it’ in my arms for a minute or two, wondering if I’d heard correctly. I could feel the warmth of the little bundle, and I could hear it snuffle. Sister told me to place it on the draining board, by the sink, and leave it. I paused for a moment. On the draining board? I asked if I should give her to her mother or hold her myself, but Sister shook her head, and said, ‘No, Nurse. Leave “it” there.’ I looked at the wrapped-up baby and my heart went out to it – so tiny and helpless, so alone and abandoned, on the large draining board, in a huge, white, soulless room. What on earth was going to happen to it? Was the baby going to be taken somewhere and adopted? Surely someone would take her away from here? But who? I looked around, and was horrified. It was the middle of the night, and the surgeon was carefully stitching up the woman, layer by layer. A Caesarean always leads to a lot of layers of abdomen being cut through, and needing to be carefully sutured afterwards, and this can take some time. I stood, in my apron and mask, eyes focused on the innocent little bundle on the draining board. Surely someone was going to tend the baby? Surely, it could go to someone who wanted one? The baby was alive, for goodness’ sake. I looked imploringly at Sister, who looked away and handed more catgut to the consultant with a forced business-like air. It was clear that everyone in the room felt upset about the business: the atmosphere was sombre, and tense, unlike the usual jocular operating-room mood. I eventually left the room, leaving the little bundle uncomforted, unloved and abandoned on the draining board – a tiny white unloved shape in a large clinical expanse. I felt like I had been party to committing the most terrible of all mortal sins – murder. I could not find it in myself to forgive either myself, or the surgeons, for leaving this poor little mite to die. Indeed, I have no idea what actually happened to this particular baby after that, but my worst fear was that ‘it’ went the way of the amputated limbs in theatre.

  Deeply distraught, I whispered to Jenny next day about the terrible baby business, which I felt was deeply shameful and a crime. I felt culpable. She told me it wasn’t only the product of rapes or simply unwanted babies that would be treated that way, but also she had seen severely disabled babies left to die, because it was felt that was the best outcome for them. She explained that the product of a white man and an African woman would be deemed a ‘half-caste’, illegitimate and shameful, so I had to imagine what kind of life it would have all alone on the margins of society. Jenny said they wouldn’t really be wanted, or cared for, as they were society’s rejects – they would end up in some terrible orphanage in the back of beyond somewhere. But surely, I argued, a living baby is a life, and no one (but God) had the right to snuff them out? Jenny looked at me with soulful eyes, but shrugged her shoulders. Up until then, I had no idea that such practices occurred. I didn’t know people thought or acted this way, I really didn’t. I found it unbelievable that people would do things like this, particularly people who had pledged to the Hippocratic Oath, which meant saving life, rather than deliberately ending it. I was totally horrified at the inhumanity of it all.

  For the first time, I found myself actually wanting to go to see the priest to get this terrible, heavy sin off my chest. Maybe my mother was right after all; maybe England was a ‘black, Protestant, Godforsaken country’. It felt pretty Godforsaken after this incident, I can tell you. I felt my faith in what I was doing in England was shaken to the roots for the first time, too. In fact, over the years, since that very dark night in the operating theatre, I have had to confess many times over this particular incident. I did not feel comfortable about not having challenged the practice, and the idea that I walked away and left that poor, defenceless, new-born babe to its fate still brings tears to my eyes, even after all these years. Of course, I felt sorry for that African woman, too; she was just as much losing her beautiful baby, and being used by the ruthless men in the military and the unfeeling system, as the rest of us were colluding with making it happen. It really was a rough old business, and although I got to take things like this more in my stride as I gained more experience, the horror of such things existing in the medicine business and the wider world would never really leave me entirely. The whole incident definitely felt like a dark stain upon my soul.

  12

  TB Traumas

  Again I was lucky to pass my second-year exams (despite my ongoing catastrophes and carpeting), and was rewarded with a different belt, a blue one this time, as I went into my third and final training year. I had to do a six-month placement in a specialist tuberculosis (TB) hospital, called St John’s, near Clapham Common. My nurse friends and I were all sent out to different places, so I found myself, on my own, in this new, vast hospital. I felt nervous, as I was used to working with my usual pals, but it was very important experience to gain and we took pride in being able to nurse all kinds of patients in all kinds of ways. It’s hard to believe now, but back then, in the early 1950s, TB was rife in the UK, and still largely incurable. It was much feared as a terminal disease and was often spread by spitting in the street and other unhygienic practices. It ranked alongside polio as one of the great killers and maimers, and a major thing to fear (we were used to having iron lungs in which polio patients lay for months, even years, as they could not breathe on their own). TB was a particularly nasty disease, as it actually rotted your lungs, made them become spongy and useless, and led to a long, slow and painful death. It could also destroy your bones and other organs long term. It was truly terrible. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it had been almost a ‘romantic’ disease as many poets, writers and musicians had faded away on their chaises longues due to dying of ‘consumption’, another word
for TB – people like John Keats, Frédéric Chopin, the Brontë sisters and George Orwell. Once you got it, it was usually a death sentence, so we all feared its inexorable rampage through our lives.

  In Putney Hospital I had seen plenty of terminal patients by now, and had faced death in general, in the young, the middle-aged and the old, and in men, women and children, but I had a particular dread of TB due to my own family history. Back in Ireland, TB had remained the main killer, too, and was often called the ‘White Plague’. Poverty, poor housing, damp, poor diet and overcrowding had meant TB marched on through Irish communities and destroyed whole families, and there was a particular social stigma of being ‘inferior’ attached to succumbing to it. Sadly, the stringent war years had meant TB was still marching on, largely unchecked, and any signs or symptoms were met with complete horror and despair by all who came across them. So when I started at St John’s all my own family experiences came rushing back to haunt me. I would have nightmares. I was already traumatised, and had to handle the trauma of my own memories returning on top of the experience of working in the hospital, which was, in itself, fairly grim.

  One of my dearest, older sisters, Una, was always coughing, coughing, coughing during her childhood, or rather our childhood. I could hear her in the living room, or up in our bedroom, going cough, cough, cough, and my mother would be shouting at her, ‘Sweet Jesus, Una, will you stop that coughing? You’re driving me to distraction. I can’t hear myself think with all yer coughing.’ Una was a lovely person, so sweet, demure and very pretty, artistic, and I adored her. When she got into her teens I still looked up to her, and felt quite protective of and empathic towards her. Nonetheless, she was still coughing away: cough, cough, cough. My mother continued to be irascible and unsympathetic, so I would feel protective: ‘Poor old Una,’ I would think. ‘She can’t help it,’ when Mother was ranting at her to stop. I suppose I never really thought much about why Una was coughing. I just knew she was delicate and poorly, and spent a lot of time in bed, coughing her heart up.

  Our mother was fiercely protective of her reputation as a good family-maker and home-keeper, and she made sure we ate well, from all her home-grown vegetables, and dressed well, with all her home-made clothes, so she saw herself as a cut above the average hoi polloi. As a consequence, she probably believed that TB was something that only really afflicted the lesser orders, or those who were unclean or starving, and would never have thought that Una could fall prey to such a foul, filthy disease. I guess my mother was suffering from what we would now call denial and snobbery: she just didn’t want to countenance what was probably obvious to everyone else who knew or saw poor old Una’s struggle with her breathing and health. When Una was coughing, she’d give her some medicine, and say, ‘For goodness’ sake, stop yer coughing.’ The doctor would only be called if Mother thought Una was at death’s door – which she almost was, several times – and he’d say, ‘She’s got growing pains, Agnes. Give her some tonic,’ and then charge us seven shillings and sixpence, which was a lot of money in those days.

  Anyway, Una’s coughing and delicate disposition went on and on, until she was sixteen and I was thirteen. On this particular night Una was in bed, as usual, lying there, reading, sleeping or doing some sewing, and my mother had gone up the road on her own (my father was at Phelan’s, as usual) to visit the neighbours to play cards. She would play to win a pound of butter or something like that. I suppose I had got used to Una being poorly; that’s just how Una was: permanently sickly, ‘pale and interesting’, as we used to say. Anyway, I could hear her coughing and coughing, hacking away as usual, while I was downstairs doing my homework at our large, wooden kitchen table. Suddenly, I heard Una cry out ‘Mary, Mary,’ in a weak, but desperate, voice. She sounded hoarse, but also scared. So I scampered upstairs and found her holding her chamber pot, which usually lurked under the bed, and it was full to the brim with frothy red blood, and there was blood all around her on the pure white linen sheets, the pillows and her pink nightie. I was terrified. I’d never seen anything like it, and I thought all of her insides had come out. And, in a sense they had. I got her a flannel and a bowl of cold water, and wiped her face and hands, and emptied the chamber pot down the toilet, and then got Una to lie down quietly. She looked grey, pale as a ghost, and really seriously ill. I was scared. Was she going to die?

  So I ran up the road to Mrs Kennedy’s house, whom I knew my mother was visiting, playing bridge, and my mother looked hard at my face and said, ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ I whispered urgently, ‘You’ve got to come now … quick, it’s Una …’ Once we were outside, I told her about the frothy blood in the chamber pot and my mother’s face hardened and she hissed at me, as we walked fast, ‘Now you’re to keep your mouth shut, and don’t tell anybody about her coughing up blood, y’hear. It’s worse than having a mental disease.’ I was horrified. ‘What is it? What’s wrong with Una?’ I was scared to death. ‘It’s probably the TB,’ my mother whispered aggressively, ‘but you’re not to talk about it. To anyone. Y’hear? Not a word to anyone.’ My mother was tearing her hair out because in those days the neighbours would walk to the other side of the street, rather than pass by, if they thought you had the disease. They knew it was incurable, and that it was a definite killer. All this time she’d denied to herself, and to us, it was TB, but now she couldn’t keep up the pretence any more.

  TB? Not TB? Surely not my dear Una? I was distraught. It was a death sentence, or so I thought, and it was a social stigma: it meant we were inferior, that we lived in dirty surroundings, that we were the lower classes. But we weren’t – so it was all very confusing. One thing was clear – my mother was terrified of precisely that kind of stigma, and wanted to keep things secret, too. To me it became obvious – and even more obvious over the months and years to come – that the disease did not pay much attention to class, age or prejudice. If it wanted to get you, it would get you, and often the nicest, kindest, sweetest people would have the worst kinds of disease, like TB, whilst the most horrible, nasty people seemed to survive or get away with the proverbial life of O’Riley. Anyway, the upshot was that Una was whisked away by my father and mother, the very next day, by car to a specialist in Dublin, and was put into an isolation ward in a sanatorium. I think my father must have called in favours and used some of his good friends and contacts to get Una specialist help at short notice – that was the kind of man he was.

  At that point, in the early 1950s, there was a belief that TB could be arrested, or contained, if not cured, by putting patients into specialist hospitals for specific treatment. They were made to have a lot of fresh air, so they were often put outside, even in cold weather, in their beds on the balconies. There were also terrible operations, and Una began to have them. Cutting through her back, they took out her entire right lung, which was infected and collapsed, so she only had one lung to breathe with (which was also damaged). It was a terrible operation called thoracoplasty. Along with the lung, they took all her ribs down one side, so her chest sunk in, and her breast disappeared as it had nothing to hold on to. She was very disfigured and badly scarred from the operations and was given a horrible brown prosthesis (it looked like a hairy coconut) for her missing breast which she wore, like a bra. Amazingly, Una went away for six whole years to the Dublin sanatorium: a really long sentence, from age sixteen to twenty-one. When people asked my mother where she was she would tell them Una had gone to stay with Auntie Marie up in Dublin and that she was at college. She was still keeping up the pretence, she was such a huge snob. I heard my mother say to my father, ‘Sweet Jesus, if the neighbours find out we’ll be destroyed.’ The boss of the local health clinic in Clonmell had to be informed, by law, and my father also knew him already, as he’d go shooting with him. He was instrumental in getting my sister into the sanatorium in Dublin, I believe, otherwise she might have died much earlier in Clonmel.

  We would drive up 120 miles and visit Una in my father’s Morris 10 car. We all went up on her twen
ty-first birthday, and I had her birthday cake firmly held on my lap the whole way. We were all crying at the sadness of her being locked up in hospital on her day of majority. I missed Una terribly, and she would be thin, pale and very ghostly when we saw her, but she was always trying to make a joke about it all to make us feel better. She was certainly incredibly pleased to see us. As a precaution, Betty, Joan and myself had to have X-rays and tests (which my father paid for), and it was discovered to my mother’s horror that the other two also had TB. At this time there was a mass X-ray campaign happening nationally to try to eliminate TB, so we were lucky to have the chance for a diagnosis. Joan and Betty were also sent off to Dublin, to the same sanatorium, for a whole year for treatment. Again, the story was they were with Auntie Marie and going to college. Amazingly, it was discovered that I had had the disease, but that my immune system was so strong that I had actually beaten it off. My brother, PJ, had also recovered. I had scars on my lungs from the infection, but somehow I’d conquered it, so I was very lucky indeed. When we visited the sanatorium, to see all three of my sisters, I hated the place: it always felt cold, huge and scary. Lots of women and men were just lying around on their beds, in candlewick dressing gowns, looking skinny, grey and forlorn. My sisters tried to be jolly, especially Una, but they went through some horrible treatments. Luckily, as we got to the mid-fifties, there were some new antibiotics and other treatments that began to work, and my sisters all managed to survive. Once she was released, she met her husband, and married him, back in Clonmel. Unbelievably, Una went on to have six children.

  All this was in my mind as I entered the TB ward for women at St John’s. It was a big, long room, with wooden floors, with twenty-five beds running up and down the sides in the usual hospital layout. Along the centre were scrubbed wooden tables, and at the end, near the doors, there was a desk for the nurses and ward sister. The women were all in the advanced stages of TB, and they looked absolutely terrible. They reminded me instantly of poor Una, especially, but also Betty and Joan, although they never got as poorly as Una. These women were all like skeletons, fiercely emaciated, with sunken cheeks and eyes, and were coughing up blood all the time into spitoons by their bedsides. It was a terrible sight to behold, and fearfully depressing, because it was clear, from the start, that these women were going nowhere. The only thing they were moving towards was a long and painful death and the cemetery. I had seen similar people in Dublin, when I visited my sisters, lovely young women who had gradually starved away in front of my eyes, until one day the bed was empty and being stripped down and disinfected. TB was a terrible scourge, and we all felt helpless in the face of it. We spent all of our time mopping, scrubbing, brushing; everything in sight was soaked with carbolic and disinfectant. Every doorknob, tap, wheel, surface, sink, bath, toilet, floor and wall was scrubbed and washed and cleansed, as the watchword was ‘hygiene’. We gave the women drugs to alleviate the pain, and would sit and read to them, or play games with them. It was like the Devil’s waiting rooms: waiting for them to die. I don’t remember any of them going home again. It was as if it was common knowledge that once they entered the ward they would be there until the end, whatever their age, their class, their marital status. I realised then how lucky I had been not only to recover from the disease myself, but also that all my sisters survived, and all went on to have families of their own. As the 1950s progressed, with stronger and better drugs being developed, the BCG programme of immunisation was introduced universally, so that TB was to become, eventually, a disease of the past. Sadly, it has re-emerged of late, but there are drugs now that can cure it, fairly quickly, especially if it’s caught early. That would have been nothing short of a holy miracle back in my day.