by Pam Weaver
‘Yes,’ snapped Jem crossly. ‘A Drambuie and lemonade … er, no, I mean a Dubonnet and lemonade, please.’
As well as good friends there were other girls who were a little harder to get along with. Nurse Hartley was an SEN. A bit of a loner, she lived with her mother and father and didn’t appear to have much of a social life. She had completed the three-year SRN training course but had failed the final exam. She could have tried again but I think she knew that she really didn’t have it in her. Besides, being an SEN carried far less responsibility.
Night duty wasn’t exactly hard work but it was non-stop. The mums would feed their babies at 10 p.m. and then we would let them rest all night. That meant the girls on nights fed the babies on four hourly feeds as well as those on three hourly feeds. In other words, we spent nearly all night feeding babies! Whenever Nurse Hartley was on night duty, instead of going to the canteen for some of those wonderful egg and chip meals, she would eat her sandwiches and do some embroidery, although there was little time to achieve very much during her break time. I think it was a peacock on the cushion cover but the trouble was, she had been doing it for so long (at least three years, according to someone else) that it stank to high heaven and it was filthy dirty.
One year, I was on night duty the night the clocks went back. On this particular night I was with two other girls, who decided to go for their tea break together. We had all been swapping spooky stories and then I was left alone in the nursery. I was a bit jumpy and then at around 5 a.m. I looked up and there was Nurse Hartley. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Was she real or a ghost? As she put her sandwich bag and apple under the desk, I realised she was real after all.
‘You’re keen,’ I joked as I came up behind her. ‘It’s only 5 a.m.’
It transpired that instead of putting her clock back an hour, she had put it forward an hour. ‘I’ll have to go back home,’ she said. ‘I’ve left my mother cooking the breakfast!’
Chapter 15
When you’re young, you not only feel invincible but immortal as well. In the hospital, we did encounter the occasional death but usually it was a baby who was badly deformed or born with an obvious problem. If they were very premature, the lungs hadn’t had time to properly form and so the baby would be in distress from the word go. In other words, it was very sad when someone lost their baby but it was not unexpected, and it usually meant an end to suffering. I learned how to be sympathetic and yet professional in my dealings with broken-hearted parents. I hope I did it with compassion but I had never experienced a loss myself.
I had my greatest shock when I was twenty-three. I had kept in touch with some of my school friends but there were several whom I hadn’t seen since school days. We would exchange Christmas cards but even the birthday cards had dropped off by the time we’d all reached twenty-one. I still sent a Christmas card to Angela Kingston but apart from a cursory promise to ‘write a letter in the New Year’, she and I knew little about each other. We had been part of a foursome at school. The other three were far brainer than I, but I think because I was the joker, perhaps that’s why they hung out with me.
The patients would often give us their newspapers once they had read them, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw a front-page story with Angela’s picture in her special constable’s uniform. I found a quiet place and read with mounting horror that she had been in hospital having a routine appendectomy when she’d suffered a blood clot in the lung. Ironically it had happened the day before she was to be allowed home and the hospital had arranged a mercy dash to Southampton Chest Hospital. Even that was not an unusual occurrence but the reason why it had become a newsworthy item was because that same ambulance on its return happened upon a serious accident in the New Forest and the medics on board had performed some lifesaving procedure before getting the second patient to the general hospital just in the nick of time.
As soon as I came off duty, I rang Angela’s mother. Apparently my friend was seriously ill but not without hope. I expressed my concern and asked if I could ring back later in the week. It dominated my conversation on the ward and I realised for the very first time how fragile life is. It only takes one thing to go wrong and because we all live on a knife edge, it can have shattering results.
I waited for four days and then rang Angela’s mother again. I was so expecting her to say, ‘Oh, she’ll be coming home tomorrow or next week,’ that I bounced into the conversation. There was a long pause and then she said, ‘You obviously haven’t heard our sad news.’ Angela’s condition had been critical – she had died the day before. I was devastated that I had been so jolly when I rang. All I could do was say how sorry I was and what a wonderful friend she had been.
I shed my tears and posted a card of condolence to her family. The next day on the ward I told the rest of the staff but instead of the reaction I was expecting, I noticed that they were all looking at one another.
‘What?’ I said.
‘We saw it in last night’s paper,’ someone said. ‘We thought you would see it too.’
‘But why didn’t you say something?’
‘Nobody wanted to be the one to tell you. We didn’t want to upset you.’
That upset me even more. To spare my feelings they had withheld the information and all I could think about was how much I must have hurt my friend’s mother with my innocent and cheerfully optimistic telephone call. I told my colleagues what had happened and everyone agreed it had been a genuine mistake. I don’t do that ‘not speaking to you’ stuff, so it was enough said.
People handle ‘news’ in all sorts of ways and sometimes the reactions of the fathers when their babies were born would surprise us. We expected joy, tears, smiles and the occasional overreaction but Mr Clapton’s reaction was in a class of its own.
Mrs Clapton had been in labour for twenty-two hours. Husbands were not required on the labour ward so Mr Clapton had gone home to sleep the night away. He turned up first thing in the morning to see his wife. His little daughter was already in the baby unit.
Mrs Clapton looked deliriously happy. ‘Have you seen the baby yet?’ she sighed.
Mr Clapton lifted her hand and kissed her fingers tenderly. ‘Not yet. I came to see you first. Oh, darling, you’ve made me the happiest man alive!’
‘You don’t mind that it’s a girl?’
‘Absolutely not. I’m sure she’s beautiful.’
‘Oh, she is. She’s got such a lovely face and the dearest little ears. Her hair is jet black and her eyes are blue.’
Mr Clapton felt dizzy with happiness. Ten minutes later when he came into the ward and asked to see his baby, I showed him where to stand and staff nurse pushed the cot against the glass. He pressed his cheek onto the cold glass as staff nurse pulled down the covers. Baby Clapton screwed up her face under the bright light. Mr Clapton’s face fell. ‘Flippin’ Norah,’ he gasped, ‘she looks just like a bloody coconut!’
I mentioned earlier that we nursery nurses were sometimes asked to do things when we had no training. Jaundice is a condition which can develop in the newborn, causing yellowing of the skin and conjunctiva of the eyes. If the liver is immature and doesn’t function properly, jaundice is the result. Jaundice can also make babies very sleepy, which in turn can lead to poor feeding. That compounds the situation because the baby is then in danger of becoming dehydrated.
If a baby was severely jaundiced, the doctors would perform an exchange transfusion. That, put simply, meant that a large portion of the baby’s blood was exchanged for new blood. There was a room in the unit, kept separate for just such a procedure.
As nursery nurses, we were trained in the care of healthy babies but had no nursing experience. We were not called upon to listen to a baby’s heartbeat through a stethoscope or to give injections. One day, the doctor wanted to do an exchange transfusion on a baby but there were few trained nurses on duty. He came to Letitia and me and asked one of us to be his assistant. Letitia was a lot stronger than I. She simply said, ‘I�
��m not trained to do that,’ and walked away. That left the doctor looking at me.
‘This baby really needs this,’ he said. ‘Without it, she will die.’
What could I say? I agreed. He explained very carefully what I was expected to do and it was mostly to keep a careful track of what he was doing. He would use a three-way exchange tap and I had to write down ten millilitres of blood out, followed by ten millilitres of blood in, until the majority of the baby’s blood was healthy blood. I had a crash course in using a stethoscope and how to write up the charts. Thankfully, there was no need for injections and to be perfectly frank, there would have been no way that I would have agreed to that anyway. That really was a step too far, but all he could think about was giving this much-loved and wanted baby a chance at life.
This treatment is virtually obsolete now. Jaundice is treated by phototherapy, which is done by masking the baby’s eyes and placing her under a special blue light for a few days. Apparently some doctor in South Africa had noticed that babies put outside in the sun (not directly!) were less likely to develop jaundice. By the time I left the hospital, this ‘new’ form of treatment was normal practice. Happily, after the exchange transfusion the baby made a full recovery. After it was all over, I caught up again with Letitia.
‘Why didn’t you help? How could you walk away like that?’ I accused.
‘This hospital is full of fully qualified nurses,’ she said firmly. ‘You were the one in the wrong. You had no business doing medical procedures you’re not trained for and you shouldn’t have let him blackmail you like that. What if something had gone wrong? Who do you think would have got the blame?’
I had to admit she was right. It was a sobering thought and although there never was a next time, I would have been far more sensible if I was ever asked to do it again.
As I have already said, the other skill I developed which was not part of my nursery nurse’s training was getting the baby on the breast. I seemed to have a knack for success. Of course, that made me a bit unpopular in some quarters. One midwife in particular called me a ‘presumptuous little cow’, but others increasingly would pop their heads around the door and ask Sister if they could ‘borrow’ me for a minute. I was also able to show the mums how to express their breast milk. Whenever possible, we fed the premature babies on breast milk but as they were too small and too weak to suck the breast, the milk had to be expressed and then given via a feeding tube. We didn’t have suction pumps on the ward. These were hand-held pumps which covered the breast and the mother squeezed a rubber bulb on the side of the contraption, which in turn squeezed the breast and made the milk go into a glass bottle. Because we didn’t have any, expressing breast milk had to be done by hand, which could be both frustrating and very tiring if you can’t get it right. We showed the mums how to lean over a sterile aluminium tray and squeeze her breast in such a way as to get the milk.
One girl I made friends with had a very unusual name. Ursula Greedy had put up with years of sniggers and jokes about her name and I admired her because she seemed to take it all in her stride. Her favourite story was the one about her mother ordering a new bed from a big department store. As she was arranging to have the bed delivered, the girl asked the inevitable, ‘What name is it?’
‘Mrs Greedy,’ said Ursula’s mother.
The girl froze, her pen still hovering over the page. Then she looked up and gave her customer an embarrassed smile. ‘Do you know,’ she began, ‘for an awful minute, I thought you said Greedy.’
‘I did,’ smiled Mrs Greedy.
It was Ursula who, after a particularly busy night on duty, caught the bus home to her parents. She was dog-tired and at that time they had just changed the design of the double decker buses. As you walked into the lower deck, there was a long seat under the driver’s cab, which faced the rest of the bus. It was the only seat available and Ursula sat down wearily. She had a bag on her lap and the next thing she knew, the conductor was shaking her awake. She had fallen asleep and gone right past her stop. The bus was now back at the depot.
‘I wouldn’t have minded too much,’ she told us as we all fell about laughing, ‘but I had my legs wide apart, showing all next week’s washing and the bag had fallen to the floor. The contents were everywhere.’
We all laughed some more.
‘And if that wasn’t bad enough,’ she went on, ‘I had a huge dried-on dribble going from my mouth right down the front of my coat!’ By the time she’d finished telling us, we were helpless with laughter.
She wasn’t the only casualty who fell asleep when she shouldn’t. One Sunday when I was on night duty I got up early to go to church. The service was at six-thirty and it was warm in the church. I had been struggling with my eyelids for some time. I sat in the pew, hoping that I looked religious rather than sleepy, but it was when we said prayers that disaster struck. I decided to kneel. That would keep me awake, wouldn’t it? No. The prayers droned on and on, and finally my head jerked forward and I bashed my cheek on the pew in front. Several people were distracted, and I tried to make light of it. Unfortunately by the time I went on duty at 9 p.m., my right eye was several shades of black and blue.
‘Whatever happened to you?’ Sister cried in alarm.
She was totally speechless when I told her it had happened in church.
There was only one death of an adult patient while I was in the hospital. We sometimes had a sick mother, but never one quite like Mrs Binney. She had suffered from severe depression with her first two pregnancies and she was on the ward with her third baby. Had she been around today, she would have been able to have an abortion in the early weeks but back then, it was much more difficult. However, if several doctors had agreed, it was still possible and she was a prime candidate. The medical staff were not only thinking of the mother and her unborn child when they offered her a termination, but also of the two little girls already in the family. The doctors explained to Mr and Mrs Binney that to have another baby would be extremely detrimental to her mental health but Mr Binney wouldn’t hear of an abortion. It was against his beliefs, he told them. In truth, it felt like they were on the horns of a dilemma, but what happened next raised all sorts of unanswered questions.
Mrs Binney had round-the-clock care. Her baby was born, another girl, and everything seemed perfectly normal for a while. But as the time went on, her mental state became more precarious. For her own protection, she was put in a room by herself and a midwife had to sit with her twenty-four-seven. She talked incessantly about ‘doing away with herself’, although I don’t think she made any real attempt.
Mr Binney hadn’t yet visited her, nor his new daughter. One afternoon as the visitors came streaming onto the ward, Mrs Binney looked at the glass panel in the door and said, ‘Oh, I think that was my husband. Does he know I’m in here?’
The midwife knew that her husband hadn’t been to see her, so she was anxious that, if he had finally turned up, his visit would be hassle-free. She went to the door and looked into the corridor, but turned back immediately when she heard a slight sound behind her. Mrs Binney was on the windowsill! The midwife scrambled back into the room, shouting for help. She managed to hold onto one of Mrs Binney’s legs as she fell, but the woman was too heavy for her and even as help came running into the room, the poor girl couldn’t hold on any longer and she felt Mrs Binney slip through her fingers. The maternity rooms were on the third floor.
When the medical staff reached her three floors below, it was too late to save Mrs Binney. Mr Binney didn’t show interest in caring for the baby and eventually a child care officer came to take her into care.
We felt very sad about it all, but baby Wilson’s father became the stuff of story-telling for an entirely different reason. I have always been amazed at how quick-witted some people are. I can never think of anything witty to say until I’m either half a mile down the road or the thing which gave rise to a clever remark happened ten minutes ago. Not so Mr Wilson. His baby had been admitted to the
premature baby unit. He was a healthy boy but small for his dates. Nurse Blundell was looking after him. She had her gown and mask on to prevent cross infection. Mr Wilson pushed open the door and began to walk into the isolation room. Nurse Blundell, who was writing up the chart, swung around.
‘You can’t come in here,’ she said tartly. ‘You’re not sterile.’
Quick as a flash, the father replied, ‘Nurse, if I was sterile, I wouldn’t be here!’
I was coming up to my twenty-second birthday and it seemed as if all my friends had steady boyfriends or were getting engaged and married. I’d had dates and I had gone out with people for a few weeks but it never really came to anything.
Jack was a friend of a friend. He was no oil painting but he was into body-building in a big way. He let it be known to all my friends that he was delighted to find a girl who hadn’t slept around and for a time, I was the apple of his eye. However, he couldn’t accept that the same rules which applied to others, applied to him too. He was desperate for me to sleep with him and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t. We started to argue about it but it wasn’t his insistence that I should ‘prove’ my love for him that made me call it a day. Back then, the shop windows had a navy blue blind which the shopkeeper pulled down on Saturday as the shop closed and raised again first thing on Monday morning. The gilt went off our relationship when I caught him constantly admiring his own reflection as we walked along the street.
Mike could talk for England about his favourite subject – Mike. And as for Edward … well, I rather suspected he had another girl or a wife somewhere because he was away an awful lot. All in all, I had reached a point when I was feeling rather miserable and a bit desperate so I wrote to Marjorie Proops, agony aunt of Woman magazine, worrying that I hadn’t yet met a man I’d really fallen for. I came across the letter she sent me in reply the other day. In it she suggested that I should put the idea of falling in love out of my head for a while. She advised me not to rush into a relationship simply because all my friends were getting married or engaged. I must have complained that I found it hard to relax with a boy and that I didn’t always enjoy kissing and petting with someone I wasn’t very keen on. She encouraged me to wait until I found someone who meant something to me. In reality, she was telling me there were plenty more fish in the sea, and somehow coming from Marjorie Proops, it was a lot more palatable than when my mother said the same thing.