Yes Sister, No Sister

by Jennifer Craig

  ‘What did you step in?’

  ‘Oh just something the patient dropped on the floor, Sister.’

  Sheila Dawson comes into the room where we are all gathered one morning, flops on the bed and says, ‘Whew! What a night! We had a man who died with an erection.’

  ‘Go on, I don’t believe you,’ Wee Jess says. We all nod in agreement.

  ‘No, I’m not kidding. He had the most enormous dick you have ever seen and when he died it stood straight up.’ Everyone’s face is registering astonishment.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We tried putting ice packs on it, then hot water bottles, but it still was as hard as a rock. In the end we just had to wrap him up in the sheet. It looked really peculiar – made the corpse look like a tent!’

  ‘Well at least you can tell his wife that he died thinking of her,’ I say.

  ‘He’s going to need a special coffin if it doesn’t go down, one that looks like a submarine with an up periscope. How do you explain that to an undertaker?’

  We are all laughing except Marie, who says, ‘Was he young or can this happen at any age?’

  ‘He was quite old but had a reputation for being a randy bugger all his life,’ Sheila answers, grinning.

  ‘Well he should have a good time in heaven – ready for anything,’ Sandy says.

  ‘Oh really, God doesn’t allow that sort of thing in heaven.’ Once again Marie is serious.

  We get into an argument about whether sex is allowed in heaven. Marie goes to bed in a huff.

  Some mornings we have the energy to walk into town, do some shopping and go for coffee at Schofields. They serve it in elegant silver coffeepots accompanied by a tiered tray of fancy cakes. You take the ones you want and then pay later. I am there with Sandy one day. I like going shopping with her as she has a dress sense that I do not. She is able to spot something that I would not even consider and I am amazed how much it suits me. Today she points out a blue, cashmere twinset on sale that I look really nice in. I am delighted with my purchase as we make for the cafe.

  ‘I can stand most things,’ says Sandy, after we have been served. ‘Emptying bedpans, wiping bums, vomit, patients who blow off in your face, but it’s sputum mugs that get to me. When it sticks on the sides – urrgh.’

  ‘Do you mind,’ I say, helping myself to another cake, ‘I’m trying to enjoy these.’

  ‘A man spilt his sputum mug all down the radiator and I had to clean it up. I thought I was going to be sick.’

  ‘Sandy, will you shut up. It gets to me too and I don’t want to feel sick right now. Talk about something else.’ I take another cake.

  ‘What else? OK. Have you thought of a way of boiling 32 eggs at once so they’re not hard?’

  ‘Collins told me to put them all in a pillow case and stick it into the pot when the water’s boiling. But they still come out hard.’

  We make the patients’ breakfast at night. It is the same thing every day – porridge, boiled eggs and bread and butter. We put the porridge on at midnight and it is served at 8 am. As letting the porridge burn is a crime as heinous as murder we are neurotic about checking the water in the double boiler every hour.

  ‘Have you ever thought that we’re more like maids than nurses?’ Sandy asks me. I’m surprised, as she is not given to introspection. ‘Do you ever regret going into this?’

  ‘Sometimes, but not often. Why? Do you?’

  ‘Anyone can do what we do. I can’t see why we need School Certificate to get in.’

  ‘Only teaching hospitals do. Other hospitals take anything that walks,’ I say. ‘Cheer up Sandy, it gets better in second year and soon there’ll be three sets junior to us so we won’t be doing bedpans and lockers so much.’

  ‘Yes, but it isn’t much of a challenge to the old brain, is it? I mean, we learn all this stuff, then all we do is maid’s work.’

  ‘When we’re more senior, we’ll be doing more. Next night duty we might be in charge.’ Second-year night duty means that some of us will be the senior nurse on the ward, at least some of the time, though others will still have to be the junior. ‘And we’ll be in block soon. That will be a challenge to your brain! Stop moaning and tell me something funny.’

  Sandy thinks for a minute. ‘Well, this didn’t happen to me but to Jones on the ward above me. A man peed in his fruit bowl. Jones decided to sterilise it but she didn’t realise it wasn’t glass – it was a sort of Perspex – and it came out like a gramophone record. It was his own fruit bowl and his wife was furious. She wanted to know what we were doing putting it in a steriliser in the first place. No one wanted to tell her.’ She paused. ‘Not very funny. You tell me one.’

  ‘We have this man who complains the whole time. The patient next to him got fed up and said to him, “Will you put a sock in it you miserable old bugger. If it was Florence Nightingale herself, you’d complain her bloody light was too bright.”’ I say, using the long vowels of a Yorkshire accent.

  Sandy laughs, and then says, ‘Did you hear about Mr Lambert? He was consulting on a patient on Ward 11 when another patient called out at the top of his voice, “Don’t let that butcher get near thee, luv. He right buggered me up, he did.” He must have felt so embarrassed!’

  ‘Never! Surgeons don’t get embarrassed.’

  The waitress comes up holding a pad of bills. ‘How many cakes?’

  ‘Well, um, ten,’ I say.

  ‘Ee luv, tha’ must have been hungry,’ the waitress says putting the bill on the table. She walks away sniggering and we leave laughing.

  I have my first run in with the Sod while on night duty. We had all moved to rooms on a floor designated for night nurses where the original blackout curtains remain and where quiet is maintained during the day. The cleaner for the floor starts work at 6am so she can finish by the time we are going to bed. She is deaf and dumb but still manages to communicate very well by effective, though sometimes grotesque, body language. She pointed at my photos one day. I told her about my brothers and offered her a chocolate. From then on we have been on amicable terms.

  I have had a dreadful night with two emergencies from a car accident. We are late off duty, breakfast is cold, and all I want is a bath and my bed. I am lucky to find a free bathroom straight away and manage to relax a little in the tub of hot water. I put on my dressing gown and return to my room. It is locked. I can’t understand it as I know I left it open. The cleaner appears and parodies a figure walking down the corridor.

  ‘Sister O’Donnelly?’ I ask.

  She nods. Then she pretends to open a door, produces some keys, locks the door, and puts the keys in her pocket.

  ‘Sister O’Donnelly went into my room, took my keys, locked the door and walked away with my keys?’

  The cleaner nods vigorously, then walks away from my room in a fair imitation of the Sod’s gait.

  I am furious. Still in my dressing gown and clutching my towel and sponge bag, I stride down to sick bay, walk into the outer office and without knocking, storm into the inner office. The Sod is sitting at her desk with two Home Sisters in the other chairs. I march up to her desk, thump the flat of my hand down upon it and say loudly, ‘Give me my keys.’

  In her astonishment the Sod simply hands me the keys but recovers enough to say, ‘Ye should knock before entering,’ as I march out.

  She doesn’t bother me again. Her favourite prey is Blinks. She will walk into her room while she is asleep, wake her up and say, ‘Narrse Blinker, do ye not know ye should stand up when a sister comes into the room?’

  Blinks will get out of her bed in her pyjamas and stand until the Sod leaves.

  Judith tells Blinks she is a fool to be bullied. ‘Didn’t you read Tom Brown’s Schooldays? It shows you that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. Now, let’s rehearse.’ She leaves the room, walks in and says in an Irish accent, ‘Do you not know you should stand up when a sister comes into the room. Now, Blinks, what are you going to say?’

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sp; Blinks stares at her helplessly and mutters something inaudible.

  ‘Blinks, all you have to say is that you are off duty and you don’t have to stand up when off duty. Now, say it.’

  Blinks repeats the words but without assurance. We know that she will simply stand up and that the Sod will continue to bully her.

  After the rehearsal, Judith says, ‘You know, that woman should be fired. She’s an alcoholic for one thing and completely incompetent. What I hate about this hospital is the way some sisters get away with murder. You know the saying – power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who said that, I wonder. They were right.’

  Chapter 11

  ‘NURSE, CAN I have a bedpan?’

  ‘Why didn’t you have one during the bedpan round?’ I ask through gritted teeth.

  ‘Didn’t need one then, luv, but I do now.’

  I am on yet another medical ward, a female one. Female wards are harder to work on than male ones because it is so much more difficult to give out bedpans than urinals. A bedpan requires screening the bed, lifting the patient both on and off it, handing out toilet paper and a small wash-basin. The two most junior nurses put pink gowns on over their uniforms and prepare for the ordeal several times a day. Each stainless steel bedpan has to be warmed under a hot tap, as, stored where they are in the freezing sluice room, their introduction straight from there would add to the heart attack rate. They are then piled on a trolley to be wheeled around the ward.

  For the few yards from the trolley to the patient, a bedpan must be covered with a cloth because its naked form might prove an embarrassment. Two nurses lift a large body onto a bedpan, move to the next person and so on around the ward. Once everyone is enthroned, we begin again by lifting the bodies off. If a woman has had a bowel movement, we will wipe her clean as this task requires the agility of an athlete to perform at the best of times and most of the women are too sick or too large to do it themselves. We then empty the bedpans, measure the contents of those on Intake and Output, stack them, wash down the trolley with carbolic, take off the pink gowns and go back on the ward. No wonder that we long to be senior enough to rarely do this chore.

  At first, wiping someone else’s bottom was appalling. For so long, since toddler-hood, such attention is strictly personal. To be doing this for adults old enough to be my parents or grandparents seems somehow obscene. But after a short time, one bottom begins to look like any other; looking at one is the same as looking at a face. It takes longer to get used to the smell and I still gag sometimes.

  The sister on the ward is known as the Dragon. She is on holiday when I first start there and the two weeks of her absence are peaceful and uneventful. Then at 8 o’clock one morning in she marches to take prayers. One look at that frozen face and I know I am in for trouble. I hate her at first sight. I suspect the feeling is mutual as her eyes are upon me from the moment she walks in. It is a face that never smiles. Her mother’s prediction that if you pull a face like that and the wind changes, you will look like that forever, must have come true; she has been caught with the permanent expression of one who has a particularly odious smell under the nose.

  On her first day, she appears between the curtains as I am doing beds and backs. ‘There is a right side and wrong side to a draw sheet, nurse, and that is the wrong side.’ The only way I can detect a difference in sides is from the narrow seam. Later, she appears again. ‘Didn’t they teach you in PTS to change the draw sheet to get rid of the crumbs?’

  ‘There weren’t any crumbs in PTS Sister,’ I say. I swear she snorts and I swear smoke comes out of her nostrils.

  She seems to be behind me all the time and always has a complaint to make. Whatever I am doing, I am doing it wrong. ‘Why are you setting up that enema tray like that? Didn’t they teach you what size enema tubes to use?’ ‘Don’t you know to clean a mouth properly? This one looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned for days.’ ‘Nurse Ross, how many times do I have to tell you to be careful not to break a thermometer? Do you realise how much they cost?’ ‘Nurse Ross, did you get talcum powder all over the floor? Sweep it up at once.’

  She does not allow us to go for meals or breaks until the bed wheels are straight and the bed-tables lined up at the foot of the beds where the patients can’t reach them. One day she sends for the junior night nurse, who is in bed, makes her get dressed in uniform and come back to the ward. The trolleys were not cleaned to her satisfaction.

  I long for the times when she is off. She has only been back a week when I find out that I am getting three ten-ones in one week. The best off duty, apart from a day off of course, is a five-to. I have none of those. Two ten-ones in one week sometimes happens but three or four are unheard of.

  The Dragon’s blue-eyed girl is Ann Milbury. She came on the same day the Dragon returned from holiday. When the Dragon asked her which set she is in, Milbury told her that she takes finals when I do. This is true but Milbury is in the set below me, and is therefore my junior. State Registration exams are held three times a year whereas sets of nurses commence four times a year, so every year two sets of nurses take finals together. As a result of Milbury’s deceit I am always placed junior to her on the work lists and so do more menial tasks.

  Milbury is my first encounter with the sort of person who gains recognition by ingratiating herself with her superiors and by subtle put-downs of others. One evening she and I are on with one of the perms, Sutcliffe, who is far too nice to perm for the Dragon. Sutcliffe comes into the bathroom where I am washing rubber sheets with carbolic and hanging them on the pulley-type drying racks.

  ‘Nurse Ross,’ she says, ‘I am very disappointed with you. You were supposed to clean up Mrs Potts ready for her visitors and she’s soaking wet.’

  ‘I changed her bed about half an hour ago, just before visitors,’ I mutter, carrying on with what I am doing.

  ‘Nurse Milbury told me you haven’t been near her since before supper.’

  ‘Then Milbury is lying,’ I shout, slapping a wet rubber draw sheet against the side of the bath, ‘and not for the first time. She told you she is in the same set as me; she is not, she is in the set below me. I’m sick to death of this ward and sick to death of nursing. Do you realise that I have four ten-ones next week? Four! And Milbury doesn’t have one. When I’m trained, I shall never be as unfair as you lot. That is, if I stay here and finish.’ I am nearly in tears.

  Sutcliffe looks thoughtful after this outburst. Although the Dragon is still breathing down my neck, the number of ten-ones is reduced to two and Milbury is placed below me on the work lists.

  One morning I wake up feeling dreadful but go on duty anyway. The morning drags on. My legs feel wobbly and barely able to hold me up. I feel so woozy that I don’t care what the Dragon says. Finally dinnertime comes but instead of going to the dining room, I go to sick bay.

  ‘I don’t feel very well,’ I tell the Home Sister. She takes my temperature. It is 104 degrees, which puts me out of the classification of those who simply do not want to work into those who are Truly Sick. I am put to bed and I lie in a fever of unknown origin for three days. A commode is placed in my room, which I am too embarrassed to use. How can I expect a sister to empty my urine, or worse?

  ‘You’ll have to use it eventually, you know,’ the Home Sister says smiling.

  I do.

  During the night and next day I am delirious but not so far gone that I cannot appreciate the nursing care I receive. The Sod does not appear so I can’t judge if she is different with nurses who are sick. The other Home Sisters are attentive and concerned. They give me cool sponge baths and fresh sheets every few hours and then leave me to sleep. Cold drinks and delightfully enticing light meals are put in front of me. There are even flowers on my tray. It is hard to believe that these Keepers of the Morality of the Virgin’s Retreat can be so kind.

  Eventually I recover. I am sent home for a few days with instructions to report to sick bay on my first day back before I go on duty. I sp
end a few days being spoiled by Amma before I return, and after being checked by the physician, I go on duty. It is about 10.30am. The Dragon greets me with, ‘Ah Nurse Ross, you’re back. I believe you are a ten-one.’ She looks in the off duty book to check. ‘Yes you are, so come back at one.’

  ‘But it’s 10.30 now Sister.’

  ‘Yes, come back at one o’clock,’ she orders as she turns her back on me.

  I’ve had it! I can bear the hard work and the exhaustion. Smells, vomit and bowel movements no longer make me gag. I am not homesick. But I cannot, and will not tolerate injustice. I never imagined that this is what would make me give up. I no longer care. My desire to finish at all costs seems to have flown out of the window; instead, I am relieved at the thought of leaving. I shall miss Judith, Sandy, Blinks and Wee Jess and I know they will be surprised when they hear I have gone. They seem to think that I love nursing.

  I go to Matron’s office. ‘I want to give in my notice,’ I say to Miss Darcy, the Deputy Matron.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘What’s happened?’

  I tell her about all the ten-ones, about being ill, about going back on duty to be told that I am to return at one to work a straight eight hours when I have just been in sick bay. ‘And I cannot work with that sister. People in India treat their coolies better than she treats me.’

  ‘Will you stay if you are put on another ward?’

  I think for a while. ‘Alright,’ I say. I really have no plans. I don’t know where to go or what other job to do. Our other choices at school had been the Leeds Teacher’s College or the Yorkshire Ladies’ Secretarial College but neither of these appeals to me.

  ‘Just a minute, I need to check the allocation,’ Miss Darcy says and leaves the room. As I sit waiting for her I become dimly aware that I have some power, that leaving is an option. ‘They’ do not want us to leave, as the place would collapse without us. I do not have to put up with injustice and contempt.

  Miss Darcy returns. ‘You are to go to Ward A of the private patient’s wing. It is a quiet ward and as you have been ill, you need a bit of a rest.’