by Annie Murray
She had, as predicted, found herself sobbing in the sluice, the room at the end of the ward where there were sinks and where they emptied and disinfected the bedpans and sterilized instruments. Sometimes she had cried not out of shame for her own stupidity but out of shock and sadness. A death, or the sadness of someone’s life or someone in pain. She had shed a lot of tears already and learned that this was a part of nursing.
But she learned fast. And she loved it. Every time she started on a shift she felt excited. In the long Nightingale wards with the beds in rows along each side, you could see everyone, more or less. There was the caring for people, making them feel better even by just replacing a sheet, smoothing a pillow or giving a kind word.
Melly loved the feeling of restoring order, of tidying and rearranging, making everything fresh and right. It gave her a motherly, protective feeling. Every spare moment she had, she would move about the ward tucking in a sheet here, straightening the wheels of a bed there. Some of the other nurses teased her about it. ‘Miss Perfect’, Jen called her.
But she did feel she wanted things to be perfect. It was bad enough that people were sick and in pain. The least they could do was to keep the wards looking cheerful and neat and under control.
Each day was like watching a story unfold. She hardly thought about anything else, wondered about her patients even when she was off duty and they were safe in the care of another team of nurses. Sometimes she found herself thinking about Mr So-and-So or Mrs So-and-So and hoping they were not having a bad night.
‘You never know a ward,’ one sister told her, ‘until you’ve seen it at night. That’s when people are at their most fragile.’ She learned that people who were most ebullient in the daytime were sometimes the most vulnerable at night.
Despite the hard work, tough on the back, the feet, the emotions, Melly loved almost every day of it and was looking forward to starting on a new ward. She was riding high. This was what she was made for and she wanted to be the best nurse ever.
She had no idea that things could tilt downhill so quickly.
‘Welcome to the ward.’ Sister Anderson, a stern-looking woman in her forties, dressed in her navy uniform, brown hair scraped back tightly under her frill-edged ‘Sister Dora’ cap, greeted Melly when she arrived for her first early-morning shift.
Once they had received the handover from the night staff, Sister Anderson drew Melly aside with a first-year nurse who was beginning her first placement, an Irish girl called Cath O’Shea with black curly hair. She was so frail she looked as if she would snap in half and was trying hard not to appear terrified.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Melly told her, also trying not to look terrified and to seem like an old hand.
‘Now –’ Sister Anderson’s tone had an edge of sarcasm – ‘do pray tell me, what is a medical ward?’ She looked from one to the other of them.
Melly could almost feel Cath seize up with nerves beside her, so she spoke quickly.
‘It’s for diagnosing and treating illnesses that do not require surgery, usually with drugs,’ she recited.
‘Good,’ Sister Anderson said, without warmth. ‘Now – Nurse Jenkins over there will be working with us and the SEN and auxiliary nurse.’
Nurse Jenkins, a third-year student, was a homely-looking girl in her twenties who Melly had often seen around the hospital. She looked nice, Melly thought.
‘If you have any questions, never be afraid to ask. Always better to find out than do something wrong because you’re afraid to question. Right – now the morning work needs to begin – ah, no, no, stop!’
They both turned, immediately feeling guilty of wrongdoing. But it was the newcomer who was at fault.
‘Your apron straps are not crossed correctly at the back,’ Sister told her. ‘Sort them out immediately. Nurse Booker, it would be quickest if you could help her.’
Melly quickly refastened the girl’s apron, unable to resist feeling proud of her own seniority. She could remember her first days on a ward and how ham-fisted she had felt.
‘You’ll soon be doing it standing on your head,’ she whispered and the girl gave her a grateful glance.
Breakfast was over and the first job was the bedpan round for those patients not allowed up. After that, they made the beds, moving the top sheet to the bottom and supplying fresh pillowcases, before the beds were wheeled into the middle of the ward for the cleaner to come and mop the floors. The junior nurses’ job was to wipe all the lockers with disinfectant before the beds were pushed back against the walls.
Melly worked as hard and quickly as she could, keen to prove to Sister Anderson that she was an excellent nurse. Over the past months she had become lithe and strong. She liked the feel of her muscles working as she pulled the beds and bent, tucking in a sheet, making it neat and tidy at the corners. She also loved the approval of the senior staff and had worked hard to get it, wanting to be looked upon as a good student, a hard worker and a promising young nurse. She zipped around the beds, proud that she knew what to do and loving comments from the patients, the older men especially who would say things like:
‘You’re a nippy little thing, aren’t yer? They must’ve put some good batteries inside you, bab!’
And she smiled and smoothed a sheet here, tidied the top of a locker there and felt like a nurse, a radiant, efficient, caring nurse which was what she had always wanted to be.
All that first morning, as they passed round hot drinks, performed bed baths and readied the ward for the dinner trolleys, she gradually got to know the patients lying in the rows of beds: men with bad hearts or lungs, the heavy smokers gasping for breath, mostly older men but a few younger ones too. There was a man of twenty-four who had come in after trying to take his own life with pills and who no one seemed to want to talk to. He lay at the far end of the ward, on his back, staring at the ceiling. And amid all the white faces was that of a black man, thirty-five years old, called Clinton Palmer, who Melly learned was suffering from an inoperable tumour on his lung.
He was a slender man with cropped hair and a slow way of talking and even slower of moving, which made Melly realize how ill he must be feeling. He was lying propped on his pillows, breathing with difficulty.
‘Hello, Miss Nurse,’ he gasped to her whenever she came close to do anything for him. He peeled his lips back in a smile. Even that seemed to involve effort. His voice was husky. ‘How are you this fine day?’
It was sunny outside now, all breeze and daffodils.
Melly smiled, holding his water jug to be refilled. ‘All right, thank you. How are you?’
‘Doing well, doing well.’ He winked at her. ‘Never better. I’ll be well again – soon as I get to Jamaica.’
‘Are you going to Jamaica, Mr Palmer?’ she asked, surprised. This was the first she had heard of it. Surely he was too poorly to travel anywhere?
‘That’s me.’ He gave a chest chuckle. ‘God willing. Off and away, home to the West Indies. Isn’t that right, Jim?’ he rasped across to the man in the next bed, a skeletal-looking fifty-year-old called Mr Stafford, who had been admitted with a suspected gastric ulcer. ‘I been telling him.’
Mr Stafford, pale and sunken-cheeked with thin brown hair flat to his head, was lying back dozing. He opened his eyes and made a non-committal sound. A sour expression came over his face. Melly thought he did not look very nice.
By the time Melly had gone to fill up the jug and returned with it, Mr Palmer’s head had lolled to one side and he seemed to be asleep. Mr Stafford, however, was wide awake and his expression seemed one of even more terrible revulsion.
‘Nurse!’ He sat up with sudden urgency. ‘Quick – give me the bowl. I’m gonna be sick again!’
He started heaving and coughing. Thank heaven there was a bowl ready on the locker. Melly grabbed it and thrust it at Mr Stafford. She yanked the curtain across between him and Mr Palmer before closing the other side as well. She went to stand beside him.
Mr Stafford gagged, bendi
ng forwards, and let out a whimper of pain. He retched and Melly saw a thin jet of pink liquid hit the bottom of the bowl. He panted hugely, gathering himself to be sick again and then again. The torrents spewed into the bowl were blood red and arriving in horrifying quantities. Mr Stafford gave an anguished moan.
‘Oh!’ Melly gasped. ‘Oh, my goodness. Hold on, Mr Stafford – I’ll get help!’
In her panic, all the ward rules about never running and presenting a calm exterior went right out of Melly’s head. She leapt out from behind the curtains and tore along the ward. ‘Sister – Sister, help!’
Sister Anderson, who was bending over another patient, looked up with a thunderous frown on her face.
‘Come quickly, please, Sister – it’s Mr Stafford!’ Melly gasped, skidding to a halt. She did at least manage to lower her voice to hiss close to the Sister’s ear. ‘He’s vomiting blood – masses of it.’
Thirty-Seven
Melly lay on her bed, the horror of the morning playing in her mind. She could not stop seeing the gush and splash of red into the white bowl, the terrifying force of Mr Stafford’s body expelling blood, splashing his pyjamas, the bedding, the floor . . .
Even though she told herself that the doctors had come and taken over, that he was being cared for, the experience had gone through her like an electric shock.
While the emergency was on, all Sister’s attention had been on getting Mr Stafford seen to. It was only later, when he had been rushed away into surgery, that she had had the time to tear a strip off Melly. She ordered her into the sluice. Even though Miss Anderson was not a large woman she seemed to tower above Melly, her expression so grave that Melly felt her already wobbly legs turn to water.
‘Nurse Booker – don’t ever, ever let me see you behave like that on a ward again!’
‘I’m s-sorry, Sister.’ Melly struggled to speak, her chest was aching so much. She could not hold back and burst into tears, which made things even worse. ‘I was so . . . It looked so awful – there was so much blood. I thought he’d flood the ward.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Sister Anderson said, though she too seemed shaken. ‘We are professionals. We do not go panicking and dashing about the ward alarming our other patients. You walk – quietly and swiftly – to where you need to be, without making an exhibition of yourself.’
‘Yes, Sister.’ Melly looked down at her already well-worn black lace-ups. ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’
‘I should think it won’t,’ Sister Anderson retorted. ‘Now – wipe your eyes and return to work.’
Somehow Melly had composed herself for the remaining hours she was on duty. She locked her distress away inside her and worked as well as she ever did. But once the end of the shift came and she was back in her room, she sank on to the bed to unlace her shoes and started shaking. Lying back on the bed she had a cry, overcome by shock and the humiliation of being so soundly told off.
Now, she said to herself after she had sobbed quietly for a while. This has to be over. That was what you had to do – have a cry, put it behind you and move on to the next thing.
Feeling slow and unusually exhausted, she pulled herself off the bed and went to wash her feet. She spent the afternoon and evening trying to get things done – stockings to darn, books to read, and Berni came in later after her shift on C4 with stories of the ladies there. Berni could always see the funny side of things. But at any quiet moment, the horrifying rush of blood forced itself into Melly’s mind again.
Later in the evening, while Berni was having a bath, there was a tap on their door.
‘Hello?’ Margaret came in, after her late shift. She saw Melly lying on her bed. ‘You all right? You’re looking pale as the sheet.’
‘I’m all right.’ Melly sat up. ‘How did it go?’
‘Oh – all right.’ Margaret sat down beside her. ‘They say you had an emergency this morning.’ Her cheeks dimpled. ‘Sister Anderson gave us a lecture about running on the ward. Wasn’t you, was it?’
Melly blushed. ‘It was horrible. He started vomiting and it was like a dam bursting. And all blood! I thought he was going to bring up all his insides.’ She shuddered and drew her knees in closer. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. How is he – is there any news?’
‘Torn stomach,’ Margaret said with a detached air. ‘A perforation. He’s all right. On a surgical ward. Sister said he’ll be coming back to ours soon – on a sippy.’
The ‘sippy’ diet was given to ulcer patients involving small but frequent meals, mainly of milk and small amounts of cereal and egg.
‘Thank goodness he’s all right,’ Melly said. It was hard to believe anyone could be all right after all that.
That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. That night she dreamt that she went into the bathroom in the nurses’ home and the bath was filling with blood, the level rising so fast that she could see it would soon be over the side. She backed out of the bathroom, knowing that she must not run, must not shout for help, and walked, hurrying desperately, all round the rooms of the home, then all round the hospital and there was not one person there.
She went back on to the ward and continued to work.
‘That poor man,’ Mr Palmer whispered to her the next day. He must have heard everything through the curtain. Though he was speaking, he could barely keep his eyes open, his eyelids a deep plum colour. He made a sucking sound through his teeth. ‘He going on all right? What happen?’
‘I believe he is, yes,’ Melly told him. She explained that Mr Stafford had been moved but would be coming back. ‘And how are you today, Mr Palmer?’
‘Oh . . .’ he sighed. ‘Strong as a horse, me. Dreaming of Kingston.’ He opened one eye. ‘You coming with me?’
‘All right then.’ Melly smiled, a pang in her heart. ‘If you like. I’d like to see Jamaica.’
‘You would,’ he managed to say, though his eyes were closing again. ‘Paradise on earth.’
The next day when she came on duty, Mr Palmer’s bed was occupied by a new patient, a white face where there had been a black one before. Melly stared at it. Margaret had not said anything – she had been on the late shift.
‘Where’s Mr Palmer?’ she asked Nurse Jenkins.
Hope rose up in her. Had he gone, the way he said he was going to? Was he now on his way to Jamaica, to the sun and sea and palm trees he had longed for?
Nurse Jenkins looked up sadly at her. ‘He died in the night,’ she said.
‘No!’ Melly protested. ‘No – he can’t have done!’
Nurse Jenkins gave her an odd look. ‘His cancer was very advanced,’ she said. ‘You knew that. There was nothing anyone could do.’
‘But . . .’ Melly was about to say, He was going to Jamaica . . .
‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose not.’
Mr Stafford was back within a few days, looking much the same as he had before, though if anything even thinner. Despite her fear of approaching him, Melly went up to him, her hands clammy with nerves.
‘Hello, Mr Stafford,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re back and all right.’
He nodded. He was a man of few words. ‘Ta, nurse. Nasty that was. Very nasty.’
‘But you’re on the mend now, I hope,’ she said.
He nodded and looked back down at his newspaper.
I’m more upset about it than he is, Melly thought.
Later in the morning Sister ticked her off for writing up the results of a urine test wrongly. It was a small thing and Sister was not even very cross, but Melly broke out into a sweat and found herself shaking. Making mistakes was always uncomfortable, but this seemed to assume huge proportions in her mind.
She did not feel right in herself. Before, she had often felt as if she was flying through her shifts on the wards, even though sad things happened. They were nurses, after all, dealing with people who were sick and sometimes dying. But now she felt as if the ground under her feet, firm before, was uncertain and shaking about.
One morning when she came on duty, the Night Sister told them during the handover that there had been a new admission in the night.
‘A Mr Alexander, aged thirty-six,’ she said. ‘He’s been in here before, more than once. Chronic asthma – he had an attack in the night. He’s stable but his breathing is still laboured. He has a Becotide inhaler now but he still suffers very severe attacks.’ She glanced along the ward to a bed on the right-hand side. ‘He’s asleep at the moment.’
When Melly and the others went to begin their morning routines, she saw Mr Alexander in the fourth bed along, or rather she saw a head of black, wavy hair and only the tip of a cheekbone of his sleeping face.
All she thought then was what a pity it would be to disturb him with all the busyness of the ward after he had suffered such a difficult night.
Thirty-Eight
Melly did not have anything to do with Mr Alexander at all that morning; he was being cared for by Nurse Jenkins and one of the first-year students. But by the time they were getting ready to bring round the dinners he was awake, propped groggily on pillows, wearing green pyjamas and reading a book. He wore spectacles and looked serious, studious. She could see his chest working hard as he breathed.
Among the many grey heads of the ward he stood out. His dark, strong hair and the round, horn-rimmed spectacles drew her attention back to him each time she passed. Something about him fascinated her.
As she hurried back and forth, carrying out all her duties, she could sense his presence. There was an intensity to him, a quiet isolation, as though he had a blanket of silence wrapped about him.
He stayed awake for a time, then fell asleep again, apparently exhausted. He was still sleeping when she went off duty.
The first time she spoke to Mr Alexander was the next afternoon when she was on a late. During visiting hours, Melly saw a woman come in and sit beside him. She was small, with blonde hair cut in a bob, and she moved about the ward as if she was used to hospitals. She brought grapes and daffodils. Melly saw her looking for somewhere to put the flowers and as she was not engaged in a task just then, she went over to them.