The Country Nurse Remembers

by Mary J. Macleod

  Moving On

  I worked on the cardiac ward for about three months. I admired Sister but was terrified of her: she was so quick at everything, including her speech. She had a Welsh accent and spoke so very fast that I had a great deal of trouble following instructions—I was still trying to work out what the first one was by the time the next two or three had been fired at me. I remember one day when I was testing urine for sugar (a newly acquired skill), Sister rushed into the sluice.

  ‘Nurse … h … you see … a lum … punt …?’

  That is how it sounded to me. I thought something was lost and she was asking me if I had seen it, so I just said, ‘No, Sister.’

  A while later, she came in again and this time spoke in disapproving tones. ‘Do you mean that you would be ill if you watched a lumbar puncture?’

  I said, ‘Oh no, Sister. I wouldn’t.’ This was the sort of thing that I was interested in. (It would also make a worthwhile change from urine testing.)

  She looked surprised and a little puzzled. ‘You mean you would like to see one?’

  ‘Oh, yes please.’

  Sister continued to look at me for a moment, gave a small sigh and motioned me to follow her. Why did I not tell her that initially I had just not understood her? As it was, she probably thought I was rather odd.

  I made another terrible gaff without knowing it. The doctors’ round was being done, so Sister and Staff Nurse were both in attendance when the ward phone rang. At first I ignored it, as juniors were not supposed to answer the phone in case they gave out the wrong information. But no one else appeared, and it continued to ring.

  Staff Nurse looked away from the doctors and motioned to me to go and answer it.

  With trepidation, I picked up the receiver.

  ‘This is Doctor … ’ I didn’t catch the name. ‘I wish to speak to Dr. Stern. It is urgent.’

  ‘Oh … yes,’ I muttered and hurried into the ward where the junior doctors were listening to the consultant, Dr. Stern, with rapt attention. I approached the great man and coughed slightly to gain his attention. He gazed at me with his eyebrows up, and I quietly gave him the message. He hurried away, and I looked around. Sister and Staff Nurse wore thunderous expressions, while the student doctors gazed at me with a sort of amazed respect.

  Oh, boy! What had I done now?

  ‘My office, Nurse,’ said Sister in menacing tones.

  She stood behind her desk. ‘Do not ever, ever do that again. Who do you think you are, addressing a consultant like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister. I thought I was polite, and the message was urgent.’

  ‘You are only a junior nurse. You have been on the ward for no time at all, and yet you think you can address a consultant yourself. Only the Ward Sister or, in her absence, the Staff Nurse in charge addresses consultants. Have you learnt nothing in your time here?’

  I was beginning to understand at last. ‘I’m sorry, Sister. I did not know that rule.’

  ‘I am ashamed of you … Such inappropriate behaviour … A disgrace!’ She ranted on, and it was only the return of Dr. Stern that made her stop. Then she was full of charm and propelled him off to the ward again.

  My colleagues seemed to know of this rule when I told my tale of woe. Why had I not heard about it? I seriously began to wonder if I might be deaf.

  I was due to move on to a surgical ward the following day, so I collected my record, which detailed my progress on the cardiac ward. I was certain that it would be awful and silently thanked the Good Lord that Mum need not know. I took it in to supper unopened.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ The other juniors, who were also moving on, were astonished. On the whole their records had been quite good, although Anna’s remarked that it was the patients who were supposed to be ill, not the nurses. A reference, no doubt, to her constant stories of this or that complaint that she imagined she had.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I know it will be bad. She’ll say that I am slow and rude and don’t listen and so on. I hardly need to open it.’

  Margaret snatched the envelope from me and ripped it open. She handed me the sheet of paper.

  I unfolded it with trepidation. ‘Wow! Oh my!’

  To my amazement, the record was quite good. I was a hard worker, neat and tidy, good with the patients, was learning quickly but needed to listen to instructions more carefully. Perhaps I was deaf because I always listened carefully but still seemed to get some things wrong.

  The Surgical Ward

  If the cardiac ward had been my baptism, the surgical ward was total immersion. Again a male ward, it was housed in one enormous room. There were fifteen beds down each side and an ‘overflow’ ten down the middle. These had little privacy, as there was no wall behind them and hardly any space between them to arrange the cumbersome screens which we put around beds to attend patient needs. The ward was only supposed to have thirty beds at most, but these were the post-war years, and hospitals all over the country were still dealing with people who had been on the waiting list for surgery for much of the war, while emergencies from the bombings, returning military personnel and those suffering as a result of wartime privations were dealt with. Now they were trying to catch up, so the extra beds, originally erected for the wartime casualties, were left in order that ordinary folk got their long-awaited surgery. I was amazed at how understanding most people were, in spite of having been in pain for perhaps years.

  The distances we had to cover in such a huge ward were punishing, and we (the new young nurses) found that the only way to ease aching feet was to place books under the legs of our beds at night, thus raising the foot end by ten or twelve inches. I don’t know who first thought of this, but it was a blessing, enabling us to reduce the throbbing, and sometimes swelling, of feet and ankles. I suppose our legs and feet eventually got used to it because I do not remember raising my bed for more than a few weeks, partly because the down side of this system was that during sleep we gradually slid downwards and found our heads pressed painfully against the iron rails of the bed-head.

  I loved that ward! In spite of the speed at which everything had to be done, the air of hope was stimulating. It was a general surgery ward, so hernias, stomach ulcers, various lumps and bumps (usually benign) and internal investigations were dealt with routinely, while emergencies such as appendicitis were whisked in and to theatre between the ‘list’ patients. The surgeons and theatre staff worked very hard to reduce the backlog, but it took a few more years, partly because new and more complicated surgery was being introduced all the time.

  I was now getting faster at the things I knew and learning all the time. I could take blood pressure and deal with sterilisers—there were no disposable needles or syringes, and the metal and glass reusable ones had to be boiled in a shallow, rectangular saucepan on the stove in the ward kitchen. This was time consuming and often resulted in broken syringes. When the needles had been used and boiled a number of times, they formed a barb on the end. If we used them without noticing, the patient would very soon tell us. But giving injections was still a long way ahead for me.

  There were some larger, electrical sterilisers for kidney dishes, round bowls and instruments for doing dressings. There was also a fearsome washer affair for the metal bedpans and glass urinals. This thing rattled and hissed and blew steam everywhere but was loved by all the nursing staff, as it had only recently been introduced. Before that, we had had to wash the bedpans by hand!

  The early mornings whirled by in a blur, rushing to get patients due for an ‘op’ that day ‘prepped’. This meant washing, shaving the operation area, preparing the bed in a certain way and urging the patient into a theatre gown. The shaving was the worst part.

  The area to be operated on was usually the abdomen, which involved shaving a very intimate area of a man’s body. If there was a male nurse on the ward, he did the shaving, but there were few male nurses then.

  At this particular time, the male nurse allocated to our ward was starti
ng the following week, so it fell to me to do the shaving. As a new, very young nurse, I found this most embarrassing. The young men tried to laugh it off with various doubtful comments, while the older ones felt deep embarrassment—and often resented the indignity. I think the Sisters and other experienced nurses could have handled the matter better, rather than throwing us in at the deep end. I, for one, had no idea that handling a young man’s intimate parts could cause unintentional excitement and embarrassment for him, and total confusion for me. I did not have the social skill to cope with this and turned my back the first time it happened. I waited a while and then carried on, but my action probably made him think that I was disgusted or disapproving. There was a tension between that patient and me for the rest of his stay.

  The episode left me in shock; as well as being awkward I had no idea of the ‘mechanics’ of the male erection. Obviously I knew about intercourse, but I did not know that what was happening was usually a necessary part of it all.

  As men from the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corp) were demobbed, more male nurses or orderlies were recruited by the hospitals, so the female nurses were spared this minefield of embarrassment.

  Natalie was completely at ease with shaving, and some of my colleagues were inclined to giggle. Anna was predictably ‘ill’: ‘I have such bad nerves, you know. I find these young men so crude—it makes me quite ill.’ Perhaps they had not experienced the same reaction I’d seen, of a man’s excitement. They didn’t say and I couldn’t ask.

  When the porters came for the ops, a nurse had to go with the patient as far as the anaesthetic room. I was most intrigued to see all the equipment on the anaesthetic trolley and to be among the white-robed figures who hurried about their tasks with such quiet confidence. Would I ever aspire to be so organised, so knowledgeable?

  ‘The Bloods’

  The surgical wards always seemed to be full of young doctors (housemen) and medical students. The more senior of these students were there to assess patients before operation—their findings were checked by the doctors—and to take blood for cross-matching in case a blood transfusion became necessary. Inevitably, they were known as ‘the bloods’.

  One of the more senior nurses, Clarissa, seemed to have caught the eye of one of the bloods, who made valiant attempts to talk to her. He had to choose a moment when she was working at the far end of the ward or when Sister was occupied elsewhere. This kept proving impossible, as either a doctor would call him or Sister would appear at the wrong moment. In the end the resourceful man slipped a note to a cooperative patient, who then waited for Clarrisa to pass his bed.

  ‘Psst!’ he said as she passed.

  She did not hear. He repeated his call more loudly: ‘Psst!’

  Clarrisa still did not hear, or did not think the summons was for her.

  But Sister heard.

  ‘What is the matter, Mr. Turner? You are sneezing a lot. Have you a cold? If so, you should have informed the hospital when they sent for you. We do not want cold germs here.’

  ‘No, I am all right, Sister. Really I am.’ He looked accusingly at the blood. ‘I don’t want my operation to be put off.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Sister. ‘I shall be watching you, and if you sneeze again, we will have to send you home.’

  ‘I won’t, Sister. I won’t.’

  I saw all this from the other side of the ward. The blood’s face was puce, as the patient scowled horribly at him. He snatched the note back, then marched down the length of the ward so that he would pass Clarrisa, who was still blissfully unaware of the drama. Without a word, he stuffed the note onto the tray that she was carrying, turned and walked out. A very startled Clarrisa must have replied because they went out together and eventually, after he had qualified and she had passed her finals, married and lived in blissful poverty.

  She became one of the very few married nurses that we had. A married girl was not allowed to train and take the nursing exams. One or two married during training and kept it a secret, as they would have been dismissed instantly, even if they were near their finals. Once qualified, however, a married woman could work, but on a part-time basis only. I have never understood these unfair, wasteful and pointless rules.

  Many of us thought that the bloods were handsome and impressive in their short white coats (the doctors wore long ones). In comparison, we were usually too busy or too lowly to be noticed.

  Sveto

  Onto the ward came a slight young man with a beard. He disappeared into Sister’s office and emerged wearing a white short-sleeved tunic. Sister clapped her hands for anyone nearby to pay attention.

  ‘This is Sveto Pannitskeya. Sveto is a doctor in his own country of Poland, but our training is different so he cannot practise as a doctor here, but he can be employed as a nurse. It was difficult to place him, as he is the first such person to come to the hospital, but Matron has put him at the stage of a third-year nurse in training. He will need to get to know our ways, and you will all be of help where possible.’

  Sveto smiled and said thank you in very good English but with a pronounced accent.

  Sister turned to me. ‘As he needs to understand the system from the bottom up, I suggest he works with you for a few days.’

  I was pleased and worried at the same time. I had never had anything to do with foreigners apart from the German prisoners of war, and Dad had not allowed me to even talk to them. Sveto was just called ‘Sveto’ because his surname was so difficult. He did all the menial tasks with me, but when we started to take the patients’ blood pressures and pulses, he was so much faster than I was that we zipped around quickly. Bed-making, however, was a closed book to him; he kept saying, ‘Why?’ about hospital corners and turning over eighteen inches of sheet. I had not thought how odd and unnecessary it all must seem to someone who was not brainwashed, as we were, into thinking that it was the only way to do these things.

  Obviously, he could not be accommodated in the nurses’ home, so he slept at the YMCA, which he praised highly. At the end of a day spent with him, I knew no more about him than at the start, although I guessed that the reason for his presence in the UK was likely to be sad.

  After supper, he thanked me for ‘looking after’ him, then said, ‘I expect you will be wondering why I am here in your country?’

  I think he wanted to talk about his circumstances, but stupidly I said, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ This could have sounded discouraging, but luckily he did not take it that way.

  He told me about his family in Poland before the war: his mother, who was from a Jewish background, and his father, who was a surgeon. The Nazis arrested his mother and sent her to a concentration camp and tried to press his father into doing experimental operations on Jewish people. I discovered that my horrors were still with me from the time that I had seen the newsreel about the German atrocities. As he spoke, I found that I was sweating and my heart was beating very fast; I didn’t want him to go on because I was afraid of what I might hear. Luckily, my inability to speak about those things prevented me from being foolish enough or unkind enough to stop him.

  His father refused to cooperate with the Germans and was shot. His mother also died in the camp. Sveto did not know if she had been killed or tortured or starved. As I listened, I realised that I was talking with someone who had been close to the horrors that I had only seen on the newsreel and I felt ashamed, but even so I wanted him to stop—not tell me any more about his mother and the camp.

  I was also ashamed for another reason: Sveto could not stop the tears, as he remembered his parents and their terrible end. I had never seen a man cry. My father was a tough Lancashire man; the rest of the male members of his family were much the same, and in that culture men did not cry. As my nursing career progressed, I would see many a man cry, either from pain or at the death of a dear one, but so far that had not happened and Sveto’s tears embarrassed me. I knew that they shouldn’t, but I had to look away from him. I don’t think he noticed.

  ‘What about you?�
� I asked eventually.

  He smiled sadly. ‘I had just passed my finals, my sister was a nurse and we knew that with the Jewish connection and our useful skills we would be either used for the same kind of work that they had wanted Father to do—and we agreed that we could not do that—or we would be killed off as being of no use. We left our home one dark night, creeping from shadow to shadow until we were out in the countryside. We were trying to get to Sweden, which was neutral, but it was wintertime and we were often cold and hungry. We tried to get food and shelter at farms along the way, but many people were too frightened of the Nazis to help us.

  ‘After months of walking, sometimes begging and sometimes even stealing food, we were about a day away from the sea. We hoped to persuade a fishing boat to take us out into the Baltic and perhaps transfer us onto a Swedish boat, but the port was patrolled by Nazi troops.

  ‘We were slinking along a road in the dark when we heard a shout. It was a German trooper raising the alarm. We had already decided that if this sort of thing happened, we would not give ourselves up—we knew what our fate would be—so we ran. Elise was shot in the back, I in the shoulder. I knew she was dead, so I kept going and somehow I escaped. I was numb with misery after her death, but I kept going. I did get on a fishing boat, and I did get transferred to a Swedish boat. I was befriended by a fisherman’s wife, who hid me from just about everyone. You never knew if someone was a German sympathiser, you see, even there. I worked at whatever I could and after the war I came here, but I was very ill with TB. So I have been in hospital for three years. I am cured and fit now, so I need to work.’