Sixty Years a Nurse. Mary Hazard
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Название: Sixty Years a Nurse
Автор: Mary Hazard
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008118389
isbn:
So I was there next morning, exhausted and trembling, and it wasn’t just Sister, but Matron, too, I had to face. I had to have a clean apron on, and stand, with my scrubbed hands behind my back, like a very naughty schoolgirl. Matron wiped the floor with me. ‘You know there are rules, nurse? And rules are meant to be followed … blah-di-blah-di-blah …’ I wanted to disappear between the floorboards. However, to be fair to her, she did stop and say, towards the end, as I was blowing my nose loudly, that she would have a word with Night Sister as I shouldn’t have been left entirely on my own while I was training. So she was actually quite fair to me in the end, and I had to learn yet another painful lesson in the importance of sticking to the damned rules … My mother would have been so proud.
There was a more tragic death one night, however, which made me very sad and again made me realise how important it was to be thorough and observant as a nurse. A young lad of about fifteen was brought in after having a fall on the Common; it wasn’t clear how, but he was probably larking about with some friends and had fallen out of a tree and broken his ankle badly. He was taken to the men’s medical ward, but mysteriously got worse, as he developed a very high temperature. His ankle was set, but still he worsened, and we discovered he was dying from tetanus (lockjaw), which was incurable at the time. However, it was only when he was examined during the post-mortem that it was found that he had a deep graze on the back of his head. This has gone horribly septic and had done for him. It was appalling to us all that this injury had been missed. More importantly, it felt terrible that such a young life was snuffed out so quickly from something that should have been dealt with at the time, and which, today, would be so easily treatable with antibiotics. This kind of tragic incident affected me deeply, as I was only a teenager myself, and made me feel that life was somehow, sometimes, hanging only by a very fine thread. It also made me realise how important it was to be thorough in the medical profession, and how the smallest thing could turn out to be important, especially if it was neglected. This made me feel much more responsible, and assiduous, when dealing with wounds after this experience.
Sister Tutor, who was a very kindly woman, could see that we were deeply affected by this kind of encounter with death – a boy who had died too soon out of both an accident and human frailty. She would tell us that we would have to get used to seeing all sorts of things in our hospital lives, and that dealing with death was a major part of it all. Sometimes we would see things that would upset us for days, other times we’d see something that would stay with us for life. Even though some of the sisters and staff nurses were quite callous and hardened, and barely paid any attention to the dead and dying, they nonetheless respected that there needed to be a dignified way of dealing with the passing of life.
Helping people to die was seen as an important aspect of the job, and so Sister Tutor taught us how to approach it with human kindness and thoughtfulness. One day, shortly after the incident of the youth dying from the hidden head injury, she sat us all down and said, ‘Don’t ever let someone die alone. We didn’t come into this world alone, and we should never leave this world alone. When someone is approaching their final hours it’s so important to sit and be with them as they go, especially if they have no family.’ Indeed, she taught us to sit and ‘mop their brows, comfort them’, she would say, ‘hold their hands and soothe them’. She taught us to care, to spend time with people, to make them comfortable, to talk to them and to ease their passage into death. She was a wonderful, sweet influence and a nice woman, to boot, and her important lessons about something that had frightened me a great deal, at first, have stayed with me all the rest of my nursing life.
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