Sixty Years a Nurse. Mary Hazard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of us nurses were taught to do, as preparation for being taken to the morgue. When he was finally finished, I called Staff Nurse to check him over. It had taken me an absolute age, since I had had to keep stopping to blow my nose throughout as I had found the whole thing traumatising. Staff came along briskly and emptied his locker of his worldly goods. There were a couple of packets of Woodbines in there, packs of twenty, which, amazingly, patients were allowed to smoke on the ward. Back then it was thought that smoking calmed their nerves … there was no thought of cigarettes being a health hazard; in fact, quite the opposite. To my horror Staff said, ‘Let’s take these Woodbines. His relatives won’t notice,’ and with that she pocketed them. I was amazed at her attitude, but I didn’t object. I’d been in enough trouble for one night. However, I thought it was a very bad thing to do, and I didn’t feel comfortable being ‘party’ to our crime. Yet, once we were on our break, and Staff got the fags out, I smoked a couple. I really needed a smoke after all that – I was gasping.

      I think during that first year I was often naïve about the rules, or I failed to follow the strict regulations, as I was used to always trying to skirt round them back home. It was force of habit for me to be a bit rebellious, I suppose. Also, a means of survival. I tried to be good, and tried to be the best trainee that I could possibly be, but I had a mischievous streak and often acted on impulse or said things without thinking them through. However, I was still really desperate to prove my mother’s prediction about me being hopeless and a quitter was wrong. I was not going to be sent home, tail between my legs. I was going to succeed: I had to, as it was a matter of life and death. Thankfully, some of the more experienced nurses took pity on me. Sometimes we spent hours hunched over the sinks on night duty scraping poo and vomit off sheets with our scrubbing brushes and bare hands, which got sore and rough. We were scrubbing and cleaning endlessly; one of my more experienced nurse friends, Beryl, used to joke that pushing the enormous floor mop would increase her breasts, so we all sang a comical ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust’ with every strenuous bush stroke across the floor.

      We would also spend hours folding linen in the linen cupboards, and if I was on nights it would get very warm and soporific in there. I had a pal, a third-year nurse, Sandy, who surprised me one night by clearing a space on the enormous second shelf (which was about ten foot long and two foot deep) and telling me to get up on the shelf, and lie down to take forty winks. ‘No,’ I protested. ‘If the Beetle finds out, she’ll have my guts for garters.’ ‘Go on with you,’ Sandy encouraged. ‘You’re all in. Have an hour. I’ll wake you up.’ I could see she meant it, so I did. It became a regular occurrence after that when I was on nights. I’d clamber up, and be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail (as we used to say). Sandy would be shaking me and I’d be down a dark tunnel, back in Clonmel, trying to avoid the whack of my mother’s large wooden spoon over my head. ‘Get up, Mary, you lazy girl,’ Sandy would be whispering. ‘Time to get up – you’ve had an hour’s kip.’ For a moment I’d think it was one of my lovely sisters, Una, and then I’d focus on starched sheets and pillows in neat white piles, and it would all come flooding back to me. Sweet Jesus, I was in that linen cupboard. However, those snatched naps were a real life-saver.

      Putney Hospital, being on the edge of Barnes Common, which was a huge geographical area, meant we got all sorts drifting in, night and day. Tramps, children, couples, basically anyone who had come to grief in the open air or on the road, some way or another, were brought in. The ambulance men (and they were mainly men then) were aware that I was a ‘new girl’ and sometimes took advantage of it, especially when I was left on duty in casualty all alone. Another bitter cold night in the middle of winter during my first year it turned out that I was the only nurse in casualty left on duty. It was sometimes like that, as we were often not that busy at night. Putney Hospital had been set up originally to serve the local community, so it was not a really hectic place serving central London, like Barts (St Bartholomew’s) could be. It was part of Westminster Hospital, so we did send patients there when necessary, such as when a case was more serious or needed more complex equipment or nursing.

      However, this evening Night Sister was at dinner and the house doctor had gone to sleep in the downstairs ‘on call’ bedrooms allocated to night staff. He could be called and woken up in an emergency, and Sister floated round the hospital at night, but I was supposed to cope the best I could with most situations, on my own, otherwise. When an ambulance turned up at the entrance the rule was that I had to go out to it and see who was being brought in. Usually the ambulance men would say, ‘Got a heart attack here, nurse,’ or ‘It’s a car crash,’ or whatever. I think this night they saw me coming. It was freezing and I’d thrown on my cape, but was shivering terribly in the wind. The rule was I wasn’t supposed to accept any patient without seeing them first in the ambulance. The ambulance men, George and Charlie, whom I’d seen before on nights, indicated that because it was so bitter cold they hadn’t got the time or inclination to let me clamber aboard and check out their patient. I was also rapidly turning into a human icicle, so I went back into casualty as the two men carried in this fella on their stretcher all wrapped in a red blanket. ‘Found him on Hammersmith Bridge,’ explained George. ‘Think it’s a heart attack, probably.’ And with that they were gone.

      So I was stood there, next to this man, wrapped in a red ambulance blanket. He looked frozen, poor old chap. He had grey whiskers and bushy grey eyebrows, and was in a brown raincoat and suit. I folded back the sides of the blanket and thought, ‘Sweet Jesus, he looks really terrible,’ so then I felt for his pulse. Nothing. I felt again, and then put my head on his chest, listening for his breathing. Not a sausage. Oh my God! He was dead! Oh Lord, what should I do? Sweet Jesus, I was really for it now! I looked around the casualty department and absolutely no one was around; it was like a ghost town, as it was now four in the morning. Thing was, the rule was I was not authorised to take in a dead body; it was absolutely against regulations. This had been drummed into us as trainees over and over and over again. Had I been listening? Well, obviously not.

      I was supposed to go out to the ambulance and assess the patient, then if they were deceased they were termed Brought-in-Dead (BID) and I was supposed to decline them, so they went straight to the morgue, or even to another hospital altogether. We had been told many times that it was too much paperwork, as a BID involved the police, the mortuary, the coroner, tracking down relatives and so on. If they were found dead in the street or died in the ambulance they were never brought in. That was the rule. It was a huge job and we were not supposed to touch it with a barge pole. So there I was with a dead body on a trolley to dispose of – a poor old BID – and I hadn’t the foggiest where to start sorting out such a mess. I could feel the panic rising: Who could I turn to? Where would I start? I pulled the blanket down further and saw his grey, frozen face with icy whiskery eyebrows. Dead all right. As a doornail. Jesus, what was I to do? In those days there was no resuscitation equipment, like defibrillators or anything like. I stood there, panting quietly – what on earth should I do next? I couldn’t go and get Night Sister and say casually, ‘Oh, by the way, Sister, I have a dead body in Casualty.’ She’d absolutely kill me. So thinking quickly now, I wrapped him up again in his nice red blanket, so that he looked like a giant Christmas cracker on his trolley, and then pushed him into a corner, trying to hide him to buy some more thinking time. Suddenly I heard Night’s Sister’s clipped tones behind me: ‘Any developments, nurse?’ I jumped out of my skin. ‘Sorry? … Er, no, Sister, everything’s fine … This man … I don’t think he’s very well … actually, Sister …’ But it was no good, Sister was already peering past me curiously at the red-wrapped bundle that I was desperately trying to hide behind me all the while.

      I couldn’t stop her as she advanced towards the stretcher. ‘What on earth is this doing here? That’s an ambulance blanket – why didn’t you give it back when they brought him in?’ And with that she pulled the blanket down: ‘Jesus Christ, he’s dead,’ she said. ‘He’s not,’ I said, covering wildly, ‘surely not. The ambulance men just brought him in. I was just … I didn’t realise …’ ‘Brought him in?’ She was shouting now, and I could see her eyes beginning to pop out in their characteristic way. ‘Nurse, you know that you are supposed to go out to the ambulance to assess СКАЧАТЬ