Sixty Years a Nurse. Mary Hazard

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СКАЧАТЬ (what we would now call cancer). It seemed so undignified and unnecessary to me for simple cases to be next to fatal ones. Then, if a man had to be shaved ‘down there’, I learned to beg Percy the porter to come and do it with a wet razor. Imagine my horror at being asked to exfoliate (yes, standard practice in disease prevention or pre-operative) a man’s privates, when, as an innocent seventeen-year-old, I’d never seen a boy naked at all. But there were times, during those first months, when I had to do it all alone, and I was a quivering wreck, hoping and praying to God that my hand wouldn’t slip at the wrong moment, and in the wrong place (I could hear Sister Margaret shouting at me that I was a ‘clumsy oaf and a silly girl’, which made it all so much worse).

      So for the first three months in training school, being taught by Sister Tutor, I sat and took copious notes and absorbed as much knowledge as I could. It was all anatomy, physiology, hygiene and everything else thrown in. We had a large school room with a pink rubber woman dummy called Araminta that we had to practise all sorts of unspeakable things on. The walls were lined with shelves with things like a twenty-foot tapeworm suspended in formaldehyde, or miscarried babies in bottles. It could be a bit gruesome. But I soon got used to it, as I soon got used to everything else about hospital life. I can honestly say these months were spent swimming in blood, poo, vomit, wee and absolutely everything else that comes out of the body: it was a real baptism of bodily fluids.

3

       Settling In

      There was so much to learn in those first weeks and months that I was in a constant whirl of activity, confusion and, often, amusement and bemusement with my fellow trainees. We worked six-day weeks and there was a huge amount to learn, a great deal to absorb, mentally, and also to master, physically. For some reason, I was often clumsy, and I was also very naïve, although always very enthusiastic. So, I would find myself being barked at by the Day Sister Burton (‘No, Powell, you don’t do it that way, silly girl!’) or Staff Nurse (‘For goodness’ sake, Powell, you’re not wrapping a Christmas present – retie your bandage properly, now!’) It was like being with my mother or Sister Margaret all over again – I could never get things right, or so it seemed.

      We had to observe the doctors’ rounds on the wards each week and I was absolutely fascinated by everything. We trailed behind the doctors and consultants in their crisp white coats and pin-striped suits, stethoscopes slung round their necks, as they pronounced on the patients and snapped their orders with military precision. We were like well-behaved little goslings following behind giant ganders. Staff and Sister would always be turned out perfectly, in smart navy uniforms, and would be beside the doctors, silently obedient, and at the ready, with notes and charts at hand, ready to answer their queries or to jump to it, as they talked loftily over the patients’ heads. It was all very formal, intimidating – and bewildering. We nurses had to make sure everything was tickety-boo before the doctors did their rounds: everything had to be spotless, tidy and gleaming; sheets neatly tucked in, patients washed and hair combed. Their lockers had to be clean, with fresh water in their jugs and their flower vases refreshed. Sometimes I thought we made the beds so tightly that I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had cut off the circulation in the legs and arms of the poor people strapped neatly into bed, like strangulated sausages in hot-dog buns.

      Back in our training school on the ground floor of the hospital (safely away from the real patients) we had our large rubber dolly, Araminta, to practise clinical procedures on. She lay, smiling her unchanging red-lipped smile, on a bed, and she could be zipped open from chin to pubic bone, so we could take all of her plastic internal organs out: liver, spleen, stomach, intestines, gall bladder, kidneys, bladder, and so on. We spent quite some time taking Araminta apart and putting her back together again: it was quite a game. We also had to pretend to ‘bed bath’ Araminta, and change her rubber undersheet, which involved rolling her onto her side, sliding the ‘drawsheets’ out from under, and rolling her back again. She sometimes rolled onto the floor, which, obviously, we knew we’d have to avoid with real patients (if at all possible). However, Araminta didn’t object to her mistreatment and sometimes we felt quite sorry for the punishment we gave her as we also had to practise giving her injections, which I hated doing. Back then syringes were made of glass and metal, and had to be re-used, so they were boiled in big metal sterilisers, which were bubbling away in the corner of the medical rooms all the time. Everything had to be boiled and sterilised endlessly, and was rejected as sub-standard if it wasn’t perfectly clean.

      Then one day, towards the end of my first three months, Sister Burton told me I was going onto the men’s surgical ward and I was going to give my first injection. I nearly fainted. A real injection into a real person. Not Araminta? No, surely not. I wasn’t ready, was I? Sister being Sister was blunt, business-like and to the point: ‘Nurse Powell, you will give the patient his injection – now stop fussing and get on with it. You know what to do.’ So I approached Mr Brown’s bed gingerly. I stood, holding the metal kidney-shaped dish with the syringe rattling in it, while he read his newspaper, totally unaware of my inexperience. He was a good-looking, fair-haired man of about thirty with a deep, badly infected cut on his leg from a work accident. He was sitting there, all innocence, in his striped pyjamas with no idea what was about to be unleashed on him – all-fingers-and-thumbs-me.

      Mr Brown looked up and saw me looking at him fixedly, just as I felt a presence begin hovering behind me. I looked round and there was Sister, glaring. Oh my God, I had to get on with it. I pulled the screens round the bed on their squeaky wheels while I was frantically trying to remember what I’d done to poor old Araminta. Sister had told me the injection, which was a thick antibiotic mixture, had to go in the outer quadrant of Mr Brown’s right buttock. Buttock! Sweet Jesus, I’d never seen a man naked before and now I was going to be looking at this poor man’s bum, and inject him, to boot. Despite my nervousness, I tried to brazen it out: ‘All right, Mr Brown, I have to give you this little injection, so could you roll over and pull down your pyjama bottoms?’

      I couldn’t believe I was saying this to a real, live man, and was even more amazed when he rolled over obediently, and did just that. Luckily, he couldn’t see my hand shaking as I got the large syringe out of the dish and prepared it for him. Little it was not. I swabbed his right buttock with antiseptic and cotton wool, trying not to take in the smooth brown and hairy skin of his muscular body. I was looking at a naked man’s posterior, my first, but was seriously trying to concentrate on the job in hand (as it were). I filled the syringe with the thick Streptomycin with trembling fingers, and pushed out the air bubble, just as I’d been taught. Surely nothing could really go wrong?

      Thing was, I was terrified of hurting him and I stood rooted to the spot for a minute trying to remember all that Sister Tutor had told me when I was torturing Araminta. Mr Brown was perturbed by my hesitation. ‘Anything wrong, nurse?’ he asked, innocently, trying to peer round over his shoulder. ‘No, no, nothing, Mr Brown,’ I stuttered. ‘No, not at all – just turn round, lie there and relax.’ And with that I lobbed the heavy glass syringe at poor Mr Brown’s right buttock, rather like a dart at a dart board, and it went in a bit, and then hung out of his bum at a ghastly angle. I knew it wasn’t in right, especially as he yelped, then hollered, loudly, and to cover my embarrassment I just syringed the viscous fluid in as fast as I could. It should have gone deep in his muscle; instead I injected it all under his skin. Poor Mr Brown was groaning as I could see a ball forming under his epidermis, like a ping-pong ball. Oh sweet Jesus! I tried to make it better by rubbing his buttock a great deal, and sort of massaging it; then I asked him to turn over and hoped for the best. The poor man looked pained, as he pulled his pyjamas up, but I tried to cheer him up as I tucked him in tightly before getting away as fast as I could.

      Next day, I was really for it. Poor Mr Brown had now developed a deeply infected buttock. I was taken back to him, by Sister, and made to look: his buttock had gone black, and the place I’d injected had formed an ulcer. There was now a large hole which had to be packed. Mr Brown got really ill after СКАЧАТЬ