Читать книгу Sixty Years a Nurse - Mary Hazard - Страница 10

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 this. My terrible injection technique was causing him almost more trouble than the leg injury that he had come in for in the first place. I felt absolutely awful, and was in floods of tears. Sweet Jesus, I was hopeless, I would never make it – my mother was right, I was utterly useless. I apologised profusely to Mr Brown, and to my utter amazement he was quite accepting about it. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It could have been worse.’ He could see I was genuinely distraught. Worse? I didn’t think it could be, and I seriously considered if I was really up to the job for the first time since arriving.

I was carpeted by Sister, who was a real dragon. ‘What on earth do you think you were doing, Nurse Powell?’ She went on and on, saying, ‘We obviously can’t let you anywhere near injections yet,’ as I blubbered in front of her, wanting the floor to open up. I explained that I hadn’t wanted to hurt poor Mr Brown, and instead I’d ended up giving him a whole load of pain. She barked at me to practise again on Araminta and stop whining. It was so humiliating as everyone on the ward knew it was me who had buggered it up and I imagined all the patients refusing to let me touch them from now on. Her? Oh, no, I don’t want her, Sister. Bring me a proper nurse. She’s the Devil incarnate. I could just hear it. Wisely, Sister moved me onto another ward the next day, telling me to ‘Toughen up, Powell.’ I certainly never gave another botched injection like that again; I learned I had to be firm and decisive from the start. Mr Brown recovered completely, I’m glad to say, and bore me no grudge. Luckily, patients didn’t sue in those days or I’d certainly have been up for the chop.

There was another time I showed myself up badly, too. We had to go to the morgue, which was also on the ground floor at the back of the hospital, and observe a post-mortem as part of our training. I was very nervous about this as I had not seen a dead body as yet, although Araminta had been taken apart and put back together like a giant female plastic Meccano set several times over. I was very intimate with her by now – but a real dead body? This brought back horrors of Clonmel cemetery and the terror I always felt there after dark with my wild imagination seeing grisly ghouls and hellfire and damnation everywhere. I was never very good with horror films, ghosts or anything spooky like that. Even the thought of the Putney Common convict ghost made me shiver, and I tried to put it out of my mind as much as I could.

So one cool winter afternoon eight of us trotted along to the morgue, feeling we were going to the gallows. We were all extremely nervous at what might be about to happen, and getting each other nervous, plus my overactive imagination was working away, as usual. I didn’t really know what I was in for until the mortician, a Mr Tayler, a lofty, serious-faced consultant, pulled back the shroud and there was a stark naked middle-aged man, the colour of putty: stone cold dead. I could feel my knees going immediately, so I crossed my arms and wrapped my fingers tight round my elbows to try to keep myself from falling over. There were lots of shiny, ordinary-looking surgical implements laid out, like a chisel, a carving knife, and then I espied something like a garden saw. Surely he wasn’t going to use those? I closed my eyes and swallowed.

When I opened them again, the mortician picked the saw up cheerfully and without further ado deftly hacked through the top of the man’s head. I stood there open-mouthed, and was amazed to see his brain fluid, like a grey, wrinkled, deflated football, which he scooped neatly in a silver bowl, explaining all the while about the nature of brain matter. Four of the assembled nurses went down immediately, like skittles, and one ran out, holding her hand over her mouth. Completely unperturbed, Mr Tayler continued his butchery, talking coolly all the while. I couldn’t really concentrate and could feel my gorge rising, but I was determined to see it through, so dug my fingers into my arms even harder. Then Mr Tayler got his scalpel and cut the poor man’s body from the neck to his pubes and suddenly all his guts were tumbling out, like miles and miles of grey sausages into a great silver tray alongside the slab … that was it, I was done for: I felt my knees buckle as the room spun round and I was sick as a dog on the floor.

When I came round I was outside on a chair, along with five other white-faced nurses, most of whom were bent double, holding their heads in their hands, and groaning. We were all told, in no uncertain terms, by a tough staff nurse, that we had to pull ourselves together straight away and get back in there. We were wasting valuable time, and this was part of our training – we were here to learn and we’d better get used to it. So after a few more woozy minutes and a sip of water we all had to troop back in and carry on watching as Mr Tayler cheerfully continued his controlled carnage, whether we liked it or not.

After a tough experience like my first injection, or the nauseating post-mortems, we took refuge in each other’s rooms at night to put the world to rights and, literally, let our hair down. I had begun to make some firm friends in those first few months: Rosie, Hanse, Magdelena, Christe and Susan, who would keep me sane over the next three years one way or another. We would all club together and nip out to the local pub and get us a couple of bottles of Merrydown cider, our favourite tipple, and a couple of packs of Woodbines (often from Bert the porter). This was standard fare for a good nattery debrief. We’d pile into my room (nearly always mine for some reason), and we’d be on my bed, cackling, gassing, recounting the horrors of the day until lights out, and beyond.

One night I drank a bit too much (as was my wont), and I was desperate for a pee. We had the windows open to waft the smoke out (smoking was totally forbidden, of course), and I realised I was too far gone to get up and find the lavatories at the end of the corridor. Being clumsy, I would probably alert Home Sister Matthews by staggering about, and then we’d all be for it. So, we closed the windows, giggling, and I decided I would pee in the sink to save time. This increased the suppressed laughter ten-fold, especially as I tried to hitch up my skirt and bum onto the tiny hand-basin and position myself to pee properly without flooding the floor. ‘Oh, Mary, be careful,’ Susan was just saying when there was an almighty ‘craa-aack’ and the sink came away from the wall, tipping me onto the floor, with my pants round my knees in a pool of water. The four witnesses fell off the bed in complete hysterics, and we all lay helplessly on the wooden floor for about five minutes until we heard Home Sister’s footsteps begin to clip down the corridor. ‘Sssshhhh,’ I said, and everyone mimicked, ‘Sssshhhh!’ and we all lay there, panting and trying to suppress our mounting hysteria, waiting for Sister to barge in with a torch. Luckily, we heard her feet pause, then begin to retreat, thankfully, once we managed to shut up.

However, next day I had to explain precisely why my sink was hanging off my wall at such a crazy angle. Home Sister fixed me with her beady eye. ‘So, nurse, you were saying about opening the windows?’ ‘Ah, yes, Sister,’ I went on, innocently. ‘Well, it was like this: I put my foot on the sink to get up to open the window as it was stuffy and, well, the sink just gave way …’ Sister peered at me critically for a moment. ‘It’s a considerable amount of weight to put on such a small sink,’ she said, pointedly. ‘Yes, Sister,’ I said, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’m for it, now.’ After another long pause she said, without looking up, ‘Well, kindly stop using your room as a climbing frame from now on, nurse.’ And that was it. She had bought my story, I think, particularly as I had a reputation for being a bit of a clumsy twit. This scene with Sister was recounted to my friends, over yet more Woodbines and Merrydown, and to the accompaniment of yet more giggles, gasps and ‘Oh, Mary’s’ later that night.

1952, the year I hit Putney, was also the year that the first espresso coffee machine came to London. It became ‘cool’ to frequent coffee bars, which were thought to be almost illicit dens of iniquity and heinous vice. In Putney there was a wonderful coffee house called Zeta’s, which was a large shop on the corner, where we would all go on our day off. There was also Mario’s, a lovely old Italian place, that did huge knickerbocker glories, which I thought were marvellous. We would sit there, nursing a coffee in a Pyrex glass cup and saucer, and someone would put music on the Wurlitzer, and it all seemed very sophisticated and grown up to be out alone, spending my own meagre earnings on coffee, Woodbines, cake, ice cream and music. We were always hungry, always thirsty, but we had to live within our means, which were very tight, so there was no other way.

Of course, I loved shopping. Window shopping, mainly, as I had little money and none to spend on clothes. Putney High Street was a broad, posh, leafy road, with lovely shops, and I liked nothing better than to stroll up and down it, lusting after goods. I remember longing for a pair of red stilettos in Saxone’s that cost £3.00 and wondering how long it would take me to save for them. I knew I would have to save for weeks, even months, as, in those days, if you didn’t have the money, you simply didn’t have something you wanted. You had to ‘save up’ and that could take ages and ages. I thought ‘I’m going to have those’ and, eventually, after weeks of saving hard, I did.

I liked fashion a great deal. Back home I had been used to my mother being able to run up anything. She made my fabulous pale strapless green evening dress, which I wore at sixteen to my first grown-up dance in Clonmel, which doubled as my leaving ‘do’. In those days you had one good frock, and one good pair of strappy evening shoes, and they lasted you for years, too. I brought the green dress with me to Putney, in the hope I’d have occasion to wear it one day, and I was always amending it: putting some ribbon on it here, or a corsage or bow, or a little flourish, there. It’s what we did in those ‘make-do-and-mend’ post-war years.

I also bought my first proper two-piece suit in Richard Shops: it was pale grey with a pleated skirt. It was all the rage to have big skirts with net under-petticoats, and to wear gypsy-style blouses on top. Everything was waisted and girly, and I knew I looked good as I had a tiny waist back then. It would all be topped by having a ‘shampoo and set’ at a new, modern hair salon on the High Street, which had those dome hairdryers we sat under in rollers (although this would only happen on very special occasions). I would have to save for a cut and set, and would have one maybe every two or three months or so. Meanwhile, I would snip my fringe myself and, being me, it was usually lop-sided once I’d finished hacking at it in the bathroom mirror.

During these first few months of settling in, I would write dutiful letters home, making my London life sound busy and meaningful, and would make my job sound important (which it was to me). I certainly didn’t tell of the men I saw naked, or the cigarettes and booze, or even what I had encountered on the wards. My mother would write back, telling of local and family news, but would ask almost nothing of my life in England or as a trainee nurse. She simply didn’t want to know. This hurt me, but I knew how proud and stubborn my mother was. So I had to rely on my sisters for the real news from back home. I felt very nostalgic thinking of the lovely rural countryside, the orchards, and my dear sisters, brother and father, and the dogs, but I didn’t miss either my mother, really, or the nuns. And of course, I never asked for money. I certainly knew I would never get any for wasting my time in that ‘Godforsaken Protestant country’, so I didn’t bother asking. I knew that I had to make it on my own, and I was utterly determined to do so, no matter what it cost.