I have just read a heart-wrenching story on Gather by my good friend Debbie G. She hasn't been feeling well lately, and this is the first article by her I have found in a long time. It is called Buttermilk Pie. It is spellbinding. She was a hospice nurse, and this tells about a visit to one of her patients. If you read it I know you will be impressed too, It reminded me of a patient in my own life during my brief attempt to become a nurse.
It was my mother who urged me to be a nurse because as a child I was always trying to mend the ailments of cats and dogs and critters that I came in contact with. In high school I had taken college prep courses including three years of Latin and two years of French, but chances of finding funds for college were slim to none for a farmer's daughter in 1940, and I had no strong ambition one way or another. I thought vaguely that if I couldn't work with horses, maybe if I was a nurse, I could meet and marry a cowboy who had horses. I was terribly immature for my age, and had read too many western novels. Nursing school was OK with me. I had to do something to earn my living and medicine interested me.
At 18 I entered nursing school at St. Luke's Hospital at 115th St. in New York in February 1941 in a class of 16 student nurses. We were issued uniforms of voluminous blue dresses with long sleeves and buttoned cuffs. We had a stiffly starched big apron to go over it and a pretty pleated cap of a gauzy material to perch on top of our neatly confined hair.
The ward where student nurses started was a charity ward that served the area of Harlem and Morningside Heights. Paying patients had much better quarters elsewhere in the hospital. Our ward was just one large rectangular room with curtains between the beds.
I can't remember for sure, but I think we started right off with four courses of study and four or more hours ward duty. The courses required homework, and a presentation based on the homework was required each morning before we started serving breakfast trays to the patients. After the patients had eaten we collected the trays, started making beds, and cleaning up the patients. We also had to clean the huge and nasty bathroom and the place where bedpans were emptied. I guess those awful jobs were to bolster us for the blood and gore to come.
There were no showers for the patients and we usually gave only sponge bathes while the patient remained in bed. We even gave shampoos to bed-ridden patients with a rubber sheet rolled into a sort of basin. Bed rest was the order of the day and patients were not urged to get up and walk. Our massages, using petroflage and efflourage (I think that is how to spell it) were supposed to substitute for exercise I guess. It wasn't long before we were giving enemas to patients. Enemas were popular in those days, both in the hospital and at home, and that brings me to the story of the blue-haired lady.
I think I had been a student nurse about four months when among my four or five daily patients, I was assigned a pretty little old lady of about 70 years old. People seemed older at 70 in 1941 than they do now. She was a small lady, very polite and soft-spoken, and I remember her sad blue eyes and lovely pale complexion. She wore her hair short with a neat permed hair-do that had just the right shade of blue rinse popular then to keep white hair from appearing too yellow. She had a friendly way of talking that I liked. She said that she had been a teacher, she had never married, and had no living family. No one came to visit her that I saw.
I don't remember what ailment caused her hospitalization, but probably it was a blockage. At any rate I was assigned to give her an ordinary soap and water enema. I did, and it didn't work. The doctor ordered another one that was still unsuccessful. The doctor, who was probably a medical student himself, was busy seeing other patients, but he ordered another and another. Other types of enemas were tried, oil for one. I can't remember the specifics, but nothing worked. Altogether I gave that poor woman seven enemas in the space of a few hours, and none of them worked. Most of the liquid from the enemas remained inside of her.
When my suppertime came, I ran the usual route from the women's medical ward down three flights of stairs, through the underground passage under the street to the nurse's residence. I ran up two more flights of stairs to the cafeteria where I filled my tray with the delicious food they served us, ate it, had seconds, and ran back to the ward - all in one half hour.
My little old lady seemed almost comatose. She could only whisper ‘yes' or ‘no' answers when I asked her if she had used a bedpan yet. She was obviously uncomfortable, but was not complaining as I thought she should have been. Somehow I felt to blame, although I only did what I was ordered to do. I knew in my bones that she should have been given more attention or tests or something other than those enemas.
My duty ended at 9 p.m. but I couldn't bring myself to leave that defenseless lady, and I stayed and sat by her bedside holding her hand as she had asked me to do. It brings tears to my eyes all these 60 years later as I think how hard I prayed that lovely lady would live. But she didn't. My head nurse made me leave at 11 p.m. and when I came back in the morning the bed was empty. She had died in the night and been removed to the morgue in the basement.
The time came soon after that when I was transferred to the men's surgical ward. Another patient who had terminal cancer made me feel concerned. Only this one was a good-looking 30-year-old Greyhound bus driver who got a very wrong idea about me. I was terribly embarrassed when the head nurse scolded me for giving him too much attention.
Not long after that I was left alone on the ward of about 34 patients with an orderly who stayed out of sight when a patient knocked over his blood transfusion IV, and I needed him. After I cleaned that up, as well as a couple of incontinent patients, I issued medications (no narcotics) and I accidentally gave someone milk of magnesia instead of mineral oil. The head nurse really reamed me out for that. Of course she was right, I could have killed someone giving them the wrong medicine if I had been stronger stuff.
That did it for me. I knew I was too scatterbrained, and too inept at dealing with people to ever be trusted to be a nurse. I quit. I went home and worked for a while in factories before I joined the Navy WAVES. I never went home again, because my parents got a divorce and sold the farm. But that is another story.
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Comments: 24 ( 1 removed by Ruth MacGill )
This story is one that pops into my head from time to time. Memories like this are a lot like looking through an old photograph album. I can still see in my mind's eye the young probationer nursing student that I once was, sitting by the bedside of a woman I had come to care about in a very short time. She lives on anonymously in my memory.
Thanks for this story Ruth. Now I'm off to read Debbie G.
Very nice story, Ruth.
There was another thing about that nurse. A couple of years before I left home to go to nursing school, I accompanied my parents to a party put on by friends. They lived in an historically old house that was going to be lost forever when they flooded the area for a reservoir. It was winter and the hosts had fixed a torch-lit skiing slope. I had the best time of my life. There was an attractive young man there in his twenties, and he made me feel pretty by giving me attention I had never experienced before. He succeeded in making a 16 year old girl feel attractive, and I know it was a sort of kindness done on purpose.
It turned out my first head nurse, the one in charge of the women's medical ward, was his fiancee. When you figure the odds in that overpopulated part of the country, that was quite a cooincidence. They were married by the time I started nursing school. Somehow she knew who I was and maybe that gave me a head start with her. I know I disappointed her when I quit.
I remember my mom coming home from the hospital one night, covered in blood- including her shoes. She calmly showered and changed as if it was nothing.
I knew right then that nurses were special people, but that I could never do that. They have to deal with a lot of things most people would never want to see.