Chapter 27 Settling In–Settling Out

                                          Chapter 27   Settling In–Settling Out.

Not being allowed to do much housework when growing up wasn’t such a good preparation for adulthood. When I went nursing I had to look after my own clothes and I really didn't have a clue. A new pure-wool dress which I loved, I ruined by boiling. Goodbye woolen dress!

    Nevertheless, as my mother often told me, experience is a great teacher.  I think it's just as well I became a nurse, for it brought me out of myself. Before I turned 17, a young chap known to Larry asked me out on a date. He had walked me home from a dance one time and I thought he would be fine to go out with. He was, but I was at least two inches taller and vastly embarrassed. In those days I would never have married someone shorter than me, which is another demonstration of the little prejudices I had.

     Usually run by one of the churches or other similar organisations to raise money, a debutante ball was not uncommon in those days, especially in the country. Another nurse and I decided to make our debut. My friend Wendy, a comptometer operator from Brisbane, who had come to Assville Hospital to change her career, sometimes visited our place in Green Springs, and she asked Larry to be her partner. I asked a tall good looking young man I’d met while a member of the Young Country Party, and he readily agreed, as a gentleman would. We had to attend rehearsals to learn to dance the Pride of Erin and other dances, and to practice the protocol for the parade of debs. All the debutantes danced in a circle. We all wore long white ball gowns and Wendy and I ordered our material from Dion's in Brisbane, and had our dresses made by a local dressmaker. My dress was made of pony skin satin with a wide border of Chantilly lace on the skirt. A description of all the girls and their dresses was written up in the local paper and the reporter referred to me as ‘tall slender Gayle.’ Whoo-hoo!

    I loved going to dances and balls and in those days, in the absence of other entertainment, they were held fairly frequently. Assville had a huge dance hall with a supper room at the side, owned by the local council and known as the Shire Hall. On the night of the debutante ball, our partners escorted us to supper and we all sat down at long tables and were waited on with tea and cakes.

    Considering my naivete, I settled well into the nurses’ home and the hospital routine, and carried on as best I could in the dowdy uniforms, trying hard not to show any embarrassment, but sure everyone was staring at me. An older girl with her eyes on Larry finally gave me the address of a uniform shop in Brisbane, and as soon as I had saved enough from my six pounds a week wages,  (about $12 at the time,) I ordered new uniforms to be sent by mail order.

    I was learning a lot about life in that first year at Assville, though still painfully shy and naive. Most of the staff were lovely and I got on well with them, but at odd times I was taken advantage of.

    One particular junior nurse, senior to me, asked me one day, "Come to the toilet, Gayle."  I wasn’t brave enough to refuse, but when she got there, she did her hair and put on fresh make up.

    I knew she was just dithering about to get out of work on the wards, but I lacked the nerve to argue. One day when we were both off duty, she asked me to go for a walk to the shops with her. On the thirty-minute walk she suggested we change shoes. Again I was too  stupid to refuse, and spent the morning wearing her sloppy, old, untidy moccasins, while she swanned around in my elegant white high-heeled scuffs.

    The most humiliating problem I had during the teen years, was a severe case of acne.  There was hardly a person I met who didn't offer me a solution to the problem, and I tried them all, much to the detriment of my skin. One time I saw a remedy advertised called F33 capsules. To the sorrow of my wallet, I tried them too, but to no avail. The last treatment I tried while in Assville, was cooking salt. I religiously washed my face with it for three months, and achieved nothing.
                                                 
                                                                                   
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     One registered nurse with one trainee worked a week of night duty at Assville Hospital, but from the very beginning I was unable to sleep much during the day. Despite a darkened room, I woke after three or four hours. On duty, walking through a darkened ward surrounded by sleeping people, it is a strange feeling. It’s unnatural and weird, and I never quite got used to it.

    My clearest memory of night duty is of sitting in the sister's office during a severe winter, huddled in front of a double bar heater with my shins burning and my back shivering. Given long enough, the little office became an oven, but strictly on the half-hour we left it to do rounds. This involved checking on each patient separately. We walked from bed to bed with a torch directed towards our uniforms, so as not to startle anyone who was awake.

     Each ward was quite large, containing about eight beds, and in the middle of the room was a small wood stove. The wards-man would have made sure that there was sufficient wood stacked beside the stove for the night, and on each round it was the nurses duty to add a piece of wood to the fire. I gingerly opened the little door at the top, dropped in the piece of wood fearing the noise it would make, and then scuttled back to the office to get warm again. The round included the maternity ward which involved a long walk along open verandas. One night the sister who worked with me left a thermometer on a verandah rail in the open air. The temperature was -3°C!
                                                       
    That little district hospital would have been a drug-takers paradise by today's standards. We gave out the daily medications from a small cabinet on the wall in the women's ward. If someone accidentally took the key away in a pocket of their uniform, we unlocked the cabinet doors with a hairpin!  One of the drugs was amphetamine, which was given to increase the patient’s appetite. Only drugs like morphia and pethidine were kept in the sisters’ office under lock and key. Heart drugs like digitalis were also kept in that little cabinet in the ladies ward. Drugs at that time were not a problem in the community and no one could have guessed that in the future amphetamine would be in demand by drug takers.

    One of our first jobs as a junior nurse was learning to test the urine samples that the night nurse had collected. The samples were poured from the urinals or bedpans into glass jars and labelled. The junior on dayshift found them on the shelf in an alcove we called ‘wee ally.’ The testing was quite simple, using Clinistix, and the hygrometer for specific gravity.
   
    There were at least three patients dying of cancer when I first started work.That was a culture shock. One was a young married woman of only twenty-seven who died of breast cancer, and two of our close male neighbours near the farm died from bladder cancer. Their urine samples were blood stained bright red. One old lady, delirious from strong pain drugs, believed her curtains were on fire. I had to draw the blinds to prevent the afternoon sun shining in her room.

     I nursed two epilepsy cases, one so aggressive as a result of his medication he  sometimes became violent, smashing chairs or whatever was at hand. When his behaviour reached uncontrollable levels, it was necessary to inject him with intramuscular paraldehide,  also used for violent alcoholics suffering from delirium tremens, (DT’s).

    In those days when a patient had a seizure, accepted treatment was to quickly place a padded spoon between their teeth to stop them biting their tongues. After some years this method was found to be wholly ineffective and impractical. One day during my shift a young woman with Down’s Syndrome had a seizure while a younger nurse was bathing her. Using presence of mind, she quickly stuffed a small wooden nailbrush between the girls teeth. I was impressed!

    Halfway through my second year at Assville, I realised I had learnt pretty much all the hospital had to offer, and yearned to go to a bigger one. Some of the other nurses were also restless. I applied for a transfer to a bigger hospital 120 miles away. Two other nurses transferred out to larger regional towns. Later on, the nurse who used the nailbrush on the epileptic patient transferred across as well and joined me. I was delighted as she was, and still is, a good friend.