Chapter 28 From Boring Efficiency to Hell on Earth

                                 CHAPTER 28 From Boring Efficiency to Hell on Earth

    If Assville had been a culture shock, the big general hospital, from here on referred to as BGH, of 1963, was hell on earth. Their methods were vastly different. I now found all the ward sinks were supplied with pHisoHex dispensers and before dressing a wound we simply washed our hands with that strong smelling, creamy white lotion. It wasn't long before I found myself being ticked off for my controversial treatment methods, and was sent back to the PTS (preliminary training school), to learn procedures.

    I now rushed from the nurses home across to start work half an hour early, and left, more often than not, half an hour late. I'd never walked so fast in all my life, or worked so hard. Unfortunately the hospital was always short of equipment, especially cloth drapes, which were autoclaved in the operating theatre utility room. I found myself in an impossible situation, not allowed to work without drapes, but not having enough to cover the trays for the wound dressings. And wounds we had plenty of!

    In my first week, I was rostered on the men's surgical ward where I was put out in the back section as the treatment nurse. Every patient had an infected wound! And they were usually post-operative. Every day I had at least eight wounds to clean and have draped ready for inspection before the doctors’ rounds at 8:30 a.m. I spent my life running, (I could have won an Olympic walking race,) between that ward and the theatre begging for sterile drapes. All the nurses talked about how much infection there was in the hospital, and how short of equipment we were. 

    In Assville, I had never seen an infected wound, now I never saw a clean one! Almost every operation site broke down with infection. The first patient I encountered in my dirty back ward, was a sixteen-year-old youth who had a wound in his side the size of a fist. In the first place, all he'd had was an appendicectomy!

     Some of the ward sisters were irrationally strict and perpetually angry, and often just downright nasty. One or two were friendly and fair, most were plainly prejudiced because I had come from a country hospital. I pined for some other career and wrote endless letters to places like airlines and defence forces asking about jobs. But there was always some reason why, in the end, I stuck to nursing.

    One time after a particularly bad session in the women's medical ward, I ended up sobbing my heart out at the matron's office. However, I was crazy if I thought I was going to get a hearing there. She told me to compose myself while she spoke to the ward sister, and that was that. I was in a bad way though and rang home, determined to leave the hospital. 

    Straightaway, as always, Mum and Dad got in the car and drove the 120 miles over mostly dirt road to where I worked. Dad had bought a Falcon station wagon the year before and while I was so far away he had a mattress made for the back of the car. Every time I had a crisis he and Mum would hastily grab their stuff and drive across that dusty road to visit me to console, cajole, and resolve. They were my soft place to fall. They picked me up and got me started again. Many a night they spent sleeping in the back of the car in a caravan park, until I recovered enough to carry on.

    One of the greatest things about moving on to a larger establishment was the friends I made. The nurses quarters were large, but apparently not quite large enough, because there came a time when a small group of us were transferred across to an old building which had been the isolation quarters. It was like a small house with its own kitchen etc and we loved it there. I was in a tight-knit group of three and the other two girls taught me to play cards. The three of us played day and night. We even played '500' on the train on a trip we took to Cairns for a holiday. Those girls started me off on a lifetime love affair with card playing

    The night duty stints lasted eight weeks, and required a move of all our possessions, lock stock and barrel, to the night duty quarters. These were situated at one end of the old brick nurses quarters. It was an elongated redbrick wing with a long veranda that looked out over the hospital grounds. For sleeping during the day, all doors were shut and all curtains drawn to make the place as dark as possible. But to keep it cool enough, all the rooms had a large noisy fan in the ceiling. All going at once, they sounded like a bomber squadron overhead.

    It was very easy to steal tablets from the wards, and I always kept myself equipped with an antihistamine with a strong sedative effect. After a while though, it builds up in the system, so after a week or so I could skip a few days without suffering any sleep loss. Night duty is also memorable for the food that was provided for our midnight meal. Each night in the ward kitchenette we’d find two tiny tins of food, one of soup and one of a variety of others. It might be curried rice and sausages, or sausages and vegetables etc. Most of us soon got into the habit of skipping the midnight meal and we took our little tins off with us. At the end of the eight weeks I had a small carton of little tins of food, which came in handy on days off. Many times I sipped on soup in the nurses day-room for a late breakfast with a friend.

     Though the town only had a small beach half an hour’s drive away, it was usual to have an annual  Siren of the Surf carnival. Some years before, the nurses had entered a team, and, messing about in the quarters one day, we found their flag. A few of us got together and decided to enter a team again. Since I was the tallest of the group, they elected me to carry the flag. I was excited. At last I was going to get a chance to do some marching. One of the senior nurses became our coach for practice and she took us down to the beach where we slogged away marching through loose sand.

    Our thighs screamed abuse at us as she yelled, "Lift those legs! Point those toes! Shoulders  back!”

    I guess nobody owned a portable tape recorder, because there was no music to march to and she kept time by clapping. This worked fine for most of us, but on the day of the carnival we discovered that one of our team had no ear for music, and was out of step for the whole circuit. That lost us points and we came third, (out of three teams.)  To rub salt into the wound the girl who was out of step came second in the beauty contest.

    I had my own special rewards though. I heard one of the judges mutter, ‘lovely legs’ in my direction... whoo hoo...  (all that marching pain paid off!) And that evening when I was sitting in the club lounge, one of the lifesavers from the town’s leading Life Saving team came up to me and congratulated me on the standard of our marching, telling me we were the best.  Lifesaving carnivals are still common today and lifesavers are old hands at marching properly.

    At the hospital there were rules about when we were allowed out, and what time we had to be in at night, but most times the rules were not strictly enforced. The permanent night sister, however, was inclined to do spot checks when the mood took her, now and then checking we were in our beds by 10:30 p.m. One night I came in at two a.m. after a date (a rare occurrence for me I hasten to add,) and I became flustered when I found the night sister in the middle of a round of the nurses beds. In panic I hid behind my door, which achieved nothing except that I had to front the matron the next morning, and explain why I was absent from my bed when the night sister checked. Had I been able to think on my feet I would have jumped in under the covers and avoided the reprimand. In any case I found that staying out until two a.m. was highly overrated and not worth the fatigue the next day, so I dropped the habit pretty much before it even got started.

    There was a lady's auxiliary that raised money for the hospital and one time they decided to have a fashion parade, and asked the nurses to parade aprons. I was among the nurses who the matron asked to take part, and we all readily agreed. She asked our group because we were always active in the Student Nurse Unit. (like a union but more of a toothless tiger)

    Soon after that though, I met a young German shipwright, who was leaving two weeks later to sail a boat back to New Guinea. We went out a few times and I developed an enormous crush on him. He had the exotic, (I thought,) name of Hans.

    The Saturday before he was to leave, I had arranged to meet him to go for a drive, but just as I was walking out to the hospital gate, the matron called out to me and reminded me that the fashion parade was in progress. I was shattered!  But I had a great respect for the matron, and would never have considered letting her down. Margaret went out with Hans in my place.With the benefit of hindsight, my loyalty to the matron was misplaced though, because she never would have sided with the nurses if it came to a showdown over anything. Anyway, Hans left and I never saw him again. Probably just as well as he was a lot older than me and a heavy whisky drinker, to the point of wiping himself out.

                                                                      
                                                                           --0--

    The medical superintendent of BGH, a man of small stature and violent temper, was someone I never got on with. I was too shy for his taste and he was too arrogant and bad tempered for mine. One time during my stint in the operating theatre, I was scrubbed up with the job of manning the suture trolley, while he operated. Apart from the anaesthetist, there was another doctor assisting the super, and a theatre sister working on the instrument table. (I had been brought up in awe of doctors to such a degree by my mother, that I thought they were Gods, too special for me to even speak to. Even the young ward residents intimidated me.)

    While the Super was operating I could see that he was becoming frustrated because I didn't have the sutures ready, yet still I could not find the courage to speak.

    Finally he begged, "Ask me what I want, nursie, for God's sake ask me what I want!"  I did after that, but I still found it difficult.

    I must admit he was a good surgeon though, and one day I watched him operate on a woman who had an addiction to the headache remedy, Bex powder. I watched his assistant scooping out the kidney bit by bit with a long instrument like a narrow spoon. The kidney had become like wet ashes from the woman's addiction to the analgesic powder. Inevitably, they became illegal.

     Too often though, the super’s angry belligerent nature got the better of him, and I saw a display in the theatre one day that I will never forget. He was in the middle of an abdominal operation, when his niggling criticism of the theatre sister about the operation starting late got to her. She bristled, because the fault lay with the young resident who was working as the anaesthetist. He had arrived late to the operating theatre. The super wanted everything ready for the moment he walked in.
   
    Fortunately that day there were two theatre sisters on hand. The younger one was scrubbed up assisting at the instrument trolley, and it was the senior sister who was arguing with the superintendent. She was not scrubbed up but was hanging around as an extra scout. I had seen the anaesthetist come in late, although the nursing staff were all totally prepared, waiting with the patient at the table. 

    When the head sister told this to the super he flew into a rage. "It's not for the nurses to question the doctors!" he yelled at her.

    Then he went on abusing the nurses and swearing, “Bloody nurses! How dare you!”

    She coolly replied, "I'll see you in your office, sir," and walked out. 

    Meanwhile, so overcome by rage was the surgeon that he turned around, looking for some way of venting his anger. I quaked in my shoes, but exchanged glances over my mask with the instrument sister.

    Next to the operating doctor there was always a little trolley on wheels which held two stainless steel hand basins of warm, sterile water. These were for the surgeon to rinse blood etc off his gloved hands while he was operating. When the enraged super turned away from the patient, he kicked the trolley hard and sent it rocking back and forth, teetering on its wheels and slopping water on the floor. Nobody spoke.

    Apparently having seen it all before, the theatre dresser stayed calm. I was surprised as he casually picked up a discarded trolley cover and wiped up the water. (The theatre dresser was like today's ward orderly. He wore a white gown over his khaki clothes and only worked inside the hospital helping to do the heavy work with patients. He had wheeled the patient on the trolley to the theatre and would be waiting around to return the patient to the ward after the operation.)

     Back in the theatre anteroom later, we were all agog to hear how the charge sister got on when she confronted the superintendent in his office. “Full of apologies! “she said, quoting ‘I promised my wife I wouldn’t lose my temper again.‘  

    Another operating theatre was used regularly once a month by the 'ear nose and throat' specialist who came up from Brisbane. Plenty of tonsillectomies were still being performed and I was the scout in the theatre for one of these one day when I was stunned by what happened. As you can imagine, cutting a little child’s tonsils out creates quite a lot of blood in the mouth and throat. As the unconscious little boy’s colour turned blue, I rushed to get the oxygen cylinder from the corner of the theatre.

    Before I could move with it, however, the specialist spoke calmly in a soft singsong voice, "Don't worry about oxygen, nurse. Oxygen is expensive, and there's plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere." (Yes, the child did recover.)

                                                                        --0--

    I had a close friend at the hospital who had transferred in at the same time as me, but she came from Brisbane and was nine years older. Margaret was desperate to get married and was always madly in love with some fellow who had a friend who needed a date. I couldn't guess at how many times she had her heart broken. After a time I woke up to the folly of accepting blind dates that she’d arranged, as most of the men were married and just wanted a one night stand, and I was tired of fighting them off.

    Margaret was an incongruity within herself, and would say, "Don't you sleep with them! It doesn't matter about me; it's too late for me, but don't you sleep with them!" At the same time her personal habits of dress were immaculate, and she always purchased sensible clothes and shoes of good quality.

    She should have accepted her own advice, because some months before the end of her training she found out she was pregnant. She made a hard decision and then, as I had already finished my training and left the hospital, wrote to me about the agonising details. 

    Abortion was illegal at the time, but someone put her on to a doctor in Sydney and lined her up with friends of friends in a flat down there. For a fat fee, the doctor arranged the abortion and sent her home to await results. The young men in the flat gave her a bed and sat with her as she writhed in pain on the toilet.

    After graduation, Margaret left the hospital to live interstate. She continued nursing and going out with new partners. Finally, I got an invitation to her wedding. We lived states apart so I was unable to go anyway, but a few weeks after the invitation came I had a second card in the post from her. 

    She’d scrawled, ‘Same day, same place, different bridegroom Here's hoping it works out between the brawls!’ She desperately wanted a husband.
   
    Surprisingly, they stayed married for quite some years and raised two beautiful, and  clever children. Margaret was a born mother with plenty of nurturing instincts and had endless patience when the babies were small.  Eventually she and her husband did divorce, but at present still live in the same house.