That's Another Story: The Autobiography (16 page)

‘Oh, Mr Jackson, I’m going to need a specimen of urine from you before you go to sleep,’ I whispered.

He smiled at me benignly and nodded, ‘Yes.’

I waited, he smiled.

‘Yes, I need you to do a specimen,’ I said a little louder.

‘WHAT?’ This was extremely loud and rasping, and several people near by started to stir. I tried to keep my own voice down.

‘Yes, now we are going to have to be very quiet, Mr Jackson, because everyone is asleep.’

‘Fat bloody chance!’ came a weary voice from the next bed.

‘WHAT? YES ... GOODNIGHT.’ And with that he slid down under the covers and turned on his side, pulling them up over his head.

‘No, no, no, Mr Jackson.’ Now my own voice was rising in volume. ‘You can’t go to sleep yet.’

‘No, neither can we!’ came a voice from the bed opposite.

I pulled the covers back, at which Mr Jackson shot up and looked at me as if I was an intruder in his own bedroom.

‘WHAT’S GOIN’ ON? WHAT ARE YOU DOIN’?’

By now everyone was awake, and requests for cups of tea or exasperated moans of ‘Oh Jesus!’ and ‘For Christ’s sake!’ were coming from all directions. After much negotiation and by this time virtually shouting at the top of my voice, I managed to get him out of bed, although he looked totally confused as to the reason why. I showed him the little pack on his bedside locker and told him that we needed to go down to the ward toilets. He seemed to pick up the word ‘toilet’ and spun around.

‘THERE’S NO NEED TO SHOUT! PEOPLE MIGHT HEAR!’

‘Shame
you
can’t,’ came the weary voice from next door again.

Eventually I part coaxed and part manhandled him down the ward and into the toilets. Once inside I showed him again the pack containing the little foil container of disinfectant and explained. ‘Mr Jackson, I want you to clean yourself with this.’ I handed him the cotton-wool balls. He stared down at them and then up at me. I dipped them into the disinfectant and pointed at his flies. At this he sprang back, cowering, his mouth agape with horror, protecting his nethers like a footballer defending himself from a free kick.

‘WHAT’SYOUR GAME? I’M OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR GRANDFATHER!’

‘No, no, Mr Jackson, I just want a specimen.’

And I showed him the little specimen jar. He then seemed to understand and I went through the instructions, with him nodding and loudly affirming his understanding at every stage. Then with fingers crossed I left him to it. Half an hour or so later I went to check in the toilets, to find that the pot containing the disinfectant was empty but so was the specimen jar, and the old man had gone. When I went back to his bed to discover what had happened, he was again snuggled down under the covers and this time clearly asleep, so I waited until morning.

‘Good morning, Mr Jackson, what did you do with your specimen?’

‘YES, YES, YES ...’ he said dismissively. ‘I DRANK THE MEDICINE.’

I stood there for several seconds, unable to take in what he had said. ‘Oh my God,’ I murmured ever so quietly when I realised that he had in fact drunk the disinfectant and simply had a pee straight into the toilet.

‘AND WHAT’S MORE IT GAVE ME A BELLYACHE!’

‘Oh my God!’ I said again and went to make my confession to the senior nurse. I was hauled up in front of the assistant matron, who explained how irresponsible it was to leave an old deaf man etc., etc., etc.

I suppose I messed up quite a bit during my eighteen months of training, but none of my cock-ups came anywhere near that of a poor girl in my set. She was on a ward mainly filled with elderly women and one evening after bed-baths she got the brilliant idea that, instead of going round each old dear and cleaning her false teeth, she would collect all the dentures in a big bowl and wash them all together. She only realised her gaffe when it was too late and just had to guess whose belonged to whom. Patients were complaining of sore gums for weeks after, and night after night she apparently went round when they were all asleep, whipping dentures off the beside lockers and swapping them around with other people’s, still trying to match the right teeth to the right mouth.

One of the most exciting places to work, I found, was the Casualty department of the General Hospital, which was situated in the centre of Birmingham and, along with the Children’s, was the other major hospital that we trained at, all three being part of the United Birmingham Hospitals group. On a busy Saturday night on two or three occasions, I was sent down from my quiet men’s medical ward to swell the numbers of this overstretched department. On one such occasion a very odd-looking man came in, in the small hours of the morning, walking with a strange, swinging scuttle. The conversation went like this.

‘Can I help you?’

‘No, dear, I wish to see a doctor.’ His face was pale and sweating.

‘I’m afraid the doctor’s busy at the moment. Can I help?’

‘No, no, I need to see the doctor. I don’t want to see you, dear. It’s got to be the doctor.’

Having showed him to a cubicle, I went to find the nurse in charge. Finally the doctor went in to see him, taking me with him. When we got behind the curtains, the man was standing in the corner.

‘No, no, dear, I want to see the doctor, I don’t want you present.’ So the doctor signalled for me to leave.

Some time later, I saw the man being wheeled on a trolley, presumably to a ward, lying on his stomach with what looked like some sort of cage over the top of him covered in a blanket. It turned out that he had the handle of a wire-mesh, deep-fat fryer stuck up his bottom. When asked by the doctor how it happened to be there, the man replied, ‘I ’ad an itch.’ It was inserted so far up and with such force that it had pierced his colon and he had to go to theatre to have it removed.

I encountered death many times whilst nursing, but never got used to the shock of finding a bed empty when arriving on duty and discovering that someone you had got to know, whose face you’d washed, whose bed you’d made, whose bottom and feet you’d rubbed to prevent bedsores and whose family you had met and chatted with, was now dead. The first time this happened, I had come on duty for the afternoon shift, which was from two till ten, and the ward was frantically busy. Usually at the beginning of a shift the senior nurse going off duty would give notes on all the patients, so that those coming on duty would be up to speed. But on this particular day they were still carrying out their various duties; nurses were rushing up and down, curtains were pulled round beds; patients were still having their pressure areas tended to, and it was clear that help was needed. At the top of the ward, next to Sister’s office, was Mr Claydon’s bed. He was a long-stay patient and had been unconscious for at least a couple of weeks. Seeing that the curtains were closed around his bed, I decided that this was where I would start. I went in and immediately began chatting. We were told that unconscious patients could more than likely hear what you said, as hearing was the last sense to go in a coma. In fact, hospital gossip had it that a nurse who had talked about how fat a female patient was whilst the patient was unconscious was slapped across the face by the woman when she came round, the woman having heard everything that was said, even though she had been unconscious at the time.

Mr Claydon was lying in a normal position on his back and next to him on the table was a bowl of tepid water. Someone was obviously intending giving him a bed-bath. Thinking the water a little too cool, I set off with the bowl to the sluice room to get some more hot. On the way, the ward Sister asked what I was doing. When I said I was getting some nice hot water for Mr Claydon, she said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t need to be hot, he’s not exactly going to complain, is he?’ I was speechless: to treat an unconscious and therefore vulnerable patient like this, even when run off your feet, was unconscionable.

I ignored her cruel assessment and carried on into the sluice room. When I returned to Mr Claydon’s bed, he was in much the same position and I began the preparations for his bath, getting his toilet bag and towel from his beside locker, whilst plucking at a large bunch of black grapes in his fruit bowl and talking away as I did so.

‘I expect your wife will be in soon, so we’ll get you nice and fresh for her.’ And so forth.

Then I pulled the sheet down and proceeded to wash him, whilst telling him what the weather was like and how busy the ward was. At one point the staff nurse popped her head through the curtains and said, ‘Oh! Are you doing this? Good . . . good . . .’ Then shortly afterwards she popped her head through again and said, ‘You do know he’s dead, don’t you?’

I felt sick and immediately, almost as a reflex action, spat out the grape I had been eating, which landed splat in the middle of her apron bib. It stayed there, all chewed and purple, for a second or two and then dropped to the floor, leaving a magenta smear in its wake. We both stared at it.

‘Oh no! I’ve been eating his grapes!’ And again I felt nauseous.

‘Well, they’re no different now to what they were half an hour ago when he was still alive. You’ve been stuffing them down you all week. His wife must be wondering how come he gets through so many, considering he’s been in a coma for two weeks. Now, do you know how to lay him out?’

‘Erm . . . No.’

‘Well, just carry on and wash him and then I’ll be back to show you what to do.’

No sooner had she left than I began to turn him on to his side, so that I could wash his back and as I did so he let out a long, low, sinister moan, rather bovine in tone. I was so shocked that I jumped back away from him and, in doing so, banged into his locker, sending his false teeth, which were in a jar on top of it, flying to the floor and skidding out under the curtain into the ward beyond.

‘He’s not dead!’ I shouted to no one in particular. ‘There’s been a mistake!’

With that the same staff nurse came back through the curtains, brandishing the teeth in one hand and, putting the top set together with the bottom ones to make them work like a mouth, said in a ventriloquist’s voice, ‘Oh, yes I am! I was just having a moan about you eating all my bloody grapes!’

She then went on to explain that the moan that I had heard was simply air passing through his vocal cords as he was being moved.

Death on a ward was a potentially disturbing and lowering experience for the other patients, and some ward Sisters were more sensitive in this regard than others. Later in my training I worked on a women’s medical ward, which was mainly populated by the elderly, so that death on this ward, while not an everyday occurrence, was nevertheless more frequent than on other wards, and so they had the unobtrusive, laying-out procedure down to a pretty fine art. When, for instance, a corpse was being taken from its bed down to the mortuary, it was transported on a special trolley. This looked for all the world like a normal gurney, but the thin mattress on the top could be lifted up and underneath was a secret compartment, into which the body would be put, so that when being wheeled along it just looked like an empty trolley. We were instructed from the start that if anyone were to die on our watch, we were not to make a ‘song and dance about it’; in fact we were to play it down, so that the other patients were unaware of what was going on. And so it was that one lunchtime when the lunches or, as we called them, the dinners were being prepared for serving, I was sent on ahead of the main course, with the soup trolley. The first patient I came to was an ancient woman by the name of Mrs Kent. I drew the trolley up to the end of her bed and dragged her bedtable to a comfortable position. She was sitting up in bed, her head resting on the pillows, staring down at her hands.

‘Mrs Kent? Mrs Kent, your dinner’s here. Are you going to eat some soup for me?’

I touched her arm and instantly knew from the bluish discolouration around her lips, and the inordinate stillness surrounding her, that there was a good chance she might have popped her clogs. I immediately set into motion my instructions for ‘finding a patient to be deceased’, and after surreptitiously feeling for her pulse and finding that there wasn’t one, I decided that the best course of action was to pretend that everything was normal and to carry on with the soups. I then ladled her soup into a bowl and put it in front of her.

‘Mrs Kent, here’s your soup; eat it up now, while it’s hot.’

I took her hand, wrapped her already icy fingers around the soupspoon and placed it in the soup. I then hoicked her up the bed - she weighed very little - into a more normal eating-in-bed position. Now she looked as though she was poised on the brink of sampling her soup and was merely examining it first, which was fair enough as only the week before someone had found a cotton-wool ball in theirs. I then continued on up the ward, handing out soup to the other patients. When I reached the far end and was just beginning to come down the other side with my trolley, a couple of the old ladies called out to draw my attention to the fact that Mrs Kent had bent over and toppled face first into her soup.

‘That soup’s hot, nurse! She must have fallen asleep!’

I rushed back to her, leaving my trolley to clang into someone’s bed and soup to slop out of the tureen in all directions. Then remembering my instructions to keep the whole thing low-key, I instantly slowed down and, smiling at all and sundry, spoke calmly to the corpse that was Mrs Kent.

‘Now what’s going on here, Florrie? You really must use your spoon, it’s very bad manners to suck your soup up like that. You’re going to get it everywhere.’

With a little laugh I lifted her face out of the bowl. Her nose and mouth were covered in a thick coating of pea soup. This I quickly remedied with a paper napkin, while the hand into which I had forced the soupspoon was now raised up, still holding the spoon but as if she were going to attack someone with it. I tried to make the hand, which was now level with her ear, come back down again, but it seemed to be somehow locked and I couldn’t budge it. By this time other patients were beginning to take notice.