When will the USA bomb Syria, Iran, Lebanon? (not an 'if' question!)

Watching an interesting Video on the future of world peace, with the USA's involvement in maintaining the strength of its Dollar, by 'any and every means possible'.

Many claim these are conspiracy theories, but how blind are people before the truth is seen?

It's fascinatingly scary when you see reality constantly buried by media propaganda, from countries that so vilified propaganda as a Hitlerian tool.

Any yes, we finally got rid of Kevin Rudd, so apparently Australia still has vestiges of sanity!
Congratulations Tony Abbott.

Only the ability to forcibly keep petrodollars payable in USA dollars keeps America alive, from this account. Sounds very plausible. Looks like the USA will not NOT go to war to keep this control, despite Russia and China's warnings.
It seems that a country that prefers the death of billions over loss of control is a country run by psychopaths.

Nursing in the 70's in Sydney - part 2

I spent my years at Lidcombe  trying to set a  reputation for excellence and the only way was to keep learning.  I had to do this as my mother had worked there for several years, and was proud of me, so there was no way to let her down.  It wasn’t that hard, simply by reading more, and working longer hours.  Because there were two  separate staff rosters -  the Matron’s roster, for the ‘real’ general nurses and enrolled nurses;   and the Chief Male Nurse roster ( for the “back wards’ – geriatric and permanent residents)  - the hospital had originally been a home for the aged and kept about a dozen wards of 30 beds where some patients had been for anything up to thirty or forty  years.

The rosters weren’t linked to each other thus couldn’t cross check on whether any of us worked 24 or more hours straight!  so some of us would work a morning plus evening shift on one roster then a night on the other, then  go back to the other roster for the next shift.  A few of us did 4 shifts in a row, till discovered. Verbal threats would scare us off, till a few weeks later.  We had mastered the art of getting paid more in nursing – though not taxation decreases!

One reason for having to do better, was as mentioned above, that my mother worked there, and any poor performance on my part would reflect on her, and she liked to brag.  The funny thing was that many of the female supervisors would roster ‘eligible’  female nurses with me on night shift and then ask if I’d asked them out yet.  Match-making was also a prerequisite to being a supervisor it seemed!  The supervisors were all senior nurses with extensive experience, many  having also trained or worked  overseas in the UK,   Austria or Denmark.

I was at the time extremely shy, more so from not wanting a nurse that I liked to reject me if I asked her out, so found it easy every day to give roses to dozens of them in the dining room, all made easy by the Sister in charge of the nurses quarters having an extensive rose garden. She suspected, but never caught  me  cutting her flowers. Included in the ‘dozens’ of nurses would always be the one I liked most. Easy!

Though I fell in love with dozens of the nurses, I never had the courage to ask them out in those early years.

When I took charge of the intensive care unit, I began spending about 6-8 hours a day outside of work, organising lecture material. Subscriptions to journals such as  ‘Nursing 1972’ (USA) (then) ; The Nursing Mirror (UK);  Current Therapeutics;  Patient Management; ANZICS; The Lamp; The RANF ‘Journal’, all  gave me sleepless hours, and I even categorized all entries for lecture material.  Though ‘evidence-based’ nursing wasn’t the vogue, it was well and truly practiced at Lidcombe.  I began agency nursing with Drake Medox when I was still working at Lidcombe as charge nurse of the intensive care unit,  only so I could  ‘steal’ ideas for improved care techniques, and better documentation/charting methods from elsewhere.  Some places weren’t impressed when I gave suggestions about better techniques elsewhere, but the fun was in the insinuation. The more I’d learnt, the more confidence I had in the field, and this always gives more power.

We worked as a team, never taking offence (as became fashionable later by some) when doctors offered lectures or suggestions for training of our nurses .  We partied together, intermarried,  and got on brilliantly. Any major differences were sorted out with a fist or two during a friendly inter-hospital footy match!   Everyone knew what was happening, but waited for the next match...

When I meet nurses and doctors from those days, they all mention how much this was one of the most enjoyable phases of their lives. Unfortunately, there was no ‘Facebook’ phenomenon, so we have lost touch with most of our friends. Recently I met one, after 20 years, but only as he was dying, as a patient of mine in haematology.  His kids, like mine, all refused to enter  nursing.

With luck, I recently was involved in organising the reunion for this hospital, fifteen years after it was closed, and twenty six years after I had left there. We expected between fifty and two hundred to attend, yet were overwhelmed with over three hundred and ninety attending, and over fifty ‘apologies’. Those attending included some from the UK, many from Queensland, many more from Perth, Tasmania, and outback New South Wales.

All spoke of the link and the bond they had with Lidcombe Hospital and with the staff there, where even the doctors knew the domestics and cleaners by name. You won’t find this occur in any hospitals today, which explains the lack of pride in belonging to hospitals today. Changes aren’t always for the better!

Nursing in the 70's in Sydney - part 3

I  started nursing on 22^nd February 1971.

Why do I remember this?  Who knows, but I know it must be so important that without my mind retaining this critical information, life on Earth will cease to have meaning!  It is the same as the fact that when I started  there, at Lidcombe Hospital, its phone number was 6497932. Try as I might, the number refuses to leave me.  I have tried, but here it is!   The fact that the number was changed  a few years later (and I can’t remember any of that one!)  again stresses the importance of this set of numbers in relation to our national defence , possibly when the aliens invade?!

About 4 months into my training , at the end of the day, one of the other trainees (previously a street excavator) was at the bus stop with me. Without a word he punched me in the side of the head. Twenty minutes of bloodshed ended when we both noticed that the matron, senior nurse educator, and Medical superintendent were all across the road , watching us.  He got sacked, and they kept me on, as the educator, Mister Olford,  plus many supervisors who were called in for opinions) insisted that I had ‘promise’.  I still remember the other idiot’s name, but why?

I started in the 1884 ward buildings at the hospital, which were still ‘Nightingale’ wards,  30-35 beds without walls between, only portable tubular metallic screens. Everything was regimentarian, and Heaven help anyone whose bed was out of alignment, or whose bedside locker wasn’t maintained in the same military precision. Those Charge Nurses and Deputy Matrons wore white gloves, and tested everything, even the rungs of overhead curtain rails, looking for the evil dust.

We scrubbed those pan rooms like mirrors.  I even ate soup out of a bedpan once ( made sure I did my own cleaning, then sterilised it in the autoclave – everyone screamed, and my reputation added a twist for ‘strange’).  I   also inserted  a naso-gatric  tube (through my nose and down into my stomach) for practice, for morning tea. The staff in the tearoom walked out.  Years later I’d do my own arterial puncture for a blood gas, to see why patients cringed so much! Did you know that you can feel the needle go through every layer of muscle in the artery, and feel the ‘crunch’?

Though strange, not long ago I let other nurses practice cannulation on both arms of mine, while doing a night shift.  I found that when a blue-eyed blonde of the opposite sex cannulates  your arm, and misses, it doesn’t hurt!    My wife insists that  I’m  just strange, with a twist of insane.

Back to bed pans – steel wool and scouring  creams did great jobs. Today’s plastic pans are filthy, often with layers of caked faeces that have almost become like Bakelite from repeated sterilisation temperatures. If you dug deeply into it with diamond drills, you’d probably go back in time over a dozen years!   I do remember the enjoyment of cleaning the stainless steel sinks with the favourite cleaner, ETHER! Worked wonders, though many nurses occasionally passed out! Today, occupational health and safety laws have taken much of the fun out of nursing.

When I worked my ‘general hospital’ stint while on secondment at Blacktown Hospital, the ‘real’ nurses there made a habit of sending us ‘from Lidcombe’ people  onto pan room duties.  When the charge nurses complemented  us for our outstanding enthusiasm and application to work in the pan room, we commented that cleaning pans while earning more money than they were ( we were on a higher rate of pay!), and that some of us were actually charge nurses in our own hospital, they made us work on the wards.  Strange way to earn respect, but we taught them that Lidcombe Hospital wasn’t  just an “Old Men’s Home”.

Back to early days and the Nightingale wards. Surgical wards also had open coal fires at both ends of the ward, and as I was a male, thus expendable, it would be my job when on night shift in the surgical or medical wards (there were four of these wards alone, among the dozens of wards there) to walk into the open forested grounds between the hospital and the largest (Rookwood) cemetery in the southern hemisphere, to gather buckets of coal from the piles that were out there. Even on hot nights the chill would ensure that the hair stood up on the backs of our necks, and we learnt to look out the backs of our heads, for ghosts and grave-robbers.  Many a zombie missed out on a meal of young male nurses in those years!

I loved the smell of the coal fires at night, and the soot always overcame the smells of the diarrhoea, and the urinary incontinence (the patients’, not ours!). 

Possats ( what we called the monstrous creatures that looked like possums, but had tails like cats) fighting and mating in the ward roof at times shooks dust through the air holes in the 15 ft high ceilings. Everywhere, the smell of ether also  brought a great sense of cleanliness to the ward environment.

Today, the wards remain, fenced all round for protection.  The land was sold off (by the government in 1996) and the hospital closed just prior to the Sydney Olympics. The new parts including the modern ICU and theatres, and surgical blocks, and many of the 1950s buildings were demolished, and now several  hundred 2-storey luxury apartments stand on that area.  Australand  is the developer, and at the end of 2010 began renovating the original historic 1884 ward buildings into quality duplexes, keeping the original roof, exterior, and verandahs but upgrading the interior of these wonderful buildings.  Nothing like moving into buildings with a history of hundreds of seaths over the century, and ghosts everywhere.

The area is now renamed ‘Botanica’ and all one has to do is enter the complex, and once around the back of the homes estate, there will appear the most magnificent structures that were once Lidcombe Hospital, and another age!

NURSING in the 70's in Sydney - Part 1

I began nursing in 1971, actually having been talked out of a Qantas pilot cadetship by my mother (also a nurse)  who said, why not come and work  here ( Lidcombe Hospital) as a nurse! My (then) first opinion  to her was : “what? A poofter’s job?!” (I am being honest – this was my comment in 1971!)

I was tricked into taking my mother to work one day, and taken through a few wards, meeting the normal, and often  wild, male nurses....totally normal to a boy from Mt Druitt. The ward attitude was like a family, and I decided to try the job. At my interview with the matron (and she was wearing the famous veil on her head!) I was asked why I wanted to be a nurse, so i told her that I had just seen a Florence Nightingale movie and a voice called out for me to 'save people'! She laughed, told me I was being stupid, and gave me the job anyway!

In addition, the hospital was full of atmosphere, and I don’t just mean the smell of strong ammonium-scented urine, wafting down some laneways! It was built in the 1880’s and had started as a ‘Boys’ reformatory’ but then was used for returned soldiers, abandoned men, homeless men. These remained, aged, and over the years did what all do who age, developing illnesses, infirmity, and friendships with the other inmates and their carers. I would spend thirteen years there, and formed friendships with hundreds of staff, and still recall them as though it were last week, despite the over thirty years that have gone by. Sadly, many I can no longer recall by name, including many patients who became special to me, as were their stories of 'old Russia' or similar homeland tales.

This atmosphere, and the surrounding giant palm trees, fig trees (from the 1880’s) created a majestic aura. So different  to a 19-year old migrant  from a war-ravaged land, who had prior to this lived for six and a half years in a tin can ( the ‘Nissan Huts’ at Villawood Hostel) and then  a few years surviving an interesting introduction to a newly-born Mt Druitt, with regular fights, house-break-ins, car thefts and the adventures from growing up with a multi-cultural group of friends ( but they were all white....this was from the days of  the famous ‘White Australia Policy after all!).

The 1960’s were the best  years I remember, till the 1970’s came along and I fell in love, that is!

Back to the hospital....I noted there were two factions:  those nurses who had  trained at “Real” hospitals ( who came to Lidcombe to help  make it transit from its 90-year status as Rookwood Boys Asylum/Rookwood State Hospital and  Home/ Rookwood Old Men’s Home, into a major hospital.

I started as a 2-year geriatric nurse  trainee, where almost all lectures were by physicians/ surgeons/ professors (and the occasional  bed-making education by nurses!). The “hospital” had been running since 1884, and its operating  theatres not long afterwards. It became a major training ground for the medical profession, in a time  when the wards were mainly run by ‘Male Attendants” who had no  real formal nursing qualifications.

When I started, they had only a few years earlier brought in mainly general trained army-experienced nurses to manage the major acute wards, splitting Lidcombe into two halves, staffed by the Matron’s Roster (for the REAL wards of acute medical, surgical, and the operating theatre and intensive care unit) , and by the Chief Male Nurse’s Roster system (that was left to control staffing of the ‘Back wards’ , as the nursing home and long-term residents wards were called.

So the place had some quality nurses, frustrated at the devil-may-care attitude of some of the pre-existing male attitudes. The advantage was that the mixture created almost a “MASH (the TV show) attitude and both sides learnt from each other, with the ‘general nurses’ learning about ‘reality’ without resorting to full discipline.

When a nurse was in trouble with the ‘Matron’s side of the establishment, a balance was achieved through intervention from the “other side”. The result was a harmonious family unit, where quality of care was increased, improved, but nurses also sat on the beds to talk to patients.

Luckily, a senior RN (“Aunty Joyce” – the only name I knew her referred to) taught me how to bounce  coins  off   ‘correctly made beds’, and showed me the real way to hold a face washer, how to keep bedsides tidy, and real nursing care. In return, I taught her logarithms for a course she was doing (‘continuing education for nurses was in full swing!’ even in the 70’s).

“Sister Wilkes” the Deputy Matron, would always try and catch us for sleeping on night shift (during our breaks).  She told me I would have plenty of time to sleep when I was dead, and I still use this line on other nurses today. Sadly, she is getting lots of sleep herself now!

She also showed respect for us if she knew we were actually working, reading, studying, living our life for the nursing profession. Heaven help any female nurse who mentioned plans to marry, or worse, to have children! Female nurses were meant to die on the job!

Certain of the nursing supervisors would drive to the (real) hamburger shops outside the hospital and bring hamburgers and milkshakes to those of us who would work overtime without question of ‘where’ or when. About 4 of us (male nurses) became the ‘reliable’  emergency  staff, who would forsake our real lives to work two shifts a day. After all, at fifty five dollars a fortnight, there were fortunes to be made!

In a way, the hospital developed an excellence in training because of its background that was probably  akin to the days of the grave-robber days of Da Vinci.

In 1974 this hospital commenced its first general nurse training. I was in the first group, gaining

‘secondment experience’ at Blacktown Hospital in the areas of midwifery, emergency, paediatrics.

Lidcombe had ample surgical, medical, immunology, haematology, renal , respiratory experience.

PS., the intensive care unit at Lidcombe pre-dated most intensive care units of the ‘real hospitals’.

As a student nurse I was in trouble from the Viennese-trained Charge Nurse of Intensive care for daring to walk into her Unit too frequently, which was basically only for doctors and trained nurses. I loved the (now prehistoric) ventilators, monitors and equipment  of the 1970’s unit. She gained her revenge by rostering me there, and giving me at times  three  times the patient load of the other nurses, advising that I “could always leave, resign etc, if I couldn’t handle the pace”. I took home every book, read the lot, bought my own, “photocopied” (I took photos of the pages then developed them myself and blew them up). I took home a BIRD respirator, took it apart, couldn’t put it back without a few pieces left (so tried about a dozen more times, then threw it away for safety).

 I completed my general nurse training in  1976, but worked an extra 30+ hours a week overtime in Lidcombe (much in ICU). I did the College of Nursing Coronary Care course in 1976, and St Vincents Intensive care course in 1978. Throughout it all I was considered strange, eccentric, outgoing, loud. I became Senior Charge Nurse (“NUM”, today) in 1979 and ran the unit till 1983 when I took over Bankstown Hospital’s ICU and CCU, before becoming the ‘night supervisor’ there.

I ran the unit with long hair ( forever advised to set a standard and have it cut, till the administration organised one of the other nurse managers to take me to her hairdresser!). We had bed-pan throwing competitions, birthday parties, farewells (all held within the ward environments and with patient involvement). There were bicycle races (oxygen-inflated tyres), cartwheel exhibitions.  “Interbreeding” – where doctors or nurses married nurses or doctors, was rife. A few nurses even married their patients (gone are the days when an orthopaedic patient stayed in hospital for 15-18 months!), which possibly accounts for a decline in nurses finding eligible spouses!

We  were quite militant there, with a strong union following, and when the hospital was being pushed into closure in the early 1980’s, we blocked the 6-lanes of the main road with beds, brought traffic to a standstill, and one nurse, “Nellie” then forced a  truckie  who tried to crash the roadblock, to cower and comply by wielding a bedpan (steel  is always better!).  ( I have many photos of this event on Joseph Street ).

We mourned our colleagues (trucks do stop nurses in cars or on motorcycles  who are coming to work!)

An injury (L5-S1 disc protrusion from stumbling on a stairway-under-repair) on my way to an emergency stopped that career for a few years, till I returned via full-time nursing home work 4 nights a week for 3 years while doing 3 nights a week in intensive care units via agency nursing (since 1999) and  then agency nursing working on average 50-60 hours a week in intensive care, emergency, cardiothoracic ICU etc – which is where I remain, with several  16-hour shifts per week  the norm, 3 days a week, with 10-hour shifts on the other.

I recently wrote on a ‘twitter’ site that I realised that in over 35 years of intensive care, that I only remembered about 3 people (patients/their families) actually  thanking me for resuscitating them.

The job is regarded as frustrating, yet the friendships and  memories more than make up for it.

As the “Nurse Unit Manager”   for many years, I was frequently  in front of nursing administration (often for supporting/defending ‘my’ nurses from being used as workhorses), and would take their patients for an hour or two to send them on a break.  That was the 70’s and early 80’s.

Today I watch from the sidelines, as an agency nurse, completely unstressed, and see that nurses are MORE stressed - so try to relax them, inform them, retrain and readjust their thinking in their career path. The training I had , hospital-based, seems to have shown me an interesting perspective, whereby I don’t stress, or worry, no matter the situation.

Nothing has really changed, if you have the right attitude, a sense of humour, and the stimulus to continue your education. I forever tell other nurses that if you don’t have a sense of humour, please don’t come to work!  Patients  and their families, as well as other stressed nurses, have enough problems without  having to put up with a nurse who needs a mental enema.