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.
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