I will never forget the day I left my home in the tiny village of Barlaston and set off with my Mum to go on what I thought then was the biggest adventure of my life, with my suit case in hand and a brand new ironing board of all things packed into her car. I was excited but I was also terrified at the same time. I had literally just turned eighteen and there is no doubt I had had a very sheltered upbringing. I had never been allowed to have a boyfriend or go out to parties and I still had to be home by 10pm .....or else!
The most adventurous thing I had been allowed to do was to ride around the village on my bike with my friends ......and even then Dad got really annoyed with me one day when he found me hanging out in the bus shelter with some boys and embarrassed me to death as he pulled over and made me go home immediately. He was not happy and neither was I.
Anyway we arrived in Nottingham and I was one of six girls who had been assigned to Nottingham City Hospital, the rest of the cohort had been assigned to Queen's Medical Centre QMC. There were fourty four of us in total. Unfortunately our rooms weren’t ready at City Hospital and so we would be put up temporarily at QMC for around eight weeks until our rooms were ready and avaiable.
For some reason I was put into a shared flat with five other much more senior girls who were not on my course and the other five girls from my course were put into a shared flat together. Not a great start I thought and I'm not going to lie.....I was terrified!
For those first eight weeks I don’t think I ever left my room unless I needed to shower or use the toilet and I lived off Pot Noodles apart from when I went to the canteen during our time in the nursing lectures. I certainly didn’t make any friends in the flat and they didn’t try to befriend me either (they probably thought I was weird) and it scared me when they were running up and down every night laughing and screaming and all I can remember doing was crying and listening to Sade on my tape cassette recorder. It was hard and I was homesick.
Fast forward eight weeks and our new rooms were ready at City Hospital, so Mum and Dad came down to help me move my stuff across as it was about eight miles away. I was going to be moving into Nurses Home Two and what was to be my home for the next three and a half years.
Well what an shock to my system this was! Nurses Home Two was a really old and awful looking huge building, and certainly not modern like the flat I had been in at Queens. I was shown to my room by the Home Warden who looked equally old and scarey! Could this day get any worse?
My room was tiny and had literally a bed and a set of drawers in it and was on a long corridor with ten such rooms down each side and in the middle were two bathrooms which housed two baths on legs and two toilets which would be shared be the twenty of us. At the end of the corridor was a kitchen with two hobbs, a small mini oven and a twin tub washing machine. All that I could think was that I can’t live here and I started crying!
I had no choice however but to unpack my things and put my very 80’s posters up on the walls, which I did and it did help a little I have to admitt. I had been told we were allowed to change the curtains and so I measured the window and decided that getting new curtains and a matching duvet cover would help even more. We all also had been advised to buy ourselves our own kettles, toasters and a mini fridge, so these were duly set up and things started to seem a little less grim.
Mum and dad said their goodbyes and this time I did leave my room as I was on a corridor with some of the girls from my course that I had started to get to know. Sam, Maxine, Patsy, Natalie and Jackie were all there with me, so I knew I would be ok, even though I still wasn’t totally part of the group as I was so shy and awkward.
They all smoked apart from Patsy and all had boyfriends too which I hadn’t had so I really did feel like the odd one out, so I bought some cigarettes and taught myself how to smoke in the mirror in my room! Peer pressure and the desire to fit in is real. I started off with small menthol cigarettes, but by the time the RGN Course finished, I was smoking twenty Benson and Hedges a day! It was ridiculous, but to be honest if you didn't smoke in the 80's were you even really a student nurse?
The next three and a half years were actually some of the best years of my life. I settled well into Nurses Home Two and we formed extremely tight and close friendships as we lived together, worked together and sometimes we even studied together .....but that was less common as nursing was much more practice based back then and we were only in a teaching environment for one week every twelve to fourteen weeks.
We laughed together .....oh how we laughed, we had so much fun, but we also cried a lot together too as we were faced with dealing with extremely challenging situations as such young girls still really. But we were always there for each other and that really helped.
We would go out to the Irish Centre every Thursday to dance and quite often we would get home and go straight to work at 7am on the wards........how we did it, I don’t know.....but we did. We never got drunk though. Alcohol was not really a big thing back then like it is now, so we were just tired if anything and would go to bed when our shifts finished at 2 30pm as thirteen hour shifts were unheard of in the 1980’s and 90’s.
Nursing was very different back then. Uniform policy for one was extremely strict. All of our dresses (there were no tunics and trousers) had to be a certain length; our shoes had to be a certain style; our stockings a certain colour; hair had to be totally off the collar and no cardigans were worn, just our lovely cloaks to walk over to the wards in when it was cold. Oh gosh how I loved my cloak! We were all given ten dresses at the start of the course and they were washed and pressed for us in the hospital laundry so we could all wear a clean uniform every day and we were regularly expected to work ten days on the trot.
Other things from back then will seem really strange though, like the fact that we all smoked in the Staff Room and patients could smoke in the Ward Day Rooms. In fact every bedside locker had an ashtray on it! Sometimes we would even sit in the Patient’s Day Room smoking alongside the patients if our evening break coincided with Coronation Street! Eastenders had not begun.
Student Nurses in their second year were left in charge of the wards at night without any qualified staff on duty with them......and we just accepted this as the norm.....it never worried us or fazed us, it was just what we did. We really enjoyed the responsibility which is also very different from now where students are not allowed to do anything unsupervised and in my opinion do qualify with far less confidence than we did. This responsibility shaped us and prepared us and when we qualified we were more than able to run a ward easily and without fear. Talking of fear though, the one thing that did terrify us all was the Night Sister or Night Charge Nurse who would always come around and whoa betide you if you couldn’t do a ward round with them at 2am in the morning and tell them everything about every single patient you had on the ward, without referring to your notes! The higher Archie was very real back then too and kept us truly on our toes.
First names were not used and you were known as say Student Nurse Milward; Staff Nurse Jones and Sister Brown. You would never dream of calling qualified nurses by their first names and I don’t think we ever even knew their first names.. Even third year student nurses were viewed as experts by first and second years, because trust me they appeared to know everything there was to know.
We always had breaks too - every single time we worked, and we were duly were assigned either first or second break at the beginning of each shift. This was day and night and the Staff Canteen was open twenty four hours a day, so a hot meal was always available and we always finished our shifts on time then too. Even with a crystal ball I don’t think we could ever foresee that in the future this would be seen as a luxury......I mean why would we even expect to have a break , leave on time, let alone eat whilst we are on duty these days? Sadly those days of caring for our staff so they can care for the patients have long gone.
The Doctors especially the Consultants were seen as God like figures and certainly the atmosphere of a ward would change dramatically when they arrived to do their Ward Round with their entourage of Junior Doctors and Medical Students. If you were asked to join them you would literally pray that they wouldn’t ask you any questions and therefore avoided eye contact with them at all times. Quite often you would see student nurses tripping up and dropping things when the ward round was being done, literally through sheer fear. Senior doctors, especially Consultants do genuinely have an aura about them. I’m not sure if it comes from their personalities, their knowledge or both. But their auras are real for sure .......and this is especially so of surgeons who were seen as the Gods of all Gods.
I remember doing my theatre placement and being astounded at their behaviour and how they literally barked at their scrub nurses when they needed certain instruments passing to them. I was also amused at the opera music that many of them needed playing as they operated and performed so many miracles that saved so many lives. Who am I to judge .....and if that is what it takes to keep them calm and focused, then so be it! They are truly amazing humans (although many I see now as also narcissistic) and back in the 1980’s it has to be noted that they were still mainly men.
One of the most fascinating operations I ever saw being done was one of the first “sex change’ operations, when a surgeon cleverly fashioned a penis into a vagina so very
brilliantly and talked us through the whole process step by step.
One of the worst operations I have ever seen was my first leg amputation and still to this day can feel the weight of that leg in the clinical waste bag I was handed. How I stayed standing I will never know!
The Consultants all had their own wards back in the day and knew each and every patient inside out. It wasn’t like it is today where patients or clients as they are now known are put on any ward where there is a spare bed, they all went to their own consultant’s ward. This allowed great continuity of care for those who were chronically ill and many faces became familiar as they were admitted, discharged and re admitted.
One of my most fond memories is of Christmas Days when all the Consultants would come in with their wives and family and carve the Christmas turkey that was sent up to each ward. There was also plenty of sherry to be drunk on those occasions which I know would absolutely not happen now, but again back then was just part of the culture.
The ward I enjoyed working on the most however was the Children’s Ward. Of course nursing sick children can be extremely sad, but it can also be absolutely amazing too ....and remember back then we were not that much older than some of the children and had been like children to many of the patients on the adults ward, so I guess we just felt more comfortable around them.
It was a medical children’s ward that I was on and we cared for lots of children with Cystic Fibrosis and because they were long stay patients we got to know them really well and I also just adored working in the “baby area” too and I decided at this point that I would really like to specialise in Children’n Nursing once I qualified.
Our training continued over the next three and a half years and we became closer and closer as friends as we moved through every area of nursing from medicine to surgery, psychiatry to maternity, community to paediatrics, and theatres to accident and emergency, growing in skills and confidence as we did so.
I was petrified to go to A & E I have to admit as I have never been able to stomach raw trauma and the fear of not knowing what was coming through the doors was too much for me to conceive and so I opted for the Burns Unit instead. This was not the best decision I have ever made in my life though as my friends in A & E saw mainly minor injuries and I was faced with adults and children who had been burnt from head to foot in house fires and lots of horrific accidents in the home and at work and the smell of burnt and rotting flesh was something I have never forgotten.
That being said, I actually really enjoyed my experience there as the team were brilliant. For some reason the nurses and doctors worked together very differently than the other wards and this made a massive difference to the atmosphere and therefore the learning environment.
The Ward Sister was young, vibrant and really friendly and the doctors were very good at teaching and showing us the amazing techniques that were evolving in plastic surgery as they were developing new techniques to help to reconstruct many body parts to give patients a better quality of life following their injuries.
One particular patient I remember was a lady who had got her hand trapped in a hot press at work and so all of her fingers had been burnt and flattened beyond belief, so they had sewn her hand into her groin to enable a skin flap to grow so that they could refashion her fingers for her. It was really fascinating.
It was also a gruesome place to work and some of the injuries were truly horrifying to see. I remember one little boy who had been burnt literally from head to toe in a house fire and he was only seven. How he had survived such a high burn percentage was inconceivable and he went for operation after operation to try to help to reduce his scaring and also to release the very damaged skin he was left with and he had to wear pressure dressings from head to toe to also aid his healing and further reduce his scaring. Lots of the patients were actually children sadly. Accidents in the home were very common back then compared to now and many a child was in for grabbing an electric bar heater with their hands and another common accident was children and toddles pulling the extremely long kettle flex that were always hanging down in the kitchen and getting scalded from the boiling water as it fell from the kitchen top.. And I’m not even going to mention the nylon nighties that were forever going up in flames as women and young girls warmed themselves in front of electric fires in a morning and an evening. It was just horrific! Chip pans were also common place in every home back in the 80’s and they caused many a fire and hot oil injury. These types of accidents are now almost extinct with much more emphasis of safety in the home and education around it thank goodness.
One rather handsome patient I recall had come in with quite an unusual injury and I always got really nervous when I had to do his dressing. Primarily this was because of how good looking and young he was (he was around twenty two) and secondly because his burn was on his bottom! This poor guy had been sitting in a sauna and the bench had given way and he had ended up falling in such a way that he actually sat on the hot coals and his whole bottom had been burnt severely. He had to kneel on the bed naked every day so we could do his dressing and he must have been so embarrassed. I still think of him every time I go into a sauna, but yet again the way saunas are heated now is very different to the hot coals and bucket of water with the ladle you used to have to use and the coals are nowhere in sight in most of them either.I learnt a lot on this placement and came away being an expert in dressing any kind of wound as trust me some dressings took over three hours to do, such was the severity of the burn injuries.
My next placement was working alongside a District Nurse in the community setting, but unfortunately the Sister I was put with was not that friendly and I really didn’t enjoy my experience with her because of how she was with me. It is hard being in a car all day with someone who doesn’t want to talk to you and finds fault in everything you do. I did get the impression the other District Nurses weren’t too keen on her either though, but maybe she had her own problems to deal with. All these years later I understand the stresses and strains of having a student with you twenty four seven all too well when you are not a hundred percent yourself and it can be difficult at times.I enjoyed the nursing part of this placement non the less and I really got to know the patients well as many were having daily dressings for leg ulcers, bed sores and for some it was end of life care at home and we were there to support the families with the nursing side of that care.
It was working on the district that I got my first exposure to poverty and depravation though too and I’m not going to lie, I was shocked and I was horrified.I had not realised that people lived this way and I found the whole idea of it very sad, really upsetting and quite traumatising if I am truly honest.
Having been blessed with an extremely privileged upbringing, my family and friends all lived in large houses and did not want for anything. I had never even been inside a “council house” or a tower block or maisonette . In fact I never really knew they existed or were a thing. I had grown up in Barlaston, a small country village which had won the “Best Kept Village” competition for God knows how many years in a row, and it really had shocked me to see the conditions that some people actually lived in.I cringe at myself now for being so naive, however you can only know what you know and what you have been exposed to.
Life can be a steep learning curve at times.......but only if we are lucky.
One day I was in a particularly poor house that was not the most hygienic place I have ever been in and the poor lady had a bed sore that you could literally place a bucket in, it was so deep. The smell of necrotising flesh alongside the poor hygiene and overwhelming heat from the small heater warming the room was too much for me and I fainted! Yes I actually passed out. I was mortified and of course my mentor was fuming with me and let me know that in no uncertain terms. She actually wrote on my report that “Caron has an obvious aversion to people in the lower social classes” I was mortified and this couldn’t have been further from the truth and I think that she would take her words back if she could see how my career worked out, the really deprived areas I ‘chose’ to work in and the passion I have for improving care in these areas.
Alongside all of the clinical things we learned.....we were also learning about life itself during this time. There were unwanted pregnancies amongst us, infidelity and what we now know as co-erosive control and also the loss of parents.
My dear friend Maxine’s Mum died RIP towards the end of the course and it was heartbreaking to think that she had lost her mum so young......and although we had dealt with death on the wards, this was very different. Maxine was our friend and certainly for me it was the first time I had ever had to support anyone so close to me loosing their mom and it was really hard to do. It was just so sad and we didn’t really know what we could do to help her apart from give her very regular hugs and be there for her in any way we could be.
Max was of Jamaican descent and as such her mom had been in an open coffin as is customary. I can remember vividly sitting next to her in her room as she showed me the photos of her mom in her coffin, dressed in her wedding dress. It was heartbreaking to hear how she had actually helped to dress her mom in preparation for her funeral. This was not something I had ever heard of previously and I honestly didn’t know where she got the strength from to do that.
This was my first real insight into a different culture other than my own and I just couldn’t imagine being in a church at a funeral and the lid being off the coffin, and again in my naivety I thought that it might had also been quite frightening to see.
Over the years I have often thought about Max and how she must have felt, and also how useless we must have all seemed to her, at the time, and I've often wished I knew about grief back then, what I know about it now so I could have supported her better. I did meet up with her a couple of years ago though and one of the first things she said to me was that she would never foget how caring I was when her mom died which really was just so lovely to hear. It just goes to show that you don't always need to know what to do, you just need to show you care.
Alongside Maxine losing her mom, we also lost two of our Course Tutors during our training too. This was even harder to understand and deal with, because they were both murdered by family members. God bless them.
We were all assigned a Personal Tutor at the beginning of our course and he / she was our go to person for any personal or professional issues we might have and so we got to know them really well along the way.I really liked my personal tutor. She was a vibrant character with a fabulous haircut and a wicked individual sense of fashion. She was very hip and approachable and had a great sense of humour .She was a great clinical tutor alongside all of this and really helped to build you confidence when you were learning how to pass a catheter or put a drip up and I can remember thinking I would really like to be like her when I grew up. Sadly she was one of the Tutors who was murdered.
I will never forget how I heard about her dying. We were second year students and therefore doing our theatre placement that day which meant lots more of us were working the same shift but just in different theatres. We were all absolutely heartbroken and many of us went to her funeral to pay our respects and somehow we managed to support each other through what was a very difficult time as we had lost one of our best and most lovely tutors.
RIP Roma.
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