The Annals of Nursing- Part Four. Consequences and Changes.

This photo is of the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital on Maynard Street in Hanover New Hampshire. It is no longer there. The hospital- now Dartmouth-Hitchcock- moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire.

This post is the fourth installment in my memoir about "nurses training" in a diploma school of nursing circa 1969. It begins with my return to school after cutting classes to go to a peace march in Washington.


Part Four


When I returned from my outlaw weekend at the November 1969 Mobilization in Washington, I went back to classes on Monday as though nothing had happened. And for a while, it appeared that nothing had. My school was silent. My instructors were silent. They were waiting.

Dr Sandra Mackay was a senior year instructor with a doctorate in nursing from Cornell. She was an imposing woman, and ever the champion, mentor, and friend of the students. I can still see her,always in a dress covered by a white lab coat, always in black heels, waving her arms as she talked, pushing her blond pageboy away from her face. She was loud. She was opinionated. And she had connections. Her husband was the handsome Dr Donald Mackay, an oncologist at the hospital. If the School of Nursing wanted me out, they would have to go around Dr Mackay, for she was on my side. Dr Mackay liked the brighter, more spirited girls. She counted me as one of their number.

The woman the school sent on that mission was Genevieve Clark, an LPN turned RN who was my freshman clinical instructor. When I walked into her office for my review, days before Christmas break, I saw I had not walked into an evaluation. I was there for The Talk.

Mrs. Clark did not ask me if I was sure I wanted to be a nurse. She told me that she, and the school ,did not think I was nurse material. She was going to fail me in clinical, for I had committed sins. Two of them. I had taken a woman's blood pressure,and the woman complained I had pumped up the blood pressure cuff too high and hurt her. Secondly, I had not been able to find a patient's hairbrush. It was in the far corner of her bedside drawer. A real nurse, lectured Mrs. Clark, would have been more resourceful and aggressive. A real nurse would have wanted to find that brush, and would have searched that drawer till she found it.

This was ludicrous. It was weak, and I knew it. Could Dr Mackay save me? I was not sure. I had to save myself. I went on the offensive.

I told Mrs. Clark that I wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world. To prove it, and to get more experience I would go to Dora Jean Johnson's office and offer to work as a nurse's aide every day of my vacation. And I would work for nothing. I do not remember that Mrs. Clark had anything to say. I left her office and went to Mrs. Johnson, and when I left her office, I was saved. Dora Jean Johnson, the hospital's Director of Nursing- fat, pink and grandmotherly- was now on my side too.

I did work everyday. I worked the old West Wing, an open pavilion ward with a unused fireplace in the center, and bed after bed lined up along the walls with the only privacy a curtain. The only time I ran into trouble was with the West Wing's head nurse, who may or may not have been in league with Mrs. Clark. A staff nurse asked me to run and get some oxygen tubing. It was a mistake to ask the head nurse where to find it. This giant woman, six feet tall, a lesbian whose lover was head nurse of the Dermatology floor, picked me up by my collar, dragged me down the hall, opened the door to the supply closet and shoved me in to where the tubing was. After that, I was careful who I asked. I became a model nurse's aide. I worked where they sent me, and I did not complain. They even sent me to The ICU one night to help a young RN who had four patients. She was a lovely girl, who was happy to teach. She showed me how to irrigate a G-tube, and when I did it bright red blood came back, for the patient was bleeding from an ulcer. Here it was! Excitement and incident. I was seduced. I was going to be an ICU nurse when I graduated.

Christmas break ended. The School, impressed by my sacrifice, let me stay. I never heard another negative word. But there were many changes happening at the school at that time,and a student who cut classes to march on Washington was not so shocking anymore. Not when the School's new Director was a nun who had renounced her vows and fled the convent. The School had hired a woman who hated rules, and we had plenty of rules for her to hate. Having liberated herself, she decided to liberate us. No more permission slips, no more parietals, no more enforced bed-times. Soon we were out late and wandering all over Hanover at will. If we could find someone to buy it for us ,we drank Gin Fizzes and Boone's Farm low wines as we gathered in the lounges we called the "smokers" to hang out. It was 1970, but at the School the Sixties were triumphant.

Thus concludes Part four. Part Five will cover the rest of my freshman year, and the summer before I became a junior.