The Annals of Nursing- Part 5. The year turns.

And so the year turned, and it was 1970. We had survived and made it to the second half of our freshman year. Our upper class men assured us we were almost home free. If one was still there after the holidays, it was because our instructors and the school wanted us to be. We might still wash out, but if we did it was because we did it to ourselves. A girl might decide she would rather be married and pregnant than go on to be a nurse. Other girls might find themselves in what used to be called "trouble", though this was not as common as it was before the Dartmouth Infirmary doctors started handing out birth control pills. It did happen to one pretty brunette named Sidney, whose boyfriend admired her too much. Sidney was lucky. Her parents had money. They sent her to Puerto Rico on "vacation".

We, of course, had split into groups, or cliques, as most young women do. There was the vivacious, blond group, led by a doctor's daughter named Margie. This crowd made the rounds on Fraternity Row, though I never heard they were invited to Winter Carnival, the Holy Grail of Dartmouth social events. Cute could not compete with the Seven Sisters. The Margie group spent sunny spring days inviting a tan out on the flat, pebbled roof of Billings Lee. Linda, not a blond, but a Margie-girl anyway, toasted herself to a shade of Hawaiian loveliness, though I imagine she might have regretted it in later years.

My friends and I were the short, smart group. We were on the plain side of pretty- all brown-haired. Most with glasses.There was Mary-Ellen Bean, who came from Burlington because all the diploma schools in Vermont had closed. She had straight hair to the waist, and an affect somewhere between deadpan and Buster Keaton. My other best friend was Christine Kelsey. I was going to describe her as having a smile like the Cheshire Cat, but that was not so. Christine was the Cheshire Cat. Her father sent her to school so she would take care of him when he was old. I hear she fled this fate, and ended up somewhere in the South. Christine's favorite phrase was "sick', and she used it a hundred ways. "Sick!" she would say if something amused her. "Sick" was her comment on the ridiculous and the absurd. I have never met anyone who could give one word so many meanings.

Pam, another of our group, was indispensable to us. She had a car.A Plymouth Duster that carried us down to the Dairy Queen in Lebanon. Margie may have been cute and popular, but she did not have a car.

Beano,Christine, Pam, and I were regulars at a coffee house on the main road into town just east of the Ledyard Bridge.We talked and ate triscuits and drank cocoa, and met a few Dartmouth boys. Once I had a date with a boy named Roger Rockbound, who was a member of the Young Republicans. It did not go well, for I was on my way to becoming a verbal Bomb Thrower who spent her off hours reading Ramparts magazine. Maybe we were all cliches in those days.

Weekday evenings we spent up on the wards reading our patients'charts and writing care plans. Freshman year was devoted to adult medical-surgical nursing. The specialties- Pediatrics, Obstetrics, OR Nursing, Psych- awaited us in our Junior year.

Along with Med-Surg and Fundamentals came Diet Science, or Nutrition. Miss Carolyn Sherman taught it. Like Dr. Sandra McKay, Miss Sherman was a hand and arm waver. She was never without a cigarette. She was a stout, ugly woman with a pock marked face, a bulbous nose, and an inexhaustible supply of purple polka dot dresses.. She always stood behind a lectern. I do not know that she ever knew my name, or recognized me in the crowd. Perhaps because I hated her class. It bored me, and I made it through with a "C". Ironic then, that two years later she was to become the greatest and most influential teacher I had ever had. But that is a story for later.

I continued babysitting and working as a nurses's aide on my off hours. I also started ward-clerking and working as an aide at Dick Hall's House, the Dartmouth Infirmary. On Saturday nights ,another aide and I would go to the Mary Hitchcock ER to bring back stretcher loads of drunk Dartmouth boys. I remember one night when a bat got in and terrorized the halls. I remember elegant, sad old Dr Chambers dying of a brain tumor in an out of the way private room. There were stories that John
Wayne had been at the Infirmary incognito as he was treated for cancer. I never saw
him. And how could John Wayne ever have been incognito? Probably just a story.

One of the unpleasantnesses of the year was how often some of us were sick. I had a staph bronchitis, otitis media, strep throat, and legions of viruses. The Infirmary treated some of these, but not all. " I am not going to give you antibiotics", said one wise old doctor, "You need to build up your resistance". He was right, and
I did.


I can still remember the smell of staph and a smell I always associated with cancer. I smelled it on the old West Wing women's ward and on the East Wing Men's ward. There were so many patients with mouth cancers and esophageal cancers. Yet I was tough. It did not bother me. I was a nurse.

Since this is a coming of age story, I should add some tales of my baby sitting , for my evenings in the homes of doctors and professors were windows to other worlds.I met my first Southerner. She was Mary Lyons, the wife of a professor. I watched over her son Charlie. Mary Lyons hired me evening after evening, for I read to Charley- "The night Max wore his wolf suit" delighted him. I met the lovely and sad Patricia Gill, who owned a house in the pines and a free-standing glass octagonal music room of great beauty.It had a piano, and it was silent, for Mrs. Gill's husband, Dr Milton Gill,a professor of Music, had died not long before along with 31 other people when their plane hit a mountain before final approach to the Lebanon Airport.There was Dr Eric Ellington, the Chief Neurosurgical resident. He , his wife and six children lived in the cheap, cramped ,subsidized housing Dartmouth provided north of town. Everyone called it "Ticky-Tacky North". I babysat his children when he took his wife to see "2001". A few years later I saw his obituary in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine. He committed suicide. I remember that I was not surprised. I also sat for a black female professor- a rarity at Dartmouth. And for people I do not remember but whose record player and Modern Jazz Quartet albums I will never forget.

May came. The seniors graduated. My friends planned their going home for the summer. I did not plan. I would spend my summer in Hanover, at Billings Lee. Hanover was now my home. I did not want to leave it. I hated Claremont, the town my parents lived in. I had no high school friends to be sentimental about. I had work in the hospital and at Dick Hall's house. I was content.

In one of our last class lectures of the year, Mrs Smith, my instructor ,said something I remembered about the nature of nursing. I liked it so well I wrote it on an index card ,and taped it on my little desk so I could read it when I needed inspiration.

"In nursing", she said, "There are no patient needs that cannot be identified and met". To this day I do not know who was more credulous. Mrs. Smith, or I. By the end of my junior year the card was gone, for by then I knew better.


This ends the memoir of my freshman year at the Mary Hitchcock School of Nursing. The next installment will cover some events of the summer, and the coming of my junior year.