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Show 168 It was a natural for me. In high school I had written a story called "The Leper," with a background of no knowledge, but heavy on service, wherein a leper had walked away into a desert and death from thirst rather than contaminate the well where healthy people were to drink. I had given strong consideration and decided that a life of service was the ultimate. Now, here it was, self-abnegation, blind obedience, and service, all rolled into one. I wanted immediately to transfer to the three-year course, and wrote home glowingly about it. Papa vetoed my desire. He didn't want me exposed to naked or half-naked men the rest of my life. He was too late. As a Nurse-Aid I would be even more exposed than I would have been as a graduate. I couldn't explain the impersonality of nursing service to Papa, so I stayed where I was. Our course specially trained us for home nursing, and we were required to think up substitutes for all techniques in the case we were faced with such emergency in the home. Our first lowly duties as student nurses were passing and gathering trays, cleaning bedpans and urinals. When I asked Mabel what she was doing at the other hospital she replied: "Same old thing. Running down the hall with a bedpan in one hand and a sandwich in the other. " We also ran errands, went to the diet kitchen for special trays, were sent with a list of the day's requirements of bandages and dressings to the dressing room where we were always cut back by an embattled keeper of dressings and table napkins. Ours was a middle-aged cockney English convert to the church, with black, flashing eyes. |
