That's Another Story: The Autobiography (17 page)

‘What’s up with Florrie? Is she playing up?’

‘Yes, I think she needs the bedpan.’

And with that I drew the curtain around the bed and went and told Sister, who instructed me to lay Mrs Kent out with as little fuss as possible. When I returned to the bed Mrs Kent was still in the same position, arm raised, brandishing the soupspoon, with somewhat horrifically a tiny dollop of the thick pea soup hanging from one of her nostrils. After cleaning this away I proceeded to remove the spoon from her hand, but the fingers were clasped around the handle, claw-like, rigid and tight. However, with monumental effort and a lot of cracking of finger joints, I managed to free the spoon. I could then begin to carry out the procedure of laying out, which involved the washing as before, labelling the body and tying the two big toes together, then placing the corpse in a shroud, which I couldn’t quite close owing to the fact that her arm was still in the attacking position and refused to lie down. Eventually Mrs Kent was wheeled off in the secret gurney and no one said a word.

Sister suddenly collared me and said, ‘Did you get her teeth?’

‘. . . Her teeth?’

‘Yes, you’ll need to take her teeth out and put them with her belongings. Go on and catch the porter, he won’t have got far.’

I chased after him, catching him just as he was in the lift and about to press the button, to take himself and Mrs Kent down to the basement. I jumped in and the lift doors closed.

The porter, as was true of a small section of the ancillary staff, was somewhat strange looking, like something out of Central Casting: Herman Munster’s better-looking cousin or a member of the Addams family on work experience. He had a rather large head and a livid-looking scar across the side of his forehead. Presumably something that most of us need in order to function as normal, sociable human beings had quite recently been removed, for he never spoke as far as I knew, never made eye contact and moved with a creepy, gliding slowness. I didn’t relish being alone in the lift with him, never mind alone in the lift with him alongside a corpse going down to the mortuary, in the bowels of the hospital.

‘I’ve been sent to get her teeth.’

He opened the top of the gurney and pulled back the shroud without saying a word. Mrs Kent greeted me with her raised arm but when I tried to open her mouth in order to retrieve the teeth, it proved impossible; it simply would not open. It was set solid in a kind of snarl and the teeth, which were tantalisingly visible, were a lurid green colour, owing to a coating of pea soup. Not particularly wanting to be in the mortuary any longer than was necessary, I was determined to get the teeth out before we got there, so I hopped up on to the gurney. Just as I was wrestling with Mrs Kent’s jaw, the lift clanked and juddered to a halt at the second floor, the door opened and a cocky medical student, whom I recognised from the wards, stood there, staring.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said with a snigger.

‘I’m just having a last snog before they put her in the fridge.’

‘God, if anyone sees you . . .’

‘I’m trying to take her teeth out, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Why? Does she owe you money?’

And with a click of the jaw, out they came.

Later that day, I returned to the mortuary and, carrying a small polythene bag containing all Mrs Kent’s belongings, I entered the visitors’ room. There are few things more poignant than the little bag of belongings that are handed over to relatives when a patient dies. In this case, a wedding ring, a pair of glasses, a little bottle of 4711 eau de cologne, a hairbrush, a toilet bag and those teeth. Her daughter, a woman of about fifty, was standing there in a shabby coat, looking lost and red-eyed. When I handed her the bag she looked inside.

‘Oh, her teeth,’ she said, sounding as if she was about to cry. ‘She never let anyone see her without those.’

Not long before I made my decision to leave nursing, I worked on the Coronary Care Unit at the Queen Elizabeth, which for me was an entirely stressful and enervating experience. Virtually every patient was wired up to a machine that measured his or her heart rate. These things were attached to the patient by means of a set of electrodes that were stuck to their chest. When I was left alone on night duty, the senior nurse having gone for her dinner, I would pace about, constantly checking the patients and their machines for any sign of potential heart failure.

I knew exactly what to do should someone’s heart stop for some reason as I had played a significant part in saving a patient’s life, when on another ward a man had keeled over. I gave him mouth-to-mouth and cardiac massage, together with another nurse, until the crash team arrived and his heart did, in fact, start again as a direct result of our efforts. It was a tremendous feeling, giving me huge confidence and an illusion of omnipotence for at least a couple of days, but I still found the responsibility of this unit, alone at night, albeit only for an hour, overwhelming. My nerves and anxiety weren’t helped by the fact that the electrodes were constantly coming unstuck from the patients’ chests and each time it happened it would set off the same alarm that would be activated should their heart have stopped. It was a constant, high-pitched beep and the electronic graph, which normally blipped up and down with the heart’s activity, would flatline.

Whilst waiting for the senior nurse to return from dinner, I realised that I had to be careful about what I might have in my hand at the time of one of these things going off, as I had already bent a small plastic ruler, snapped a pencil and, on another occasion, an old-fashioned, glass thermometer, cutting my hand in the process. During my first week on this ward, one of the alarms, attached to a huge Irish labourer, was activated. Quick as a flash, a diminutive medical student, who had been going round practising taking blood from the patients, vaulted the cot-side and, landing on top of the man, proceeded to carry out cardiac massage by bashing his breastbone with some force; I was once told that if you broke the sternum you had done a good job. Within seconds the Irishman rose up in the bed and, thinking he was the victim of an assault, punched the student in the face, knocking him clean out.

I wasn’t much enamoured with the operating theatre either. I was too short to watch my first operation, the repair of a hernia, and was given a stool to stand on. I was dreading the scalpel making the first cut into the unmarked, pristine and healthy flesh of the patient, but once this was over I was fine and found it fascinating, not least the conversations between the surgeon and the anaesthetist, chatting away about where they had been at the weekend, gossiping and telling jokes. On one occasion the theatre Sister was hit in the centre of her forehead by a splash of blood and the surgeon said, ‘Oh, changed your religion?’ And all this whilst sorting through the bleeding innards of an unconscious human being.

The most interesting operation I saw was on the brain of an Iranian woman with Parkinson’s disease, which involved drilling holes in her skull. The drill, of the hand variety, bore a close resemblance to one my dad had in the shed and made a similar and unforgettable sound as it cracked slowly through the bone, just as my dad’s did when it went through plywood. Once the brain had been reached, it was the surgeon’s task to locate the overactive cell that was causing the patient’s tremor, then try to zap its nucleus, which he did by watching the brain on a monitor in another room entirely. It was like
The Golden Shot
quiz programme: ‘Up a bit . . . Now left and down a wee bit.’

I was shocked to find on surgical wards that a neat scar depended entirely on how well the surgeon could sew and there was a huge difference in their sewing capabilities. For a time I worked on a ward that did a lot of colostomies, carried out by two different surgeons; one was extremely tidy and the other one, nicknamed by some ‘The Butcher’, made what can only be called a pig’s ear of the job, with a great piece of colon lolling lumpily about on the abdomen, where the other one’s efforts were neatly finished off. The same was true of appendectomies: the neat one’s scars were small and straight while ‘The Butcher’s’ efforts were wonky and sometimes a bit gathered in places. And for the poor patients, it was just a case of who got the luck of the draw.

Surgeons, generally speaking, tended to be more of an extrovert nature than physicians, flirting more with the nurses. Their dress erred on the side of flamboyance, with brightly coloured bow ties and waistcoats, in contrast with the more conservative suits of the physicians. Surgeons were the show men, the stars of the hospital, and one or two were known for their short fuses, screaming and shouting during operations, throwing scalpels, kidney dishes and worse when things weren’t going exactly to plan.

Once I was summoned to a theatre that was short staffed and asked to help clean up after a major operation. I was just wondering what that operation might have been when I plunged my hand into a sink filled with bloody water, in order to pull out the plug, and found something soft and cold lying on the bottom. On taking it out, I found it to be a man’s severed leg, from a below-the-knee amputation. I yelped and flung it away from me across the room, at which the nurse helping me said, ‘Oh, not you as well! That thing has been tossed about like a bloody caber all afternoon.’

My experience on the Coronary Care Unit and in the theatres, I believe, went a long way to convincing me that perhaps I wasn’t in the right profession and it was probably not going to get a lot better. There was a side of nursing, however, that I loved. It was the basic nurturing: the feeding and the washing of patients, making their beds, eating their grapes, chatting and making friends. I ended up writing to several ex-patients for some time after I had given up the profession altogether. I fell in love with them frequently; other people fell in love with doctors, but not me: I fell in love with the patients. There was something about having a man captive in a bed and seeing to his every need.

Well, nearly his every need. We were told in no uncertain terms in preliminary nursing school that we should whip out our biro, which was to be kept in the top pocket at all times, and give the offending member a short, sharp rap with it, but knowing my propensity for unknowingly pulling out the wrong thing, this was a little worrying, as whacking an erect penis with my Spencer Wells forceps, which were kept in the same pocket, could be very nasty. I never had cause to take this drastic action; only once or twice did my hand hover over my biro and both times when I looked at my pocket, it was in fact hovering over my torch.

My favourite ward was a men’s medical. Thirty men, all on bed-rest! Unlike the Coronary Care Unit, I used to long for the odd shift, usually evening, when I would be left in charge. As soon as the staff nurse had gone, I would stand at the end of the ward, hands on hips, and shout, ‘OK, you horrible lot, get your goodies out! Who’s got chocolates and who’s got a nice grape? Come on, the wife must have brought you in something nice.’ I would then do my version of tap-dancing around the ward, picking up the odd chocolate here and grape there, whilst cracking a few jokes and telling one or two stories. On this particular ward at the end of the shift, I would go round and kiss them all goodnight. On the cheek, of course.

Another ward I had adored at the Queen Elizabeth was a men’s surgical, dealing mainly with peripheral vascular disease, which seemed to be caused almost entirely by smoking. The men on the ward were all of a particular type, almost without exception: small, thin, wiry and funny. It took a few days for me to realise that the reason I was so at home on this ward, and got on so well with the men, is that they reminded me of my own father: the physique, the humour and, of course, the heavy smoking. One man, whose veins had been destroyed by smoking, had had an arm amputated some years earlier and was back in to have the other one removed. Just before he went down to theatre, he asked the staff nurse to light him a last cigarette, such was his addiction.

One of the symptoms of this condition was called intermittent claudication, which meant that after walking a certain distance the patient would experience pain in the calf muscle, presumably because enough blood couldn’t get through to it via the ravaged veins. One weekend whilst I was working on this ward, I went home and heard my parents talking in the scullery.

‘Well, you’ve probably pulled a muscle, that’s all.’ The clinking of plates and cups and the smell of soapsuds indicated that my mother was washing up.

‘No, I don’t get it straight off. If it was a pulled muscle, it’d hurt all the time I was walking, but, like, I was walking down to the post office and after about thirty yards I suddenly got the pain and I had to stop, and I, like, rubbed my leg and it went off and just as I got to the post office it was coming on again.’

‘Well, that’s strange, I don’t know what that would be.’

But I did, I knew exactly what it was.

‘Dad, get it checked out.’

‘No, it’s all right, it’s just old age.’

‘No, Dad, you’re sixty not eighty. Go and see the doctor.’

‘Nah, don’t you worry about me.’

But as ever I did.

However, ultimately, nothing was going to keep me in nursing. When Sister Ignatius had said to me, all those years ago, ‘You should go on the stage,’ she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I had always known, from as far back as I can remember, that what I really wanted to do was act. I stared at my name indelibly printed on my laundry bag and I thought of Sister Hartwell, still living in the nurses’ home after fifty years, and knew I had to do something. But what?

I looked up drama in the telephone directory and found something called the British Drama League. I rang them and told a very posh-sounding woman that I wanted to become an actress. What should I do?

She said, ‘Well, really you should go to university.’

‘But I’ve only got four O levels.’