The Search for Joyful (6 page)

“Our order, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, eventually added an orphanage and dispensed free health care, funded in part by philanthropy, but mainly through a brewery and a freight company that the Sisters organized and ran themselves.” She paused, daring us to laugh. No one did.

“The next hundred years saw nurses trained to serve as administrators, doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Canadian nurses first came under fire in the Riel Rebellion.”

I pricked up my ears at the mention of Louis Riel. I knew from Papa that my mostly French grandfather, Raoul Forquet, was his lieutenant. But I judged it would be as well not to mention that here. The past was very much part of the present in these cloistered walls. It would be prudent not to trumpet the fact that I was the granddaughter of a revolutionary.

“By the last war,” Mother Superior continued, “more than three thousand nursing Sisters served as officers. They were stationed in England, France, and Belgium, and around the Mediterranean. Forty-seven died under combat conditions.”

She paused while this sank in.

“Because you young women are to be serving in a wartime situation, the entire program has been accelerated. Instead of the normal three years, it has of necessity been compressed into two. And if you inspect your handouts, you will note that instruction in military matters has been added to the established nursing classes. It will require diligence and hard work on your part, but it is our hope that you will follow the tradition of your chosen profession with the honor and dedication that is the standard for the Daughters of Charity. I ask you to remember that the eyes of your country are on you and on this institution.”

Although I laughed and joked about it afterward with the others, the sense of awe remained. I explored a bit on my own, trying to memorize the layout of the hospital. Plaques on the wall each carried the name of a donor, and one, I noticed, honored a Brydewell. Was that my roommate's father or grandfather?

The second lecture of the day took place after lunch and was given in the same hall. I tried, as I had last night at supper, to count heads. My best guess was there were around sixty aspiring nurses. We filed in and took our seats with a buzz of anticipation. The lecturer was not only a medical man, but a distinguished professor at McGill University. He strode onto the podium, a white-haired gentleman obviously brought out of retirement. “One of your young interns,” I whispered to Mandy.

He greeted us pleasantly and stated that he was going to commence with a test, “which is by way of determining both your courage and your observation. Now then,” he continued smoothly, “I have before me a beaker of urine. Observe it closely.”

No one ever in my memory had used the word
urine
in public. It was indicative of coming to grips with the functioning of the human body. Which of course as a nurse I would have to do.

“Now,” the professor's voice filled the auditorium, “please watch carefully because I am going to ask each of you to come to the podium in turn. At which time you will do exactly what I am about to do. Observe.” With that he dipped his finger into the vial of urine, then brought the finger to his mouth and sucked it.

A murmur of horror went through the room. Ignoring it, he invited us in the most cordial terms to come up by rows and repeat the experiment. Like stricken sheep we mounted to the podium and one by one dutifully filed past the urine in its clear glass receptacle and imitated his actions.

Each in turn, wincing a bit, stuck her finger in the urine and with a final shudder licked it. When my turn came I immersed my finger and, repressing a gag reflex, proceeded to lick the substance off.

When we returned to our places the professor rocked back on his heels and, brushing aside his white coat, hooked his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. “Well, young ladies, you deserve an A for courage, but an F for observation. I stuck a finger into the urine right enough. But it was the finger next to it I put in my mouth.”

A gasp followed this announcement. Mandy and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

There was more hazing from second-year students, whose chores we ended up doing, including bedpan duty. But I was not again singled out. The story of the Whites Only incident had spread through the hospital, and it won me, if not friends, at least respect.

 
THE HOSPITAL WAS a massive network of services. There were the pre-op and post-op patients, on which everything from appendectomies to bowel resections were done. There was a trauma center and a burn center. Of course, as first-year students we weren't allowed near the serious cases unsupervised.

My first job was to clean the needles and syringes that had been used during the day. Our limited supply of autoclaves was strained past capacity by the influx of new cases. We had to fall back on the old-fashioned procedure of washing instruments in ether, then plunging them into boiling water. But, as I discovered the next morning, making rounds under the careful eye of a doctor, the ends could become plugged. When I jabbed the needle into a patient's arm sometimes nothing came out. This was unpleasant for the patient and for me. I guessed that the problem was the hard water I'd washed them in. So I did what Mama Kathy would have done—after dinner I went outside and collected snow. Melting it took a long time with very little water to show for it. And I didn't get to bed until after the bell.

However, I had soft water in which to sterilize my needles, and next day when the resident had me start an IV, my needle glided in smoothly without sticking. Afterward, the girls wanted to know my secret. When I told them I had gone out and collected snow, they said I was crazy.

I had collected snow before. When I was little I made ice cream by taking Mama Kathy's vanilla and shaking it into newly fallen snow. Thinking this, I realized a week had gone by with no word from anybody. Just as I began to worry, a whole packet of mail arrived, two letters from Vancouver and one without stamps, meaning armed forces. I was most surprised hearing from Georges. Georges dear—I remembered him in his magician's cape (which was Mama's apron worn inside out but with a Georges flair), waving one of Papa's good dress handkerchiefs and, over his protests, making it disappear. Georges, Georges, can't you make the war go away? Georges dear, where are you? North Ireland with the 80th? Libya? Egypt?

Mama Kathy and Connie were embarked on their own adventure. Mama had consented to pull up stakes after all. They were in Vancouver machining spare parts for planes at thirty-six dollars a week. With wages like that they could put by for the rainy day Mama was always expecting.

But there was sad news as well, the kind that was in almost every letter these days. The Clacks' youngest son had volunteered and was missing in action. I paused a moment to remember his pleasant, freckled face and readiness to laugh.

Then turned to the lively descriptions of life in Vancouver. They had found a comfortable apartment, but with no growing thing about. Mama had lugged in a flower box, in which they planned to raise a tomato vine. Down the street in the schoolyard a section had been set aside for a communal victory garden where they donated what free time they could.

I felt the love behind the ordinary sentences and drank in every word. Both Georges and Connie asked if I'd heard from the other. I knew how hard it was for them to be apart.

My own free time was Sundays and a half day on Saturday. Mandy and I went to the library at the first opportunity to find out about Indians. We carried several volumes to the table; Mandy sat on one side, I on the other. My tome started back in 1763 when the Crown laid claim to all unoccupied land.

I leaned across to Mandy and read the paragraph in an undertone, adding, “The Indians, being nomadic, didn't occupy any land at all.”

“So the Crown took it all. Pretty neat if you can get away with it.”

“Oh, they were fair—according to their lights. Indians were allowed the
use
of selected lands. ‘Selected lands' is code for reserves. And here's something they don't teach you in mission school: even today the Indians don't hold legal title to their reserves.”

“I tell you what,” Mandy said. “When we've finished off the Germans, we'll go to Ottawa and march on the Canadian government, make them give it back.”

“Here it tells about the welfare system instituted for the aboriginals. Instead of justice—handouts.”

“That fits with what I'm reading. Two and a half times more poverty among Indians, three times the prenatal death rate.”

“But they're starting to fight back. Listen to this. It was proposed in one of the tribal councils that they stop thinking of the money as charity and call it rent, rent owed them on the land.”

We'd done enough digging for one day and absorbed all we could of Indian rights. Mandy was hungry, and when she mentioned it, so was I. We splurged on sandwiches and a soda.

“In school,” Mandy said thoughtfully, “I remember reading how the tribes escaped extermination in the States by fleeing to Canada, where they were discriminated against but not slaughtered in those terrible Indian wars.”

“You don't have to fight a war,” I responded, “if you can get it all with a forked-tongue paper.”

We didn't go back to the library. Mandy had other things to do, and I didn't like the feelings of anger and resentment that had been stirred up in me. That was no way to be joyful.

The next fortnight I was assigned to blood draws, which entailed going up and down the rows of beds taking blood, smearing the plasma onto glass slides, and labeling and keeping them straight. The second-year nurses complained at this acceleration of our training. We had been promoted from bedpan duty much too fast, in their opinion.

The number of patients on crutches distressed me. They were so young, these boy-men without feet or legs, the lucky ones in casts. I watched my chance and slipped into the stock room to try crutches myself. I spent half an hour swinging about on them. At the end of that time I was exhausted and my armpits were sore. As a result I sewed additional padding onto those waiting to be used, and sprinkled them liberally with baby powder.

Mandy kept a diary in her underwear drawer. It had a vellum cover and tiny gold chain and key. I wondered what she said about me. I think she was disappointed that I wasn't more fun, that I had my nose in a book all the time.

At night, instead of chatting, I sat late, memorizing bone and muscle structure for hands and feet, and I was working on the neck. There were no plots or stories in these books, but after a while I managed to weave the charts and graphs into tales of saving lives.

Besides Saturday half days we students had all of Sunday to allow for church attendance. This, I often thought as I turned the pages of my hymnal, is the sin city Mama Kathy worried about.

Mandy was asked out a lot. Several times we double-dated. But I had the feeling that it took a good deal of manuevering on Mandy's part. I was invariably self-conscious and uncomfortable and finally persuaded Mandy that I preferred a good book, or listening to Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, or studying French by puzzling my way through
Le Devoir.
Also I was familiarizing myself with the big bands, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. They set your feet tapping—that is, until they broke off the music for news flashes.

General MacArthur withdrew to Bataan. They used the word
withdrew
but it didn't fool anyone. It was a retreat, a rout, and the rich oil fields of the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese. They took Singapore and the struggle was now for Java. In the Java Sea on February 27 we lost five warships in a seven-hour battle. The Japanese sustained slight damage to one destroyer. By March 9 the last Allied troops in Java surrendered.

I gave up reading the papers. It didn't do to think of all those young men dying horribly out there on unknown beaches or winding up in ward B without faces, without limbs. They put their lives on the line and it wasn't enough. We were losing, losing badly—over six million tons of shipping in the Atlantic and endless square miles of territory in the South Pacific.

A new load of wounded were brought in from ships sunk in the North Atlantic, some off our coast. The protective attitude the Sisters had endeavored to maintain for us new girls was a thing of the past. We were, you might say, posted to frontline trenches and found ourselves in the thick of things.

The first time I was called on to hold down the head and shoulders of a patient in the throes of a gastric bleed, whose body contorted and whose blood splattered my uniform and my shoes, I almost passed out myself. Instantly I was in the little back bedroom, and it was Papa. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet and, afterward, in the bathroom, splash water over my face. I dabbed at my uniform and shoes, making a solemn resolution as I did. A resolution I broke the very next day.

I was present at an amputation. It was all right when the form was swathed by a sheet, but then a mangled leg was sterilized and a surgical saw—which was nevertheless a saw—bit into flesh and began to cut. I swayed on my feet . . . that wasn't a human being under the drapes . . . this wasn't happening to a human being. The room swirled. I passed the bandage roll I was holding to the person next to me and raced for the bathroom.

I slammed the door shut and leaned against it. The gastric bleed, now this. At the first sight of ligaments and tendons, I'd given way. I hadn't the stuff to make a nurse. I couldn't look at dismemberment in a cold, professional way. I'd blown it.

“Don't feel too bad, Kathy.”

I hadn't noticed Sister Eglantine washing her hands in the corner.

“Compassion is very important in a nurse. The very best nurses have it in good measure. If you can look for the first time on an amputation unmoved, you're not much of a human being. And you have to be a human being first.”