I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (5 page)

7

To be a trainee nurse in the 1970s was like returning to boarding school; it was compulsory to live in the nurses’ quarters. Only six years before my traineeship, a nurse had to resign if she married.

It was 4 pm on Sunday 7 September 1975 and I was standing in the foyer of the building that would be my home for the next three years. The nurses’ quarters were almost as big as the hospital itself. Bryan dropped me with my single suitcase at the front door. A woman in uniform stood at the entrance, clipboard in hand.

‘Name.’

‘Mary Capra.’

‘First floor, B block. You will find your name on a door.’

There were a few girls in the corridor when I entered, but as soon as I found the door with my name on it, I went in and shut it. Lying on the bed was a neat pile of freshly laundered uniforms, a red cape and four starched caps. I picked up the uniforms and immediately recognised the smell of starch and was transported back to the Holy Cross laundry. It didn’t deter me. Though I had experienced more than most eighteen-year-old girls my age, I was determined not to let that define me. A thrill ran through me. I was on the verge of my adult life – at last. I unpacked my few belongings, sat on the bed and looked at the strange buttons that had been delivered along with the uniforms. I fiddled with the clip and worked out how to insert the buttons and secure them with the clips provided. All the items had my name on them. No sooner had I hung my new uniforms in the closet and was trying to work out how to fold the cap when there was a knock at the door. I opened it.

‘Hi, I’m Sally! I’m in the intake three months ahead of you. Some of us thought we’d come and say hello and welcome you new girls.’

‘Wow, that’s sweet of you. Take a seat.’ I began to close the door.

‘Nah, leave it open. There’ll be a bunch of other girls here soon.’

Soon I heard other doors opening along our corridor and similar conversations. We sat on my bed.

‘Want a cigarette?’

‘Mmm, yeah okay. That sounds like a good idea.’

I had tried smoking before and this cigarette tasted good. I felt very grown up. We talked about the uniforms and the buttons.

‘Why have I only got one set of buttons?’

‘Oh that’s standard issue,’ she replied. ‘Hang on to them. They’re rare as hens’ teeth. If you lose them, they’re pretty stingy about giving you more.’

‘Why do they use that funny system of putting them on the uniform?’

‘I dunno, something about the steam irons they use. They would break the buttons.’

‘They must wash them in an industrial laundry.’

She shrugged her shoulders. Soon the corridor was buzzing with the sound of other girls chatting and we moved to join them.

‘Hi, I’m Suzie.’ I met Catherine, Karen, Shirley, Dee, Linda, Margaret. They kept coming. The lady who had pointed me to my corridor – there were several others who worked in the quarters, called home sisters – had told me that dinner was at 6 pm in the dining room. Our new guardian angels showed us the way there. It was in the main hospital building and on the way they pointed out some landmarks – the doctor’s quarters, emergency department and so on.

‘Your table’s down there.’ One of the girls indicated a table at the very back of the huge dining room, which seated around six hundred nurses and sisters (trained nurses). It was humiliating to have to walk past the other nurses all seated at their tables because we stood out in our civvies – the others were mostly dressed in uniform. They were working and this was their tea break. We would soon learn the hospital hierarchy. It was blatant here in the dining room, where sisters sat at the head and, as the tables progressed towards the back of the room, the status of the nurses diminished.

The next day we began our training. We started with a six-week block of lectures. Apart from consuming the content of the book I had already read twice, we learned how to ‘make a tray’. There was a tray for nearly every procedure that a nurse had to perform in her first year. At night, at our desks in our rooms, we made accurate diagrams in binder folders. This was to enable us to remember all the items required for each procedure. Our tutors taught us about swabs, kidney trays, forceps and catheters, items that were familiar to me since I had read about them during my days at the home and had used some of them when I was in hospital. When we learned how to use a bedpan and had to practise placing one under one of our colleagues, I was especially careful with my instructions.

‘We’re the bottom of the pile,’ I announced one lunchtime, as we sat watching how the dining room functioned.

‘You’re not telling me,’ said Catherine. ‘My mum’s a nurse and she warned me that I would spend first year either in the pan room or at the end of the dining room!’

In the evenings in those first six weeks, we began to get to know each other, cigarette in hand. Suzie was a little older and seemed very worldly. She had worked in Western Australia as a nurses’ aide so she knew a little about nursing and hospitals. Dee came from a farm near Beaudesert. She had tried university but decided it was not for her. Her mother, also a nurse, suggested nursing. Linda had worked at Binnaburra Lodge on the Lamington Plateau, a few hours’ drive from Brisbane. She told us stories about working as a chambermaid at the Lodge and hiking in the forest on her days off. Because we started in September, every one of us had done something in between finishing school. I made up a vague story about looking after my grandmother. Of course it had been the other way around.

Bryan and I continued our relationship. Some of the other girls had boyfriends too. When they came to visit or pick us up, the men had to park their cars outside the building and the home sisters would page us to come to reception. No men were allowed inside the building except the few male nurses who lived on a separate floor. If we received phone calls, the home sister on duty would page us on a loudspeaker and transfer the call to a phone located on our floor. Our every move in and out of the hospital was vetted.

After the six-week introduction to nursing we were assigned our wards. Mine was a medical ward. The patients were mostly old and needed a lot of bedside care. As Catherine had predicted, the pan room was where I spent most of my days. Despite the nature of the work – lifting patients on and off bed pans, and assisting them at meal times – I took to it with great enthusiasm. I loved getting into my uniform and going to work. I even enjoyed the shift work, though not night duty. On those nights I struggled to stay awake and forced myself to stay in bed when I heard my friends returning from day shift. I relished studying, making new friends and getting a pay cheque each fortnight. I was on a roll.

When we went into our second block training, we realised what a bonus it was to be in the classroom, off our feet and able to go out at night together. We made the most of it. I was a bit bored with the textbook and one day I noticed Suzie had another book hidden behind her text.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, this is a great book, Mare.
Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs
.’

As soon as I could I bought myself a copy and read it in classes too. At lunchtime we discussed our star signs and once we knew each other’s, we studied them with gusto and moved on to friends and parents, even our tutors. In this way we were sure we could predict the nature of everyone around us.

My second rotation was another medical ward. My friends had told me about the lighter wards and I was hoping for one of those. The eye ward was prized since there was no lifting and patients could shower themselves. When I eventually got assigned there, on night shift I would make a bed out of a linen bag, pull it into the pan room and have a nap, since the patients rarely called us. The surgical wards had younger patients with shorter hospital stays. In the theatres junior nurses didn’t have to do much – just get packets of instruments – and there was no lifting because there were wardsmen to do that. One day on my ward, a patient had a cardiac arrest. A specialised team came running to the patient’s bedside with the crash cart, a trolley especially equipped for emergencies. I heard the ward phone ring and, since all the other staff were tied up with the emergency, I answered it. It was the sister of the patient who was being attended to.

‘He’s just had a cardiac arrest,’ I said, ‘but he’ll be okay. The doctors are resuscitating him.’

‘Oh, he’ll pull through again, will he?’

‘It looks that way. Has he arrested before?’

‘This is his ninth.’

‘Why do some people die and not others?’ I asked Suzie that night as we sat smoking on my small balcony.

‘I don’t know Mare, just luck I suppose.’

‘Where do you think we go when we die?’

‘Heaven! Didn’t the nuns teach you anything?’ Suzie had also been to a Catholic school, as had many of the girls in our group. We laughed.

‘No really, do you believe all that bullshit about heaven and purgatory?’

‘No, I don’t. I think we all have a purpose and it’s up to us to find out what that is.’

‘Well, why do you think bad things happen to some people and other people just breeze through life?’

‘Luck.’

‘Nah, I don’t think like that. I think people who have bad things happen are lucky, because they learn to grow up, to stand on their own two feet and face life’s challenges.’

‘A wise statement from a young girl!’ She kicked me, jokingly. But I wasn’t joking.

‘I don’t want to go out this Saturday. My friends are going to see Normie Rowe at a club in town.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Bryan said.

‘No I don’t want to go out with you tonight. I want to go with my friends.’

‘What are you talking about? Aren’t I your boyfriend?’

He was, and he had stuck with me through thick and thin, but I was increasingly uncomfortable in his company. He wanted to resume a sexual relationship but I couldn’t – sex meant babies and babies meant sadness. It would be years before I had sex again. I wanted to put all the grief behind me, throw myself into a career and be the young girl that I was. I wanted to savour being young since I’d missed the best part of a year of it. For Bryan, ‘moving on’ meant resuming our relationship as it was before our son was born.

‘Look, just this one night, okay? Let’s go out for dinner next Saturday, I have the night off.’

By the time Saturday came round I had made up my mind. It was over. I told him over dinner.

‘What! But you promised me we’d get married.’

‘I know, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea any more.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t explain it, Bryan. It feels wrong to me.’

He was angry. I couldn’t blame him. But I knew what I felt.

Over the coming week he rang me every day.

‘Nurse Capra, nurse Capra.’ The home sister chimed.

At first I answered and repeated over and over, ‘It’s over Bryan.’ Then I stopped taking the calls and he left message after message.

‘Boy, are you popular,’ Catherine said to me one day. ‘All I hear on the pager is your name.’

‘I wish he’d get the message.’

One day soon after, I was on morning shift when I received a call from a nurse in the emergency department.

‘There’s someone here asking for you. He’s in the admission ward.’

‘Who?’

‘I think you’d better come and see him.’

I asked to be relieved from my duties and ran downstairs. When I arrived in the ward and approached the nurse on duty, she led me to a bed. It was Bryan. His mother was by his bedside. I hadn’t seen him for at least six weeks. I wasn’t surprised to see him, rather annoyed.

‘What happened?’

‘I took an overdose.’

‘What? What did you take?’

‘Aspirin.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t remember, I want you back, please ...’

‘Are you happy with yourself now?’ said his mother. ‘Look what you’ve done to my son!’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘And you gave away my grandson!’

Up until this moment I had not considered Bryan’s parents’ grief. Perhaps it was because my own parents had never shown any concern for their grandson.

‘I could have adopted him,’ she said.

This was the first time she’d expressed this to me. She’d known all along I was pregnant. Admittedly she hadn’t seen much of me during my pregnancy, but Bryan was living at home with his parents and he’d never said a word about his mother wanting to keep our baby. I was confused at first, and then angry.

‘Look I’m sorry if you feel that way, but it was our baby and Bryan agreed with me that adopting him was our way of giving him a better life. Now I need to go. I have patients to look after.’

With that I walked away. I knew his overdose was a cry for help. Suicide had been another topic Suzie and I had discussed when she’d been working in the emergency department and had a patient who had taken some drugs but not enough to be fatal. ‘It’s their way of saying, “I need help,”’ she had told me. I knew there was another hospital nearer to his home that Bryan could have gone to. It was obvious that he had chosen to come here to get my attention. It was even likely that he knew that I was on duty that day.

I couldn’t help him and as I returned to my ward I felt a strong resolve. Bryan’s mother was sad for him and she wanted him to be happy again but our baby had nothing to do with that. I had broken it off with him because I was no longer a naive seventeen year old. Telling me that I had made a mistake and blaming me for Bryan’s attempted suicide was her way of trying to get revenge. This gave me a new insight. I actually felt pleased that Christopher was away from this and with his new family. It was the first of many times over the coming years when I knew I had made the right decision. Something strengthened in me. I was not responsible for Bryan. He had to learn to move on, and take care of himself, just as I was doing.

One day I returned from work and heard crying from Catherine’s room. I knocked and went in.

‘You okay?’

‘I just talked to my older sister.’

‘Did something happen to her?’

‘She had a baby girl and she put her up for adoption.’

My heart sank. ‘Oh.’