Memories

I asked my Mom what some of her earliest memories were.  She says when she was just a little girl, she remembers sitting on her Grandma Scott's knee in her big brick house.  She remembers her Grandpa Scott walking away from her towards the barn with his hands behind his back.  He was beginning to get sick and would eventually be stricken with what they called 'Creeping Paralysis' in those days. He eventually became totally paralyzed and was left bed ridden until the time of his death.  Close to the end, he could only blink his eyes to communicate.  I did some research and found that in some circles, the other name for Creeping Paralysis is Lou Gehrig's Disease.  Although I understand the mere mention strikes a chord of fear, apparently, it is neither contagious nor hereditary.

 Mom remembers her grandma giving my great grandpa a dill pickle to suck on at times as it seemed to help with something...possibly a dry mouth.   It must have been exceptionally heavy work for my great grandma to take care of him day in and day out because one day she simply laid down beside him and died.  Everyone assumed she had a heart attack.  If he knew she had died, there wouldn't have been a single thing he could have done about it.  All he could do was lay there and wait for someone to come by.  After her death, the grown children took turns sitting with him night and day. Mom remembers her mom going over and sometimes in the middle of the night.


The Scotts had ten kids ...  Aaron, Jimmy, Johnny, George, Irvine, Edna, Francess, Margie, Jeannie and Jessie.  My grandma was Jessie, and she was the youngest.  She of course was my favorite, but they were all special in my eyes and have been gone from this earth for many years now.  I inherited a silver tea set from Aunt Edna.  My Aunt Francess did beautiful handiwork and made me a beautiful quilt and a whole set of embroidered tea towels, one for every day of the week.  As you can imagine, after four decades of use, the tea towels are well worn.  The silver tea set however, is turning black,  even though it's all wrapped up in many layers of Saran Wrap!  I think the last one of the Scott children to pass away was Aunt Jeannie.  She was one of the feistiest ones, as she lived the ranching lifestyle with her husband, Uncle Roy and their family out in Alberta.  They were truly red necks even before there was such a term. 

Unfortunately, one of the first ones to pass away of those children was my grandma, Jessie Louella.  She was only 59 and it was from a massive heart attack.  She had been suffering with what the doctor's thought was an ulcer, but apparently it wasn't.  Grandma had short, wavy snow white hair for as long as I can remember.  They said it had gone white in her twenties.   One of the best things about grandparents is that they seldom give you heck.  They fit you into their household like you always belonged there, and they have so much patience.  My parents seldom gave me heck either, but I think we got things at Grandma and Grandpa's that we normally didn't get at home.  For instance, I was introduced to Dad's Chocolate Chip cookies for dipping into coffee with fresh, thick cream. We got this as a bedtime snack, so no wonder I had a hard time falling asleep! I'm pretty sure they hadn't invented decaffeinated coffee yet...My little brother and I slept in the middle bedroom which was located off the dining room.  There was a beautiful wine-coloured comforter on that double bed that was made of some kind of satin material.  It was so slippery it would  slide to the floor multiple times overnigth and for sure come morning.  We were little and I always remember we would wake up freezing to death.  I loved the closet in that room because there was a doll in it that would cry if you held her a certain way.  She also had glass eyes with eyelashes that shut when you laid her down and opened when you sat her up.

My grandma used Atrixo hand cream because after all the times her hands were in water they would be as rough as sand paper if she didn't.  She had beautiful hair and since 'kiss curls' were in, she had  one on either corner of her forhead.  She wore black cat glasses...and although that description sounds garish, she really was a very beautiful and well respected woman (even with the cat glasses).  They were all the rage after all.   In her bedroom she had a small built- in cabinet that housed things like a talcum powder puff.  I distinctly remember her wearing just a titch of red rouge and red lipstick when she went to town.  She would also dab perfume behind each ear.  There was no such thing as a "No Scent" policy anywhere in those days.  The rouge was in a tiny round metal tin inside the cabinet.  I can't really remember, but I think there might have been a mirror on the outside door too.  There was no such thing as make-up brushes, so she used her fingertip  to apply the colour.  She would have had a basin bath while getting ready to go.

On the other wall was a  half closet type cubby hole full of things like all these woman's hats, and matching gloves.  These were meant to dress up an outfit for church, weddings or funerals.  Her parents' huge black family bible sat open on the dresser.  It said when all the family had been born, married and to who, baptised etc.  It was a very important book, so I'm not sure how Grandma got it, out of all the ten children, but maybe because she was the youngest.  I don't know where that book resides today, but I am pretty sure someone has it.  She had another of these cubby hole closets in the dining room.  In there was a long, narrow can, that if you took the lid off a long snaky green thing would spring out at you.  It was a joke, but the first time you had it played on you, you got quite a jolt! They heated the place with an oil stove in the living room.  There was a stove in the kitchen that had some sort of contraption on the side of it, a reservoir I think, to heat water.  Uncle Jerry's bedroom was off the kitchen, and I remember that room was always freezing cold first thing in the morning.  We were reminded how important it was to always wear shoes or slippers inside Grandma's house in the winter time.

Mom remembers her dad hand-making little wooden baby carriages for her and her little sister. The little wheels were even made out of wood.  He was actually quite a good carpenter.  He built his own shop and a camp kitchen in the midst of a bunch of trees he had planted in between the house and the barn. The "Forest", to us kids, it was more like an Enchanted Forest.  We stayed out of the forest for no real reason other than it was rather creepy.  It was on the one side of the road that led to the barn and on the other side was the "Big House".  This was Great Grandma and Grandpa Gunderson's home.  In my entire youth, it had no one living in it.  It had original wood trim and doors and a wooden stairwell to a second storey.  The closets in the bedrooms had slanted ceilings.  There were women's leather shoes in those closets that had buttons on one side that came up over top of the ankle.  All those shoes were black and I always tried to see in my mind's eye what the women who wore them would have looked like. It was a huge two-storey home and I always wondered why it sat empty while my grandparents raised their entire family of four only a couple hundred yards away in a small bungalow.   I could only think that the big one would have cost too much to heat, or for whatever reason, I guess I will never know.  Once as a young girl, I was going through some of my Grandma's treasures, including her photo albums.  I had a big shock to see a picture of my Great Grandma Gunderson in her casket.  I had never before seen anyone dead, so I had a few nightmares after that!

There was a kind of closet at the front door of the Big House and for some reason some sticks of dynamite had been left there for absolutely years.  Eventually, someone came and removed them in a safe manner, but there were some tense moments, because of the instability of the nitroglycerine.  Dynamite was commonly used to blow up beaver dams that were affecting the free flow of the creeks with subsequent flooding of land and crops.  There were no ceiling lights in any of the closets in the Big House.  The walls were kind of chalky and great for drawing pictures on.  We drew an old fashioned telphone and played house and office by the hour.  There were trunks of books and clothes and we could stay most of the day if we liked never lacking things to do.  The windows upstairs were big and the position of the house facing south made it possible to have the sun streaming in, especially in the afternoon.  Downstairs, by the back door was a pantry-like closet.  I remember all the old things sitting on the shelves collecting dust.  One was an old wicker picnic basket.  One was a foot heater that a person could use to warm their feet while riding in a cutter.   The windows in the large living room were stained glass.  The dining room was off of the living room and I'm not sure if the room at the back of it was the kitchen or another bedroom.  It was always dark, so I didn't like going in there.  There was a big veranda out the front door that faced the road, with carragana and lilac bushes planted on three sides of the house.  The house was built at the top of a hill, so overlooked alot of countryside.  There is a creek to the south and east of the farm yard, so in the Spring of the year when the flood came in, the view from the house would have been spectacular.  The countless birds, geese, ducks and swans that flock to that area to this day during the flood in the Spring is nothing short of awesome.

Grandpa built a set of kitchen cupboards for grandma. He was a bit shorter than her and built the cupboards to his own height.  This was a little too low for her so she had to bend down a little while washing  dishes or vegetables or working at the cupboard in general, especially preparing meals.  I remember that issue being a bone of contention, but she was always happy with her new cupboards regardless.  I remember them being varnished to a really high glossy coat.  I remember her pen drawer and the fact that she always kept several boxes of Chicklets chewing gum in the same drawer.  After all, she was a closet smoker and it wouldn't do to smell like smoke when any of her sisters or brothers showed up at her doorstep for a visit . One of the best jobs my little brother and I had when we visited them was to check out all the scores of pens individually to see if they still wrote.  If they had dried up, then it was time to throw them out.  Another job we had was to gather the eggs.   For some reason, her hens were mean and cranky.  Grandma showed us how to reach under the hen to get the egg.  Some of these hens could tell just by looking at us little kids that we were easy pecking... Did you ever get hen pecked?  It hurts like anything to have a sharp beak give you a good one on the back of the hand.  I never really liked gathering the eggs for that very reason.  Then we would sit up with Grandma late at night until each and every egg was washed.   They would be sold at the creamery in town, along with cream from the Jersey cow.
Mom blistered her whole hand once on a hot exhaust pipe that ran from a motor on the washing machine and exhausted out a window.  Her dad had rigged up the motor to make the washing machine work.  Mom was a little girl and was fascinated with the whole set up.  For some reason, she reached out and grabbed the pipe and her hand instantly blistered.  Grandma Gunderson immediately thrust her whole little hand into the flour bin.  I really don't know how flour would help, but I guess it did.

Mom remembers going for a ride in an old car at her grandpa's.  It was in the 1930's and had a canvas roof.  She was just a kid and several cousins got to go for the ride with her.  She said it was a real highlight because no one had a car in those days.

What became of all these places?  The Scott house with it's dumb waiter (another name for lift or elevator) was burned unexpectedly one night.  It had housed leather couches and many other treasures that were being stolen because no one was left to live in it.  The Gunderson's Big House was ransacked by vandals and had the inside walls shot up.  Someone got loose in there with a gun and went crazy wrecking the place.  After much of the woodwork was salvaged by family and friends, it too was burned.  The big hip-roofed grey barn was burned one night  too and no one knows if it was lightning or deliberately set.  The smaller house where my mother was raised is still standing but as a cabin at a lake. 

On being a nurse Part I of a gazillion

Nursing can be rewarding, exciting and exhilarating, but it can be heart-wrenching and terrifying.  Particularly pediatrics, which is the care of children.  That is the area where you are either a match or not.  Personally, I chose not to work in that area, because I identified too strongly with the little ones.  For instance, I don't like needles myself and when I saw their little eyes grow big and well up with tears at the prospect of a needle, it broke my heart.  I knew that the innocent love and trust that they had felt for me as their nurse and substitute parent, was being crushed in that moment and they were too little to understand.  They didn't know why I was about to hurt them when they were already sick and hurting....That one look just broke my heart every time I saw it.  On the other hand, the  nurses who love and thrive on working in pediatrics nursing say they can give the needles because they know it will help reduce the child's suffering.  I give them absolute credit for their bravery with children.  It's not easy.  As you know, little children need watching every minute, as they are like herding chickens, scattering in every direction.  They're all over the place, catching their fingers in doors, falling, slipping in bath tubs.  You just have to have eyes in the back of your head as your mother used to tell you.  I wanted to play with and cuddle them all, but I had other things to do as their nurse, like look after a whole bunch of others.  At best, I think in future I would be a better volunteer on a kids' ward than a nurse.

The training to become a nurse can open up doors that you never knew existed. If you are thinking about nursing as a career and want to make a comparison of wages, think of it this way.  Those who do entry level positions in administration now, for instance, would stand to literally double or triple their salaries, depending where they might find work.  It goes without saying then, that the pay is pretty good.  Front-line hospital workers make top wages, with educators usually falling behind, physican's office nurses are sometimes paid less, and of course, volunteers bring up the tail end. Except that volunteering brings different kinds of rewards for the heart which are sometimes far greater than any hourly wage could compete with. Think of sitting at the bedside of a dying war veteran and having him tell you his amazing stories of life overseas. If you want to drench your soul in wam emotion that's one thing to try.

That brings me to some of the places in the hospital where I did work:  maternity, the nursery, long term care, medicine and palliative care.  As a nurse, I went from the beginning of the life span to the end of it.  It's the relationships, oh the relationships...they nurture you in a special way  that you may never have known existed.  Your ability to care for these people becomes symbiotic..you get so you need them as much as they need you.  You get filled up and rewarded simply listening to them, sharing the stories of their journeys, and being strong with and for them.  You may not even be aware of the impact you have made on them, as you try to calm and soothe with a smile, a word, a small deed, or most importantly, a touch.  You are there to help guide  and support them through a time in their life that they may have had no way of preparing themselves for.  You may think you are just  doing your job, but the appreciation and outpouring of thanks by some can really take your breath away.  They hug you and give you presents like chocolates and flowers  and sincerely thank you from the bottom of their heart.  They call you an angel.  One man called me the girl with the gentle hands...these big, old clumsy cow milking hands he liked because he thought I was gentle with his fingers and hands every time I checked his blood sugar.  These people thank you in the only way they know how which melts you and humbles you and tugs at your heart strings.  These people miss you when you leave.  One man I spent a whole summer working with on palliative care.  We became friends and he told me about his feelings of not wanting to be a burden to his wife and family.  We talked about his being brave and kind and good.  Then the summer ended and I went back to my other job.  I never got a chance to say good bye to him and that chokes me up to this day.  Another man who was crotchety and cranky watched me walk down the hallway after I'd been gone from that floor for almost a year.  He stood with his hands on his hips and looked me straight in the eye and said, "where on earth have you been?"

Nurses are also employed as entrepreneurs.  They own and operate their own businesses or franchises.  They work for governments, public and separate schools, jails, industry, including mines, plants and mills, etc.  Nurses are employed in many more sectors of society so don't think my  list is exhaustive. Nurses are researchers and policy writers and developers.  Nurses work in public health and home care...so it seems you don't have to go too far to find a nurse.  They'll do everything from provide you with foot care and toenail trimming to washing your hair and brushing your dentures to everything elese that falls in between!   The Medicine Wheel is taught by those in the Aboriginal community and is all encompassing of mind, body and spirit.  There is no denying that holistic medicine is the most inclusive and nurses understand this and have their basis in not only caring, but in practising using holistic ideologies.  Western medicine, although evolved over the years into separate specialties that struggle to communicate, is thankfully made up of individuals.  As individuals, the majority largely accept the facts that every person requires a continuum of care, a hand off from one area to the other, a not allowing anyone to 'fall between the cracks' mentality. Care is patient and family centred.  As individual health care practitioners, we instinctively take responsibility for other human beings, knowing they deserve compassion on every level and rely on a strong systems framework that won't let anyone down. At least this is what we strive for, because sometimes the system or the individual does let the person down.  If we are any kind of human being, we will do our level best to investigate what went wrong and try to make sure it doesn't happen again.  We after all, are only human just like you and no one is perfect, even if we strive to be.
 
The responsibilities that come with being a nurse are hard to imagine, especially if you've never thought about or been exposed to what goes on in a hospital or other places where nurses practice.  There is no denying that the accountability for all health care workers is stark, and nurses are front and centre in that department.  Someone has to take the reins to orchestrate the twenty-four hour a day care...and that role includes nurses.  Hospital services operate seven days a week, 365 days a year..., year after year after year.  The type of care that all patients receive comes directly from a team of professionals that includes nurses.  Patients, clients, their situations and symptoms must be assessed, treatment planned, interventions carried out and evaluations observed and recorded.  Everything that is associated with every individual patient must be taken into account.  The work is onerous and never-ending until the patient is discharged, only to have him or her possibly return sometime again in the future.  At that point, you start over with charting and admission records, not just picking up where you left off.  The patient's physican relies on the nurse to report assessments and treatment results promptly and concisely.  Record-keeping and documentation must demonstrate what happened because some time down the road, that might be the only proof available in a court of law that you actually did what you said you did, because you signed for it.  So, everything good and bad about what happened to and for your patient, but especially those things that might have adversely affected him or her has to be written down. Potential nursing students, stop and think...can you spell?  Can you read?  Are you able to understand what people say to you?  Can you speak English?  If you have difficulties learning and you already suffer from any of these communication issues, maybe nursing is not really appropriate for you until you do.  It's not enough to simply have the ability to love and care for others.

Receiving nurse's training at an older age has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.  The pluses are that you are a mature student and have already had important life experiences such as taking on the responsibilities of raising a family.  You may have been around someone who had to be hospitalized for surgery or for treatment of a medical condition.  You probably already know a whole lot about certain illnesses, because you or a family member may already have had one or more.  Looking after others is generally built into your life fairly early on, meaning that you know how to  do things that others without the experience are not so comfortable with...Like wiping and washing brows and bottoms, feeding people with bottles or spoons, nurturing someone to rest and sleep.  The disadvantage of being an older student nurse is that many people you meet assume because of your age that you have been nursing forever.  You look for all the world like the seasoned package, yet little do they know that you are actually of the unmarinated variety and green as grass.  This can lead to safety issues....believe me, so watch out for that one.  By the later age, you may be used to calling the shots, making important decisions all because you are the mom or the dad...but remember, this is not home life, this is dealing with human lives.  You have to cultivate the ability to admit that you don't know and will have to consult with others who know more than you.  You have to swallow your pride and admit to being new and to not knowing everything.  You will be respected much more for that than if you try to bluff your way through.  Absolutely nobody wants to see that happening, so if you have the urge....just stop it.  Another disadvantage is that many of the other professionals you will work with look to be about twelve.  Don't let their youth confuse you....most of them know exactly what they are doing.

Knowing what you're getting yourself into before you get into a nursing program is probably a pretty wise thing to find out up front.  For instance, if you don't like alot of physical activity, math, people in general, people with problems, people who have chronic diseases or contagious diseases, people who are smelly, or who emit odours in general, then nursing may not be the profession for you.  If you don't like the sight of blood, or the sound of someone coughing up sputum, people crying, people angry, people hallucinating...then nursing may not be for you.  If you don't like chaos, stay away from the hospital...you can still be a nurse even with all these dislikes, but you may have to be a little choosier about where you work.  The reason I'm telling you this is that I have had experiences on several occasions when half way through the first day of the first time a student had a patient and was providing personal care like giving a bed bath, the tears began to flow.  "I didn't know there was going to be a smell."  These students really wanted to be nurses and tried all sorts of things like Vicks up the nostrils.  Some made it, but some had to slowly back away. As a nurse you will encounter all sorts of dementia and mental illness and you have to learn to find the irony and the funny side of it all.  For instance, there's nothing funnier than coming across someone in the middle of the night that's wearing only their bib like a superman cape with nothing else on.  You have to learn to laugh because if you don't you will see how sad some of these conditions are and you will be crying all the time, which is no good.  Wearing two pairs of glasses with an adult diaper on backwards in the middle of the night is also right up there with things that make you laugh. 

The life of a student nurse is no picnic either, but it seems once a person makes the decision to become a nurse, there's no stopping them.  I could tell you anything and you really wouldn't listen because you have already decided this is what's right for you.  This is your goal and you will move Heaven and earth to get to it.  I respect your motivation and your drive and I don't want to discourage you in any way.  I do want you to prepare yourself though because it's hard work to sit in a class all day long.  Then you really do have to go home and read all your notes again in order to sync the work deep into your long-term memory reserves.  I'm not kidding, because there's really no other way.  If you're anal retentive like me you likely reorganize and rewrite the notes you took that day during the evening.   This re-writing and syncing turns out to be an excellent study strategy, especially if you have a hard time remembering things.  Incidentally, what I discovered is that you can't possibly remember everything.  You have to learn to know where to look and to digest and synthesize concepts.  You read material, or look at the results of studies that include numbers and graphs.  You begin to learn how to watch for themes and patterns and interactions that might explain why something happens and how it affects people.  If you can attach a story to boring readings, you can make sense of it for yourself.  How that helps is so that you can remember your story and not try to recall the million details you heard in the classroom.  Nursing classes are mostly held in the daytime, but some are offered by distance - print based, evening, or online classes.  If you are already working full-time because you need to make ends meet, then night school or online classes may be for you.

The theory portion of the program is called the didactic and occurs in the classroom.  The hands-on learning occurs in both the  nursing and anatomy & physiology (A&P) labs.  A hospital experience that happens three or four days a week and is combined with one or two days of classroom teaching  is called a clinical.  Practicums are the ones where there is no classroom time, just five days of each week out on the wards.  These clinical experiences are where you get to learn the ropes of your profession.  In my day, we had to wear caps and they were lovely when on straight, but all you had to do was catch them on a hospital curtain that separated the patient beds and you would look ridiculous.  Add sweating because you are doing manual labour and glasses that keep sliding down your nose and now you can never get across to another human being that you actually know what you're doing.  Throw in your clumsiness with metal bath basins, bedpans and kidney basins and you have the recipe for a comedy worse than the Three Stooges when one clangs against the other or as you drop a full basin of water on the floor.  Patients must get a real kick out of nervous student nurses trying to do what they're supposed to.  Mature nurses shake their heads at your disorganization as you run around like a chicken with your head cut off.  Back and forth to get fresh linens...back and forth as you try to set yourself up for things like dressing changes or catheterizations, back and forth, back and forth until you start to play out and that's just the first three hours.  You still have to go for a minimum of eight hours and God forbid, twelve.  After a twelve hour shift, you can be almost certain that your legs will feel numb from the knees down.  The positive to all this is that you didn't have to go home and make supper for the family....they got to fend for themselves!