Ooh Matron!: The Nomadic Nurse Series, #1

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the many people who inspired and nurtured me and my career during my formative years as a nurse. However, in addition, I would like to dedicate it to student nurses and nursing assistants for their contribution to healthcare, in its many forms, around the world. The nursing profession is not an island and it takes a team effort to provide consistently high standards of care. To nurse educators and ward based mentors in all specialties who play such a vital part in laying the foundations for high quality nursing care provision for our future generations. And last but by no means least to the ancillary staff who support all grades of staff, not just by fulfilling their roles to the highest standard, but by being the ones to go the extra mile for you. For example, from my experiences they will be the ones to bring you a cup of coffee when you have already worked eight hours with no official break and still have at least four hours to go. Or those who come to your aid when a patient gets violent or abusive towards you while help is summoned.

Thank you to everyone, you are all appreciated.

Over the years a couple of nursing based quotes have become memorable for me and I would like to share those here in case anyone else can relate to them:

‘Sometimes I inspire my patients; more often they inspire me.’ Unknown author

‘They may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel.’ - Maya Angelou

‘Nurses may not be angels, but they are the next best thing.’ Anonymous

Acknowledgements

Firstly I would like to say a big thank you to my editor Martin Papworth. An honest, gracious and hardworking gentleman who has enhanced my work and reputation as an author.

Secondly to Clair Victoria Butfield, my step-daughter and newly qualified paediatric staff nurse who kindly contributed to this book to provide a comparison between student nurse training in Essex 1983-1986 versus 2012-2015.

I would also like to acknowledge and thank the following people and groups for helping me on my writing journey to date and providing the support and encouragement I needed to expand my memoir writing into a new direction with this new nursing and medical memoir series. Just knowing that your peers have faith in your writing ability can carry an author a very long way.

My social media friends and colleagues in the Rukia Publishing social media tweet team including the leaders, Nigel Butfield, Samantha Parker & Shontae Brewster. http://www.rukiapublishing.com/

‘We Love Memoirs’ Facebook Group and especially Julie Haigh for her input towards the cover design for this book and her relentless endeavours to support the WLM authors. Julie also provides a tremendous source of help and guidance to myself and many of the WLM authors on Goodreads which is greatly appreciated. https://www.facebook.com/groups/welovememoirs/

‘Tom Winton Authors Helping Authors’ Facebook Group especially Tom Winton and Mark Williams. https://www.facebook.com/groups/495847367109155/

ASMSG - Author Social Media Support Group, its tweet teams and the inspirational Christoph Fischer. https://www.facebook.com/groups/389343847782037/

Copyright

©2015 Sarah Jane Butfield ©2015 Clair Victoria Butfield – Chapter twelve Student nurse training now.

Cover design Nigel Butfield

Editor: Martin Papworth

First e-book edition: August 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise without the written permission of the author and publisher.

The people and events portrayed in this book are as remembered, perceived and/or experienced by Sarah Jane Butfield. However, some of the names and locations have been changed for privacy and legal reasons. The author takes no responsibility for the accuracy of events and dialogue retold to her by third parties, close friends or family.

The photographs included in this book include some recovered scanned copies, as we lost most of our originals in the Australian floods, hence the production quality may be impaired. Other photographs have been obtained and used with the permission of family and friends, including Samantha Parker and Richard Klein.

For links to all of Sarah Jane’s books and to join her private mailing list for subscriber first access to sneak previews and behind the scenes photographs visit Sarah Jane’s author website

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter one: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Chapter two: Student Nurse McDonald

Chapter three: Banana Banshee Happy Hour

Chapter four: Mind your backs!

Chapter five: Slip, slop, slap summer fun

Chapter six: Wacky races and sad faces

Chapter seven: Do I really want to be a nurse?

Chapter eight: Highs and lows of womanhood revealed

Chapter nine: Mind Matters

Chapter ten: Theatrical high jinks and honey traps

Chapter eleven: By Royal appointment.

Chapter twelve: Student nurse training now

Chapter thirteen: Accident and Emergency beckons

Chapter fourteen: The Anatomy of becoming a qualified nurse

Chapter fifteen: Enter Staff Nurse Parker

Medical Terms Glossary

Step back in time

About the author

Travel Memoirs by Sarah Jane Butfield

Other books by Sarah Jane Butfield

Sneak preview of Bedpans to Boardrooms!

Ooh Matron!

Introduction

‘Ooh Matron!’ is the first book in The Nomadic Nurse Series which serves as a biographical compilation of stories, anecdotes and reflections from a varied nursing career in health care establishments across the UK and in various parts of Australia.

Each book in this series will represent a new chapter or episode in my nursing career, which I hope will not only be entertaining, but may also inspire readers to explore all opportunities, however obscure they may at first appear.

Sarah Jane has no career aspirations, all she wants is to leave school, work as a cashier at Woolworths and get married. Then everything changes and she finds herself wearing a fluorescent pink uniform and studying to get into Nursing School. What inspired this surprising change of direction? What happens when she leaves home to live in a garrison town with a housemate who is a party animal? The big question being, is she really cut out to be a nurse?

Let’s start at the beginning with Sarah Jane as a sixteen-year-old country girl, a bit old-fashioned but who has a mischievous sense of humour who suddenly decides she wants to be a nurse!

Beta reader review

This funny, yet poignant nursing memoir has Sarah Jane’s trademark honest writing style which shines through in every story she tells. From starting her student nurse training in Essex to coping with patients in happy, sad and heart-breaking situations. It gives you a young woman's view into the realities of entering the world of nursing in the 1980’s. A highly entertaining and informative memoir which was able to take me from laughing out loud to having welled tears of empathy. S. Brewster

Why is it called ‘Ooh Matron’ and what does that bring to mind for you?

Readers of a certain age will probably remember the naughty seaside postcard style humour of the ‘Carry On’ films series in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The films starred some of the great comedy actors of all time such as Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Sid James, Jim Dale, Frankie Howerd and Hattie Jacques, to name but a few. I grew up exposed to these films as my mum was a huge fan. She had a wonderful, infectious, slightly naughty laugh, so this type of humour entertained her. My mum’s love and fondness for Hattie Jacques originated from these humble beginnings. She watched all the films that Hattie appeared in many times over, her favourites being ‘Carry On Matron’ and ‘Carry On Doctor’.

There was a physical resemblance between my mum and Hattie Jacques, but in hindsight and with a tinge of sadness I realise now that they were also similar in their personalities and the personal struggles they faced with relationships, weight gain and loss.

My Mum, me and two of my sisters

From left to right Susie, me, mum and Sally

Our mum in 1990

One of the proudest moments of my life was the day I told my mum I had passed my final examinations and was at last a qualified nurse, even though she didn’t see why I needed a career as I had ‘a nice man to take care of me’. Nevertheless, I knew that she was proud of me and if she were alive today and had witnessed the twists and turns of my 28 year nursing career I think she would have become one of those annoying neighbours always going on about their super talented offspring. Everything that I have achieved over the years is due in part to the sacrifices she made both on both a physical and psychological level during my childhood. I hope she knows that those sacrifices were worth it and that as a result I have managed to provide for my children over the years with the security of a valuable nursing qualification behind me.

So let’s start at the beginning with my innocent days of becoming and living the student nurse life in Colchester, Essex. Find out how and why a sixteen-year-old country girl, who was a bit old-fashioned, but had a mischievous sense of humour, suddenly decided she wanted to be a nurse!

Chapter one: What do you want to be when you grow up?

In 1981, as I neared completion of my high school years in Debenham, Suffolk, I had no thoughts about a career of any description. I knew that I would need to find a job straight away because we would need the money and I wanted my mum to work less. However, I had no thoughts of finding a career, considering what direction it might take and where that decision would lead me in the future. As a young country girl growing up with typically traditional, some would say, old-fashioned family values instilled by my mum, I always imagined leaving school and working as a cashier in Woolworths or one of the another department stores in the nearby town of Ipswich. This would be followed eventually by getting married and having a family of my own to care for. There was never any mention or discussion about me pursuing a career of any description and, with no career motivated role models to inspire that train of thought, I had no deep rooted ambitions or objectives, because that wasn’t how my life was destined to be.

I came from a family where my mum, a single parent, not by preference but as a result of a poor choice in men, worked three jobs in the days of little or no social security support. She worked as a cleaner, regularly undertook a variety of fruit and vegetable picking jobs, turkey plucking at the local farm before Christmas and she also worked as home carer. She did all of this to ensure that myself and my three sisters always had everything that we needed. We did not have an extended family network to rely on apart from my Nan, who lived in the next village, however, she had limited mobility, using two walking sticks due to chronic leg ulcers, but she loved having me there to watch the wrestling on television with her on Saturday afternoon.

Unless I was oblivious to it, there was little talk of careers at school until towards the end of the final year and it was after one of the first sessions with the careers adviser that I thought, ‘Hey perhaps there is more on offer than a shop job.’ At one of the sessions we had a talk from a tutor from the Suffolk College who handed out the prospectus for the coming year. I turned the pages not even sure what I was looking for. True to my old-fashioned approach to life, thinking of jobs suitable for women, I headed straight for the secretarial office skills section. This was before I remembered the words of my office studies teacher Mrs Sibley, You might be better suited to filing and indexing than typing, so let’s not worry about the typing speed and accuracy test.

Several of my friends were opting for hairdressing courses, but I had always been such a ‘Tom-Boy’ with little interest in anything of that nature and always happiest in my dungarees sporting my usual unkempt hair style or a ponytail.

One definition of a ‘Tom boy’ is:

A girl who behaves in a way that is perceived to be stereotypically boyish or masculine and/or a girl who acts or dresses in a boyish way, liking rough outdoor activities.

Quote http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tomboy

And this definitely applied to me, a born and bred country girl.

As I turned the page I saw a photograph of an elderly man being helped to put his socks on, in what looked like his own home, by a pre-nursing student wearing an extremely bright, almost fluorescent pink uniform dress. Something stirred in my brain. No, not the thought of the pink dress. At once this image made me think of my Nan and her leg ulcers and how the district nurse visited each week, sometimes with a helper, to redress them. I also thought about our elderly neighbour Mr Forsyth whom I visited a couple of times a week to apply or check on his corn plasters. He couldn’t reach to do it himself due to his arthritic knees and hips, or his war wounds as he called them. My mum had done some home carer work so perhaps I could do something similar after completing this course. I liked old people, they were interesting and always had great stories to tell.

This accidental and humble beginning is where it all began, and so my nursing journey started.

Don’t I look the part in my pink pre-nursing student uniform, fob watch and identity badge?

In September 1981 I started the pre-nursing course at Suffolk College in Ipswich. The purpose of the course was to prepare students for making an application to any UK nursing training establishment to complete either their State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) or State Registered Nurse (SRN) training, I wasn’t entirely sure I would do either of those, but I focused on completing the course and achieving the entry qualifications anyway. The course that I was accepted onto aimed to incorporate the educational elements to ensure that all students achieved the minimum of five O levels including Mathematics and English language at Grade C or above, which was the minimum entry qualification for an SRN