At the conclusion of my first year law studies, my girlfriend - herself a Psychiatric Nursing Sister - persuaded me to work as a Trainee Psych Nurse until university recommenced some fourteen weeks later. This I did somewhat reluctantly - I would rather have spent the entire break surfing - but, to my surprise, I eventually found myself thriving on the challenges the job presented.
After serving my "apprenticeship" (or baptism of fire) in the maximum-security men's ward - a place not unlike the Bedlam of nineteenth century London - I spent a month on night shift tending to the bed-wetting and psychotic patients of an alcoholic ward. After that, the hospital board decided to adopt a novel idea in respect of the maximum-security women's ward. It was ordained that a male nurse should be embedded amongst all these women in the hope that it might impact on their behaviour. There were fewer violent inmates amongst the women, but day-to-day life in their secure ward was generally characterised by feeding frenzies of mass mania and this was impacting severely upon the morale of the female staff stationed there.
Originally, the hospital board intended to assign this role to the burliest and most experienced male nurse available, presumably in the hope of cowing inmates into submission. It was ultimately resolved, however, that a younger male might be preferable - someone for whom the younger girls might want to behave, someone towards whom the older women might feel almost maternal, someone kind of cute and full of life and fun. My girlfriend, Julia, was actually involved in these deliberations. I didn't find this out until long afterwards, but I have no doubt that she enjoyed steering the committee in my direction and - given her wicked sense of humour - I am certain she enjoyed my discomfiture when it was announced that I was to be the pioneering sacrificial lamb!
Day 1 with the women was little different to Day 1 in the locked men's ward. A similar mass of heavily medicated people slumped in armchairs; a similar pall of cigarette smoke floated above them. The smells, however, were considerably less pungent and offensive than the rank odour of the men's ward. My brief, essentially, was to be an activities officer for this smorgasbord of mentally-ill women. My actual nursing duties were to be minimal - administer the occasional injection to any woman deemed to be "acting out" excessively; take blood samples from new inmates; maintain file notes on behaviour; and assist when periodic cat-fights broke out.
For the women in this ward, each new day was like the one before - a long and dreary captivity with little but cigarettes and meal-times to break the monotony. When asked to draw up an activities plan, I was advised to stick to simple things like book-reading, games of cards and discussion groups. What I actually presented for approval was light years away from such a safe and dreary program. I wanted to enliven their days (and mine) by introducing exercise classes, relaxation sessions, painting classes, dancing, sing-alongs around the piano and games of table tennis.
Partly because I was management's newest blue-eyed boy (with a girlfriend in a management role), but mostly because the ward sister spoke up in favour of my plans, I was given the green light to proceed with my program. The only item not agreed to was the painting sessions - too messy.
Astonished to have been given so much rope, I did not repine over the painting. In my enthusiasm, I gave no thought to one possible outcome of giving a guy enough rope. In any case, raw enthusiasm is a wonderful thing - failure never occurred to me for a moment.
I should pause here to describe the inmates I was dealing with. Most were middle-aged to elderly and many were suffering from dementia in its various forms. It saddened me to see so much General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI), generally attributed to untreated syphilis having reached its tertiary stage. Some of these women may once have been prostitutes, but most had contracted syphilis from husbands returning from World War II and had either been asymptomatic or had not recognised any of the symptoms. Additionally, there were those in the ward who were dangerously schizophrenic or depressed and some who were simply intellectually challenged and had nowhere else to be placed.
I cannot pretend that overnight I single-handedly transformed this miserable place into a palace of fun and good behaviour; nor can I pretend that bad times, bad days did not continue to occur. But, with the increasingly enthusiastic assistance of the female nursing staff, things did improve markedly.
One month in, it had become routine for me to set up my portable record player soon after breakfast. I had raided my own LP collection and that of my late father for music likely to appeal to mentally-ill women. In reality, this amounted to music that would appeal to almost any woman. A large group of ladies - some dressed for the day and some still in night-dresses - would join me in listening to the music. Firstly we just lay on the floor and listened to something soothing like the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" or a Supremes ballad or the Everley Brothers, and then I would crank up the volume and the tempo as we stood and swayed with our arms in the air and made some attempt to swoop down to touch our toes. The finale was always a hilarious conga line around the room to something like Miriam Makeba's "Pata-Pata" song. And then we lay down on the floor again to cool down and chill out to a short piece of classical music.
The exercise sessions just before lunch were also a great hit. To music once again, I had the women copy me in bends and gentle lunges and simple leg and arm exercises. Their co-ordination was generally poor but their enthusiasm knew no bounds. Admittedly, some of the ladies in nighties were not always wearing knickers and this made alternate leg-raises somewhat of an ordeal for me when I raised my head to check out how people were faring, but I soldiered on! Once again, when exercise was over, we would conga our way into the dining hall, with the other nurses joining in. It was great fun and light years away from the endless doom and gloom of other days.
It was not all milk and honey of course. There were days when someone would go right off and have to be dragged away to a "safe room" - in reality the traditional padded cell - receive a dose of Largactyl and be restrained in either a strait-jacket or by being strapped to a bed. My job was usually to hold the woman down while another nurse sought to give an intra-muscular injection in the buttocks, but sometimes I was called upon to do the injecting. I used to pray that I would not hit the sciatic nerve of these struggling women and, fortunately, I never did.
One day there was a new admission - a vast woman who spoke no English and who was way off her face with combined madness, anger and fear. We got her to a safe room by acting lile some heaving rugby scrum and then a nurse tried to give her the obligatory injection. But this woman was so strong and squirmed so vigorously that the poor nurse simply couldn't get a clear run at injecting her. I had realised by now that this woman was Italian. I began to speak to her in that language. It caught her attention momentarily. I moved closer, planning to mutter soothing words in Italian, but she grabbed my tie - yes, the men wore ties; how silly that seems today - and she pulled at both ends and damned near strangled me!
With precious little training - we practised on oranges! - I became adept at giving injections and even at drawing blood for testing. Although it was officially a no-no, I was also called upon to administer intravenous injections, normally something requiring a doctor's presence, but doctors and psychiatrists were always thin on the ground. Social workers abounded but I cannot recall ever seeing a single psychologist on the campus. In those days, psychiatrists and psychologists were anathema to each other. In many ways that pissing contest continues to this day, and courtrooms often hear a prosecutor dismiss expert testimony as "only" being that of a psychologist - the unspoken message being that psychologists are little better than psychics and fortune-tellers!
There were sad days too, like the day I learned that one young girl had somehow escaped during the night and thrown herself from the roof of a nearby apartment block. Such a sweet girl but who is to say that she is not better off at peace than condemned to a lifetime of close confinement? And there was the day I was called to another ward to lay out the body of an elderly man who had died in the night. I had never seen a dead body before, let alone handled one, but I so desperately wanted to treat him with reverence and respect. It seemed an indignity to tie a cord tightly around the base of his penis, to stuff wadding up his rectum, and to strap his jaw so it would not flap loose. I cried when I got home that night and I remember his name to this day.
To conclude, my deepest and most abiding memories of the secure women's ward are of ladies singing while I played the piano or the guitar; of silly table tennis matches played with maniacal laughter at each point; and - naturally - of the driving rhythm as a conga line of crazy women weaved its way around the room and into the dining hall, led by a happy young guy who felt he was making a difference.
After serving my "apprenticeship" (or baptism of fire) in the maximum-security men's ward - a place not unlike the Bedlam of nineteenth century London - I spent a month on night shift tending to the bed-wetting and psychotic patients of an alcoholic ward. After that, the hospital board decided to adopt a novel idea in respect of the maximum-security women's ward. It was ordained that a male nurse should be embedded amongst all these women in the hope that it might impact on their behaviour. There were fewer violent inmates amongst the women, but day-to-day life in their secure ward was generally characterised by feeding frenzies of mass mania and this was impacting severely upon the morale of the female staff stationed there.
Originally, the hospital board intended to assign this role to the burliest and most experienced male nurse available, presumably in the hope of cowing inmates into submission. It was ultimately resolved, however, that a younger male might be preferable - someone for whom the younger girls might want to behave, someone towards whom the older women might feel almost maternal, someone kind of cute and full of life and fun. My girlfriend, Julia, was actually involved in these deliberations. I didn't find this out until long afterwards, but I have no doubt that she enjoyed steering the committee in my direction and - given her wicked sense of humour - I am certain she enjoyed my discomfiture when it was announced that I was to be the pioneering sacrificial lamb!
Day 1 with the women was little different to Day 1 in the locked men's ward. A similar mass of heavily medicated people slumped in armchairs; a similar pall of cigarette smoke floated above them. The smells, however, were considerably less pungent and offensive than the rank odour of the men's ward. My brief, essentially, was to be an activities officer for this smorgasbord of mentally-ill women. My actual nursing duties were to be minimal - administer the occasional injection to any woman deemed to be "acting out" excessively; take blood samples from new inmates; maintain file notes on behaviour; and assist when periodic cat-fights broke out.
For the women in this ward, each new day was like the one before - a long and dreary captivity with little but cigarettes and meal-times to break the monotony. When asked to draw up an activities plan, I was advised to stick to simple things like book-reading, games of cards and discussion groups. What I actually presented for approval was light years away from such a safe and dreary program. I wanted to enliven their days (and mine) by introducing exercise classes, relaxation sessions, painting classes, dancing, sing-alongs around the piano and games of table tennis.
Partly because I was management's newest blue-eyed boy (with a girlfriend in a management role), but mostly because the ward sister spoke up in favour of my plans, I was given the green light to proceed with my program. The only item not agreed to was the painting sessions - too messy.
Astonished to have been given so much rope, I did not repine over the painting. In my enthusiasm, I gave no thought to one possible outcome of giving a guy enough rope. In any case, raw enthusiasm is a wonderful thing - failure never occurred to me for a moment.
I should pause here to describe the inmates I was dealing with. Most were middle-aged to elderly and many were suffering from dementia in its various forms. It saddened me to see so much General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI), generally attributed to untreated syphilis having reached its tertiary stage. Some of these women may once have been prostitutes, but most had contracted syphilis from husbands returning from World War II and had either been asymptomatic or had not recognised any of the symptoms. Additionally, there were those in the ward who were dangerously schizophrenic or depressed and some who were simply intellectually challenged and had nowhere else to be placed.
I cannot pretend that overnight I single-handedly transformed this miserable place into a palace of fun and good behaviour; nor can I pretend that bad times, bad days did not continue to occur. But, with the increasingly enthusiastic assistance of the female nursing staff, things did improve markedly.
One month in, it had become routine for me to set up my portable record player soon after breakfast. I had raided my own LP collection and that of my late father for music likely to appeal to mentally-ill women. In reality, this amounted to music that would appeal to almost any woman. A large group of ladies - some dressed for the day and some still in night-dresses - would join me in listening to the music. Firstly we just lay on the floor and listened to something soothing like the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" or a Supremes ballad or the Everley Brothers, and then I would crank up the volume and the tempo as we stood and swayed with our arms in the air and made some attempt to swoop down to touch our toes. The finale was always a hilarious conga line around the room to something like Miriam Makeba's "Pata-Pata" song. And then we lay down on the floor again to cool down and chill out to a short piece of classical music.
The exercise sessions just before lunch were also a great hit. To music once again, I had the women copy me in bends and gentle lunges and simple leg and arm exercises. Their co-ordination was generally poor but their enthusiasm knew no bounds. Admittedly, some of the ladies in nighties were not always wearing knickers and this made alternate leg-raises somewhat of an ordeal for me when I raised my head to check out how people were faring, but I soldiered on! Once again, when exercise was over, we would conga our way into the dining hall, with the other nurses joining in. It was great fun and light years away from the endless doom and gloom of other days.
It was not all milk and honey of course. There were days when someone would go right off and have to be dragged away to a "safe room" - in reality the traditional padded cell - receive a dose of Largactyl and be restrained in either a strait-jacket or by being strapped to a bed. My job was usually to hold the woman down while another nurse sought to give an intra-muscular injection in the buttocks, but sometimes I was called upon to do the injecting. I used to pray that I would not hit the sciatic nerve of these struggling women and, fortunately, I never did.
One day there was a new admission - a vast woman who spoke no English and who was way off her face with combined madness, anger and fear. We got her to a safe room by acting lile some heaving rugby scrum and then a nurse tried to give her the obligatory injection. But this woman was so strong and squirmed so vigorously that the poor nurse simply couldn't get a clear run at injecting her. I had realised by now that this woman was Italian. I began to speak to her in that language. It caught her attention momentarily. I moved closer, planning to mutter soothing words in Italian, but she grabbed my tie - yes, the men wore ties; how silly that seems today - and she pulled at both ends and damned near strangled me!
With precious little training - we practised on oranges! - I became adept at giving injections and even at drawing blood for testing. Although it was officially a no-no, I was also called upon to administer intravenous injections, normally something requiring a doctor's presence, but doctors and psychiatrists were always thin on the ground. Social workers abounded but I cannot recall ever seeing a single psychologist on the campus. In those days, psychiatrists and psychologists were anathema to each other. In many ways that pissing contest continues to this day, and courtrooms often hear a prosecutor dismiss expert testimony as "only" being that of a psychologist - the unspoken message being that psychologists are little better than psychics and fortune-tellers!
There were sad days too, like the day I learned that one young girl had somehow escaped during the night and thrown herself from the roof of a nearby apartment block. Such a sweet girl but who is to say that she is not better off at peace than condemned to a lifetime of close confinement? And there was the day I was called to another ward to lay out the body of an elderly man who had died in the night. I had never seen a dead body before, let alone handled one, but I so desperately wanted to treat him with reverence and respect. It seemed an indignity to tie a cord tightly around the base of his penis, to stuff wadding up his rectum, and to strap his jaw so it would not flap loose. I cried when I got home that night and I remember his name to this day.
To conclude, my deepest and most abiding memories of the secure women's ward are of ladies singing while I played the piano or the guitar; of silly table tennis matches played with maniacal laughter at each point; and - naturally - of the driving rhythm as a conga line of crazy women weaved its way around the room and into the dining hall, led by a happy young guy who felt he was making a difference.