Huts4

Marie Clocherty was a big boned, bouncy girl. She dropped down right in front of me, smacking her head off one of the dining room chairs. We piled them up in the corner after the patients had their meal. I was on a morning shift: 7am-3pm. That was the busy shift. You had the meds in the morning and some people have peed or shat themselves during the night and needed a bath. And you’d need to mix and match the clothes. Then it was the main meal of the day. Breakfast.

The kitchen was modern. There were all kinds of hotplates and there was porridge and all the different kinds of cereals, sausages, eggs, black pudding, red pudding, which I’d never even heard of, never mind seen and potato scones, of course. There was tea and coffee and hot chocolate. Michael went and got fresh rolls from the shops and brought back the papers. I started getting the Glasgow Herald. There was more in it and reading it gave me something to do. The staff breakfast could last for as long as two half hours.

The patient’s breakfast was, of course, not as near leisurely. Wullie the Pole decided who was getting what and when. There was no arbitration. It was the only way to do things. We’d a ward to run.

The real killer was backshift: 3pm-10pm. That gave a new meaning to the word vegetable. After the meds there was nothing to do, but stew and wait, wait and stew. And smoke. I just kinda drifted into smoking in the same way that I’d drifted into my first job as a student nurse. It gave me something to do and a new identity. I was a smoker. The only upside was that most of the patients started drifting to their rooms to go to bed after about 7pm. That way they were nightshifts problems. Wullie the Pole, the charge nurse, didn’t discourage the patients from going to their beds, but he didn’t encourage them either. He also just kind of drifted along. But by that time he’d usually done a double shift, which for me was the equivalent of swimming the Channel, getting up on the French beach and then suddenly deciding to swim back again. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances that would ever make me do that.

There were no warning signs, no frothing at the mouth, Marie Clocherty just went straight down. I shouldn’t have been surprised. With nothing do all day I sat in the office and read everything and anything. I flexed my new found knowledge like a triceps’s muscle. She’d been on a cocktail of 30 different tablets for epilepsy alone. She been through every combination of barbiturates and the newer benzodiazepemes that the only amazing thing was they found new ones to try. Marie was not expected to see her 16th birthday, but she was now 18. Marie also defied statistics in another way, she’d an extra chromosome and therefore suffered from Down’s syndrome and people with Down’s syndrome don’t suffer from epilepsy. Only Marie did. She’d been my first. My first epileptic.

I’d ran and got Wullie the Pole the first time I’d seen Marie go down. She was lucky then, because it was a soft landing, bouncing off one of the couches on in the Common Room and onto the carpeted floor. I’d heard somewhere or other that you were meant to put something into the epileptics’ mouth, a knife or pen or something to stop them biting their tongue off. I’m not sure what the exact words were. In my excitement I’d said something like that to Wullie the Pole.

He was looking at Marie Clocherty lying on the floor as if she was an interesting specimen of fish wriggling about on the end of his line. But when I said that his black pupils focussed directly on me.

‘Boy, how many are in your family?’ Wullie the Pole had bluntness about him, but I wasn’t sure where he was going with the conversation, or when he was going to do something about Marie Clocherty, whose threshing had increased and, to my eyes, looked as if she was going to take her last breath. But Wullie the Pole seemed in no hurry.

I was shuffling from foot to foot. I desperately wanted him to do something, anything, but he waited impassively for me to speak.

‘Muuum and Dad,’ I stuttered out.

He waited again.

‘That’s it,’ I almost screamed, ‘just mum and dad and me’.

Wullie the Pole simply nodded and shook his head again. ‘I thing that is a good thing.’

I didn’t care then what he thought of me. I just wanted him to do something for Marie Clocherty. But he surprised me.

‘What do you think we should do?’ Wullie the Pole asked me.
I put my hand to my mouth and nose, Marie Clochety not only had peed herself, it smelt like she had also shat herself.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘give her a jag, or something?’

Wullie the Pole leaned down and put Marie Clocherty on her side, adjusting her body so that she lay convulsing like a swimmer half way through the breath stroke.

‘As you can see,’ said Wullie the Pole, ‘she has lost control of her voluntary muscles. What we can do. What you can do, is help clean her up?’

‘Can’t we call an ambulance or something?’

‘Yes,’ said Wullie the Pole, matter of factly, ‘but a nurse would have to go with Marie from next door and I’d also need to go as well. There has to be two nurses. That leave you and the other nurse, next door, with 55 patients between you to deal with. And they treat someone like her at hospitals like Gartnavel General as if her mental handicap is contagious. They panic. You can see it in their eyes. Nothing in their training has equipped them to deal with these kinds of patients. All the nurses there want to do is get rid of her as quickly as possible. Give her back to us. And that’s best all round. We tried it, but it was a waste of time. You’d have guys that were taking 80 to 100 fits per day and even fitting in the ambulances coming back here. And all the ambulance men did was put on the sirens and drive back here faster. Nobody wants them.’

Wullie the Pole didn’t have a sense of humour. But I could almost have laughed when he held something behind his back: ‘You know what they prescribed for Marie when the Phenytonin didn’t work?’ he handed me a bicycle helmet.

Boredom may set its own pace, but the three minutes Marie Clocherty thrashed about in front of us lasted longer than I could have imagined. So when Marie Clocherty dropped down right in front of me I looked to see where she had put her bicycle helmet. It was no joking matter. She should have been wearing it. I couldn’t find the marmalade in the kitchen. There was that orange stuff, but I preferred lemon.