Cherry Ames 02 Senior Nurse (11 page)

“It’s a good party,” he confided to her happily. Cherry knew what he meant.

“It’s a
very
good party,” Cherry replied, delighted.

At eleven-thirty—the doctors’ Christmas entertainment was scheduled for the stroke of midnight—

Miss Reamer arrived. The Superintendent of Nurses was stately in a long violet dress. Usually, at their parties, she circulated for a little while among the guests. This evening, however, Miss Reamer went directly to the platform and held up her hand for silence.

“I’m sorry to break in on your party with this announcement,” she said. “It looks like a very nice party.

But unfortunately someone will have to miss the entertainment. An extra doctor and nurse are needed immediately. We’re shorthanded—again—as usual.” Miss Reamer looked around the room. “Would anyone care to volunteer?”

Lex, at Cherry’s side, whispered instantly, “Come on, Cherry, it’s a chance to be together.” He raised his hand.

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She hesitated. Lex pinched her arm hard. Cherry raised her hand, too.

“Thanks very much,” Miss Reamer said. “Miss Ames, will you go right up to Men’s Surgical? Dr. Upham, you’re needed on your own ward.” Lex looked so crestfallen, so dumbfounded, that Cherry doubled up with laughter. “Lex—Lex—” she gasped. “Don’t look like that—think of your duty—–”

“I’m thinking of you,” Lex grumbled and stamped off like a disappointed small boy without another word.

Cherry ran back through the snow from Spencer to Crowley, changed quickly into uniform, and hurried back to Spencer where the ward was. She went upstairs, thinking of the odd sensation she had experienced when she slipped off her black lace dress and donned the uniform. It was as if she were giving up all the happiness and reward that the black lace dress stood for—no, not exactly. It was merely that the hospital uniform came first. The black lace dress was still there, and she was earning the right to enjoy it with a free mind.

“Puritan!” Cherry laughed at herself, as she entered the darkened ward. “Why, you early American!” But her sense of duty was deep and strong. She would not have had it otherwise—and absolutely not in wartime, when her country, and therefore her own fate, was in danger.

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Cherry worked hard for an hour at the doctor’s direction. It was Dr. Randall, a surgeon whom she knew only by sight. The patient had suffered a hemorrhage, and Cherry assisted him in staunching the bleeding, cleansing the wound and putting on a fresh dressing.

Meanwhile, the night nurse from an adjoining ward temporarily patrolled this ward as well as her own.

Cherry’s patient, an elderly man, was in a serious condition.

“Look at him every half-hour. Call me if there’s any bleeding,” Dr. Randall ordered. “All right, thanks,” he said to the night nurse, “you may go back to your own ward now. The night supervisor said Miss Ames will stay here all night. Thank you, Miss Ames.” He turned, remembering. “And Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas!” Cherry responded.

She was left alone on the sleeping ward.

“So this is a nurse’s Christmas,” Cherry thought. She began to pity herself a little. Cherry glanced down at her oxfords—just a while ago she had been wearing frivolous slippers. Those satin slippers had seemed so exciting, so important, early in the evening. Then she recalled the emergency preparations deep in the hospital basement, and the helpless premature babies curled up in their incubators. Now as she softly walked about the sleeping ward with her flashlight, the frivolous slippers were completely forgotten. Cherry heard a
B L AC K L AC E

scratching and suppressed laughter at the ward door.

She looked up.

Out in the lighted corridor, looking like huge butterflies in their soft-colored dresses, Ann and Gwen and Bertha and Josie and all her other friends were beckoning to her. Cherry slipped out to them.

“We came to tell you what you missed, you poor thing!” Ann whispered excitedly. “The entertainment—–”

“—was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!” Gwen interrupted. “They did a take-off on the head resident surgeon, and another of Miss Reamer, and then they had a zany play—–”

The girls chattered on. Cherry listened to the details.

They were loyal and dear to come, but to her surprise she was not much interested. Finally the girls slipped out, leaving a trail of laughter and scent.

“Good night and Merry Christmas,” Cherry called after them.

She returned to the ward and went immediately to look at the hemorrhage patient. He was all right. “Now why wasn’t I disappointed that I missed the entertainment?” Cherry wondered. The flashlight’s beam brushed her starched white apron. Then Cherry understood.

The white apron symbolized what Christmas stood for.

Cherry settled down at the head nurse’s desk for the long, lonely night. The night before Christmas. The night of unselfish love and goodness and devotion.

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Cherry glanced around the darkened, quiet ward.

She gazed at the still figures in the beds, who were dependent upon her this night for their very lives. As she wrote out the night report, and got out gauze to roll into bandages, during the long still hours ahead, Cherry thought:

“This is the first Christmas in my life, I think, that I’ve realized to the full the spirit of Christmas.”
c h a p t e r i x

Operating Room

the new year started off with a bang. cherry’s doughty old enemy and friend, Dr. Wylie, unexpectedly came back to the hospital on a short leave from the Army Medical Corps. Cherry, recalling her past conflicts with the grumpy surgeon, felt that it might be only a matter of time before she would tangle with him again.

Operating Room loomed just ahead! Cherry was assigned to Women’s Surgical Ward and sometime during this three-month period, she would be called for O.R. That was the acid test . . . and Cherry looked forward to it with much trepidation and misgiving. As a further maddening touch, those of Cherry’s classmates who were already operating seniors dashed in and out of her room, shouting and moaning such verdicts as, “It’s awful—I’m petrified—I’ll be the death of somebody yet!”
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. . . “Most wonderful thing! But hard!” . . . “Cherry, wait till you’re called! I’m warning you! Just wait!”

“Just keep calm,” she advised herself frantically, as she sat in the lecture hall. The class was having a review of aseptic procedure, preparatory to going on Operating Room. Cherry had learned in her first year how to keep articles free from germs, or sterile, and in her junior year how to care for patients before and after surgery, but those courses had been easy and elementary compared to this senior work. They were having a great many lectures, a great deal of preparation for O.R.

Meanwhile, working on Women’s Surgical as a senior was very different, too, from the work she had done on Women’s Surgical Ward as a first-year student. Then she had given bed baths and simple care to post-operative patients who were nearly well. But the patients Cherry now cared for only recently had come down from Operating Room. They were helpless and seriously ill, and required the closest charting, difficult techniques, and expert care. As a senior, Cherry had the heavier responsibilities of giving medications, treatments, and also charting for the whole ward. But Cherry was relieved to leave bedmaking and baths to the first-year nurses and do the more complicated work herself.

There was one patient on the ward who watched Cherry sympathetically as she worked in the long, quiet, white room lined with high, narrow, white beds. This
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patient happened to be the only woman on the ward who was already convalescing and was ambulatory.

She was allowed by the doctor to be up and about for a few hours a day. She was a plump cheerful woman of sixty, who had been a practical nurse. Everyone called her “Mom.” She was quite alone in the world, and poor.

Mom had been a farm girl in Minnesota. When she was fifteen, the farm had burned down and only she had survived. Kindly nuns took her in and from them she learned practical nursing. Alone, and stunned by what had happened to her, Mom dedicated her life to serving others. All this Mom had gradually confided to Cherry.

One bitter day, snow and sleet raged out of an over-cast sky. The electric lights had been on all day. Even the bustling, self-contained, clean white world of the hospital seemed gloomy in these long winter months.

Cherry went about her work on the ward, wishing that Operating Room would hurry up and assign her.

She started to turn a helpless patient in bed, when Mom called out:

“Don’t lift her that way, honey! You’ll strain your back!

You dassn’t lift without a helper.” Cherry looked up, surprised. She smiled at the elderly woman who was earnestly shaking her gray head at her. “You’re right, Mom, but there’s no one around to assist.” She again arranged the two propping pillows at
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the side of the bed and murmured encouragement to the sick woman.

“And what’s the matter with me to assist!” Cherry had slipped her hands under the patient’s shoulders and hips, when she glanced up again. Mom was walking toward her, unsteady but determined. Cherry was horrified and exclaimed:

“Get back in bed! You’ve been up long enough!”

“Won’t!” Mom struggled with her vivid kimono, hung on to a chair, and reached Cherry’s side. “I’m a sort of nurse myself, anyhow.”

“You’re too weak to lift!” Cherry cried. “Get back in bed! You know the nurse is boss!”

“Don’t sass your elders,” Mom said as she, too, slipped her hands under the helpless woman. “Over she goes!” and automatically Cherry slid the woman to the propped pillows, flexed her knees, then drew the woman onto her side. Mom competently stuffed pillows behind the patient’s back and between her knees.

“That’s to support her,” Mom announced, out of breath but proud. “You obeyed me like a real good girl.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to!” Cherry retorted, amused and flustered. “And now, please, please, get back into bed.”

“No, ma’am,” Mom said happily. “It feels good to be up and useful. I’ll tell you what. From now on, I’m your assistant.”

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Cherry bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Mom, you’re incorrigible. Must I call the doctor to get him to
order
you back into bed?”

“Call him, but it won’t do any good,” Mom said, unre-pentant. And she wandered around the ward, folding towels and straightening blankets and thoroughly enjoying herself. When Cherry saw how it satisfied the old lady to be busy, she asked the head nurse about it.

The head nurse approved letting Mom stay up, and promised to get the doctor’s order on it as soon as possible. After all, to convalesce Mom had to get her mind off her illness and take an interest in outside things.

Mom proved to be more of an “assistant” than Cherry had bargained for. In the next few days, Cherry found, on the lower shelves of the linen closet where Mom could reach them, towels folded incorrectly, instruments out of place in the utility room, and Miss Waters’s flowers on Mrs. King’s bedside table.

“But Miss Waters has so many flowers and she’s too sick even to see them and that poor Mrs. King didn’t have a single blossom!” Mom explained. “So I just evened things up a little.”

Cherry did not have the heart to scold Mom. “What about the linens? And the instruments?” she asked sternly.

Mom looked apologetic, and fingered her two short curly gray braids. “I expect I’m not a real nurse like you.

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I never had any good training like you and mostly my uniform was just a housedress.” Her face crinkled up in a smile. “But I nursed a lot of people and brought a lot of babies into this old world and—” Her smile faded. “I tried to do the right things, but maybe I did ’em the wrong way.”

“I’ll bet you’ve done a lot of good,” Cherry consoled her.

One evening, when Cherry was on duty from three to eleven, Mom insisted upon helping her serve the supper trays. She beamed so, padding from bed to bed, that Cherry could practically see Mom’s chart showing her physical improvement. Besides, Cherry was growing fond of the game old lady in her violently colored and checkered kimono. Her unquenchable good spirits helped against the difficult work on the ward and the black howling night outside.

“I’ll just take a look to see that everything’s going all right in the kitchen,” Mom said importantly as she ambled out of the ward.

Suddenly the lights went out. The ward, in the midst of supper, was plunged into darkness. Cherry groped her way into the darkened corridor. Shouts and questions and faint expletives came from the other wards. The whole floor was left in blackness. Flashlights went on quickly. Out of the clamor, Cherry heard a quavering voice call her name.

“Yes?” Cherry followed the sound down the inky corridor. “Who’s calling Cherry Ames?”
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Then she heard loud weeping. She half-fell into a closet and there was Mom, one bare foot entangled with an electric cord.

“I stumbled. These old slippers never did fit me! Oh me, oh my, what an awful thing I’ve gone and done! Got all tangled up in this—this—” Mom blew her nose hard.

“Never mind.” Cherry knelt and focused her flashlight. Because of repairs in progress, one plug temporarily controlled the whole floor. She plugged in the connection, and all the lights went on again. “Never mind, Mom.”

“What are they going to do to me?” Mom pleaded. “If they put me out, I haven’t got a place or a soul to turn to.” Cherry soothed her and promised her she would not be turned out of the hospital until she was much better.