Life as an Army nurse. Part 4

In this epsiode there is some light relief, as two stories are told that show that there is humour in even the most difficult of siutuations.

Part 4

During my training we often had to be ambulance orderlies on night shifts. This meant covering accident and emergency cases, road traffic accidents, etc. I can remember some amusing incidents which occurred; one being when the ambulance was called out on a blue light to the soldiers' married quarters block in Aldershot. It was about 3.30 a.m. and the message received was that an army wife had gone into labour. I had, at this time, completed my training modules on shock and the loss of body fluid circulation, the treatment being direct pressure, elevation, and treatment for shock.

We arrived at the block of flats with the lift not working and the expectant mother on the third floor, which meant that we had to use a chair lift to bring her down. She was clearly in desperate pain, huffing and puffing and squealing, so I was obviously concerned. When we got her down to the ambulance she started shouting "it's coming, it's coming!" I didn't really know what was coming - I hadn't done that module yet! Needless to say, true to the motto of my corps "In arduis fidelis", I felt I could cope. The difficult part was asking her if she had any knickers on. This took most of my courage, the rest of it being needed to actually look at the naughty bits. Upon doing so, imagine my shock when this fluid and blood burst out. I quickly thought that I must do something and, of course, my training on how to treat shock came to the front of my mind. I took out an abdominal shell dressing from the stock that was kept in the ambulance, placed it over the offending article, and pressed tightly. The poor woman was quite concerned at this stage and asked me if I knew what I was doing. Like the true professional I professed to be, I said of course I did and promptly took out another shell dressing and tied it round her legs. By the time we arrived at the maternity ward there was a series of shell dressings wrapped around the offending parts of this poor woman.

When the midwife opened the back of the ambulance there was a moment of stunned silence and the crash maternity team surveyed the masterly work of yours truly. Then came the laughter. It is said that it was the first recorded time that a baby had been born clutching a shell dressing!

One of the beautiful things about the Army is that if you make a spectacular hash of something everybody know about it very quickly. That was how another super woman came to my rescue. She was Colonel Anderson, the head of midwifery in the Louise Margaret hospital, and she suggested that I came and attended emergency childbirth lessons. I did so, and as a result assisted in the delivery of several children.

Being an ambulance orderly seemed to me to be fraught with minefields of events that tended to go out of my control very quickly. Another instance was of being called out at four in the morning to take a dead patient to the mortuary. It was winter and snowing, and the mortuary is at the back of the hospital down a hill which runs at approximately 45 degrees.

The ambulance drivers were civilians, some were who were quite senior, as in old, and this shout had a very old and asthmatic driver. He grumbled and carped about the time and the weather as we loaded the body into the ambulance and proceeded to the morgue. At the morgue I collected the trolley and pushed it to the back of the ambulance, where the ambulance driver took the feet of the stretcher and I the head and we went to lift the body out of the ambulance. Unfortunately the driver slipped on the ice and the body shot off the mattress, down the road and disappeared. The reason for it disappearing was that it was wrapped in a white sheet and we were in the middle of a snowstorm. This would normally not be so much of a problem except that the relatives were viewing the body in about 15 minutes and we had lost it! We had to wake up the barracks, call out the guard, and search the snowdrifts until we had found our missing stiff. The stiffness was the result both of rigor mortis and the freezing temperature, which made it doubly difficult to get his teeth in!

Needless to say, there were also incidents that were far from amusing but were all part of the training, such as attending road traffic accidents, sudden deaths, overdoses and other unpleasant events.

© J K Adler-Collins 2008