Chapter 14
“What would you say is the doctor’s diagnosis, Nurse O’Halloran?”
Miss Caldicot, the Lady Superintendent of Nurses, eyed Maggie with a beady expectancy as well as a kindly smile, as she waited for her reply. A tall, thin woman with a brisk and cheerful manner, she was both feared and revered by all the trainee nurses.
Maggie removed the stethoscope from the chest of the patient, an elderly woman with a rattling cough, who had been admitted the night before. It was morning rounds, and Miss Caldicot insisted upon swift answers to her questions as they moved about the ward.
“Bronchitis, I believe, Miss Caldicot,” Maggie answered, doing her best not to let her voice waver with so much as a second’s uncertainty.
Miss Caldicot wanted her nurses always to be confident in their answers, otherwise, she’d told them sternly, they should simply admit they didn’t know, and in so doing keep from endangering a patient with their ignorance.
No nursing student of Miss Caldicot’s ever wanted to be put in that uncomfortable and unfortunate position.
“Very good,” Miss Caldicot affirmed, and Maggie felt a rush of pleasure, as well as relief, at getting it right.
Two months into the nurses’ program, and she knew all too well how scalding the superintendent’s disapproval could be.
Her disappointment felt even worse. “And what is the recommended treatment for bronchitis?” she asked in her calm, brisk way, her pencil-thin eyebrows raised expectantly.
“Steam for the cough,” Maggie answered promptly, “and a mustard plaster to ease any discomfort.”
“Then get to it, Nurse O’Halloran,” Miss Caldicot replied with a smile, and she and the two other student nurses moved to the next bed on the ward.
As Maggie hurried by, she gave Gladys a quick, encouraging smile; she knew how terrified the other nurse was of getting anything wrong.
She stayed up far too late every night squinting over their textbooks, sometimes falling asleep with her cheek resting against the page, and yet the information she’d learned by heart seemed to fly clean out of her brain as soon as the superintendent turned her assessing eye on her.
Sure enough, as Miss Caldicot barked out the next question, Maggie heard Gladys miserably stammer an incoherent reply.
Poor girl, she thought, not for the first time, as she hurried toward the supply cupboard to make up a mustard plaster.
She hoped Gladys made it through the probation period.
There were twelve nurses in the program this year, and they’d already been told that it was unlikely all twelve would still be there after Christmas.
Maggie fully intended to be one of the nurses who remained.
Since being accepted to the program back in August, after Dr. Brown had written a fulsome letter of recommendation, Maggie had worked harder than she ever had in her life, harder even than when she’d been spending twelve hours a day bent over a smoking kerosene lamp, sewing piecework back in New York.
The work here might be more difficult, but it was also so much more rewarding.
Admittedly, much of it was menial, even more menial than the scrubbing and sweeping Maggie had done back at the Caters’, as that family’s second girl.
Here at the hospital, one of the student nurses’ main jobs was to check new patients for lice—and then dispose of those tiny, unwelcome creatures if they were so found, an unpleasant task to be sure.
The trainee nurses were also required to give sponge baths, change sheets, make beds, empty slop buckets, mop floors and bring meals. And in between all those necessary and laborious chores, they did the actual nursing work Maggie enjoyed—helping to diagnose and treat the patients.
Each morning, the nurses went on rotation through the various departments of the hospital—maternity, surgical, ear, eye, nose and throat, pediatric and general.
They accompanied Miss Caldicot or one of the senior nurses on her rounds, listening to various doctors’ diagnoses and offering their own suggestions of treatments, gleaned from the books they pored over every evening in the residence’s sitting room.
Then came the actual doing—making mustard plasters as Maggie was doing now, putting on a cast after a broken limb had been set by a doctor, even helping to deliver a baby.
And then, after a ten-hour day on the wards, Maggie ate a quick supper before evening lectures and yet more studying, save for the occasional evening off when the student nurses gathered, to read or chat or, most often, study some more.
Maggie enjoyed their company, but she was conscious of a slight distance between her and the other training nurses, and she couldn’t decide if it was in her own mind or not.
They were all solidly respectable and middle-class, the daughters of bankers or businessmen, dentists or doctors, whereas she…
well, she didn’t tell anyone that her last address had been a parlor house on the Barbary Coast, but her humble origins were obvious, all the same.
The slight nose wrinkle, or narrowing of the eyes, the exchanged glances when her Irish brogue thickened just a little… was she imagining these things, simply because she was so sensitive to them?
Maggie was often too tired to care.
On most nights, it was usually after eleven before she fell into bed, exhausted but satisfied, only to wake the next morning at six o’clock for room inspection and breakfast.
The standards for the nurses were exacting—hair always pinned neatly under their caps, aprons starched and spotless.
Every morning, Miss Caldicot inspected their rooms, running a finger along the bureau to check for dust, pulling at the bedsheet to make sure the corners were tucked in tightly.
If something was not to her satisfaction, it would have to be done again, which might mean missing breakfast; the doors were locked at seven o’clock, and, as Maggie had experienced, rattling them helplessly as she’d breathlessly arrived just a minute after the hour, it felt like a very long time until lunch.
All in all, though, Maggie found she thrived under the regime.
She didn’t mind the rules and regulations, the high standards or the sniffy way Miss Caldicot would look her up and down if so much as a single stray hair was out of place.
She didn’t even mind the most menial of jobs she was required to perform on a daily basis, or the various indignities she had to face—a patient who insisted on seeing a “proper” doctor rather than a lowly student nurse; a meal thrown in her face by a woman in the throes of delirium; a child who had vomited all over her when she’d attempted to take his temperature.
What she did mind, and couldn’t keep from taking deeply to heart, were all the hopeless cases that came through the hospital’s doors.
The women with tumors they stubbornly believed were babies, who had to be told that instead of welcoming a baby, they likely only had a few months left to live.
The children whose pitiful bodies were racked with coughs or their mouths covered in sores, their eyes glassy with pain.
Often they died of tuberculosis or cholera or drinking contaminated milk; living past four or five years old in many parts of the city seemed like a game of chance, with the dice loaded against them.
Many babies were born as addicts, from their mothers taking cough syrups that were laced liberally with opium or alcohol, without them even realizing they’d imbibed such ingredients, and were both incredulous and horrified when they were told they had.
For every patient who was healed and sent on their way, well again, there were often two others who would either die in bed or at home, alone in their suffering, with nothing at all that could be done.
At first, it had made Maggie feel sick inside, and she’d despaired of ever making the difference she craved to.
Once, a month into her training, after a particularly grueling experience helping to deliver a baby that was born tiny and lifeless, its skin already turning blue, and then seeing the mother bleed out right there on the bed, she’d considered quitting altogether.
Not because she didn’t think it was worth doing, but because the cost to her own soul and sanity simply felt too high.
That night at curfew, Miss Caldicot had found her in the little courtyard behind the nurses’ residence, staring up at a moonless sky, the September air damp and cold.
“Nurse O’Halloran,” she’d said sternly, “it is nearly curfew. Furthermore, you will catch a chill standing out here, and then you will be of no use to anyone.”
“I’m of no use to anyone already,” Maggie had replied on the start of a broken sob she’d managed to suck back in.
She knew the superintendent despised self-pity, and she hated it herself, but in that moment she found she couldn’t keep herself from feeling it, a wave that rolled over her and threatened to pull her under.
To her surprise, Miss Caldicot did not reprimand her for her moment’s weakness.
“Today was a hard day,” she said instead, her tone gentler.
“And during your training, there will be many such hard days. And part of that training is to learn how to live through them, Nurse O’Halloran, and accept the weight of them without bowing beneath it. ”
Maggie had nodded jerkily, her blinded, tear-filled gaze still on the sky. “I don’t know if I can,” she’d whispered. The sight of that baby, so tiny and blue, and then the mother, barely able to take in the sight of her dead child before her own life leaked out onto the sheets…
Maggie had closed her eyes against the memory, but she’d still seen it. She never could unsee it, she’d realized hopelessly. For all the good she was doing, that she wanted to do, it was mere drops in an endless ocean of pain.