Movie Brings Flood of Nursing School Memories

I finally saw “Atonement,” the powerful film nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. I went with my nurse-friend, Donna, and the scenes we liked best were those in which one of the film’s main characters, Briony Tallis, attends nursing school during World War II.

There’s Briony marching in formation with the other students, scrubbing floors, scrubbing metal bed frames, scrubbing bedpans, and… wearing a navy blue, gold buttoned cape with red taffeta lining.

“I still have my cape in my cedar chest,” confessed Donna as we left the theater – after which we began reminiscing about attending nursing school in the mid-1960s. She began her career as a licensed vocational nurse (she’s now a nurse practitioner); I attended a now-extinct three-year program.

We didn’t march in formation or scrub floors, but Donna and I agreed that a lot has changed in the last 40 years when it comes to educating nurses. So at the risk of sounding like one of those we-never-wore-seatbelts-and-we-lived e-mails aimed at aging boomers, here are some of the things we remember from the good ol’ days but will rightly never see again:

• Student uniforms: white seamed stockings, striped dresses, white pinafore sand starched caps.
• “Pincushion patients” (all those antibiotics and analgesics were given IM, not IV).
• Urine tests that determine insulin doses.
• HIPAA? Ha!
• Male nurses? Never!
• Working extra shifts for $2.65 an hour.
• Sneaking into the student dorm after hours.
• Senior year: Being charge nurse for 25 patients on the night shift with no supervisor.
• A middle-aged Mercy nun, sleeves rolled up, demonstrating for a roomful of 18-year-old female students how to insert a Foley on a male patient.

Do you have snapshots-in-time of attending nursing school or stories of days-gone-by? Share your memories – the good, the bad, the ugly – and don’t forget the funny. Then we collectively can be glad that all these things belong in the memory books.