Always a Nurse
Cheryl L. McLean
Delivered as part of the keynote address to the Alberta Psychiatric ConferenceBanff Alberta 2014
My mother who is
now 85 had been the head nurse at a
geriatric ward at our city psychiatric hospital (previous know as an asylum for
the insane) in Southwestern Ontario for
over thirty years. She started her
career in geriatric care as a nurse in
1952 and worked her way through the
50's, the 60's and 70's, through the
days of electroconvulsive therapies
, lobotomy surgeries, insulin shock
therapy, strait jackets, restraints. One of my mother's many assignments was to dispense medications like tranquilizers and
phenobarbital to 450 older patients twice daily on five wards. Many of her geriatric patients lived out
their later lives and died in
hospital. My mother was proud of her
nursing job. When I was a girl of fourteen and thinking about nursing as a
career myself she drove me to her hospital, turned off the main street past
the grassy fields and up the shaded
tree lined road and down the curved driveway leading to that big old building.
I met her patients. They told me their stories. Some were very interesting. One elderly lady said she was friends with a
"gangster" named "Duninger"
who, she said, went everywhere
with her.
Mom made sure she
kept the staff and the ward together.
But there were serious troubles at home.
Mom worked late most nights and always took her work home with her,
sitting at the kitchen table, draining the coffee pot, coughing and chain
smoking Export A's while trying to get her time slips done, couldn't sleep at
night, was worried about how to cover
for staff when attendants said they were
sick or took time off. Then one day she
just stopped talking, wouldn't eat, went to her bedroom, turned off the
lights and shut the door. But somehow even through these darkest of
times she managed to get up in the
morning at 5:00 a.m., still got the car started in the dead of winter and made it in...on time, to work. My mother, an attractive woman, always concerned about her appearance, her
hair, her makeup, was meticulously, even
compulsively neat. We knew there was
something terribly wrong when she started falling asleep in her uniform... One sleepless night while fighting yet another
migraine headache she cried out, "What's the use?" Yes, she had her nursing friends, but most of the time she tried to make it
through these dark times alone. Mom
would never have admitted she had a mental health issue nor that was
depressed. You just didn't talk about
those things. She was a psychiatric
nurse, and proud of it., she cared
for patients with mental illness,
consoled the families when their
loved ones passed away. Her staff
came to her when they were depressed, to
solve their problems. She was praised by the psychiatrists for her meticulous attention to detail
and tireless dedication to her job and her patients. My mother wasn't just a nurse. Nursing was my mother. As I reflect now in this writing years later
I see now that my own mother, herself a professional working in mental health, suffered with
depression, the classic DSM indicators of major depressive disorder but, according to my mother
she wasn't sick...she was fine. It was her job as a psychiatric head nurse to keep in all together at all times, to keep everything under control.
For more information about Cheryl L. McLean keynote presentations CherylMcLean@ijcaip.com
http://www.cherylmclean.com
http://www.cherylmclean.com
