Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
A lifetime ago
It occurred to me this morning that 2023 marks a milestone for me and some of my friends. Sometime in June of 1973, on a brilliant Saturday, forty-plus women went to Graham Chapel at Washington University. We lined up in rows in the front of the sanctuary and prepared to graduate, or it may have been called “matriculate”, from Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing here in St. Louis.
We had been students in a three year Diploma program. Over the years I have had head nurses say that getting a three year graduate meant getting an accomplished, experienced nurse with a ton of direct experience in patient care and management. That meant hiring a nurse who had passed her board exam and was ready to hit the ground running.
There are reasons for that. Our program was hospital-based, meaning that we worked in all departments of the hospital and spent 12 week rotations in various clinical specialties like Psychiatry, the OR, obstetrics and gynecology. We had a rigorous classroom schedule to accompany each rotation, in addition to the basics of anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, and pediatric nursing. Oddly enough, for our peds rotation we were sent to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, rather than one of the two programs in St. Louis.
What I remember about that out of town experience is that it was during the Summer of 1972, we spent 6 weeks in two specialty areas, and it was a grueling experience. My first rotation was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU. I spent six terrifying weeks working with babies that fit in the palm of my hand. My most memorable patient was a little four pound girl named Carol Dove. She had been born way too early and was something of a miracle baby. My six weeks with her ended on the day she was to be discharged. She weighed a whole six pounds. As I bathed her I decided to wash her hair which was slicked down from weeks in an incubator. I gently washed and dried her little head and what popped up was the most beautiful afro I have ever seen. Her parents cried when they saw her magnificent head of hair. Somewhere in the world there is a 51 year old gorgeous woman who started life in the roughest way possible.
Psychiatry was my favorite specialty. I was fascinated by just how disordered a mind can get. I started on the open unit, but my favorite place was the locked unit. Treatment modalities were just beginning to expand through the use of medications developed as recently as the 1960’s. Probably the most dramatic treatment was electro-shock therapy and the positive results it produced in people who were profoundly depressed, for whom the few medications available were not successful. The first treatment I witnessed was on a woman who was a frequent visitor to the unit. She came in regularly for a series of shock treatments and would change from a practically catatonic person to her “regular” self. What we didn’t know then is that we were treating an active alcoholic with a therapy that would never give her complete recovery. It was not until the 1960’s that addiction was recognized as a disease, not a character defect. We did the best we could with what we had.
Now, 50 years later, there is a small core group of us who try to get together at least once or twice a year, and at least every two years we plan a trip with a few of our classmates who live in other states. These occasions are uproarious as we tell stories of our Deaconess days. There are some classic stories that get re-told every time because they get funnier with age. And the beauty of it is, we can tell the same stories over and over again and not remember that we have heard them dozens of times.
If my memory served me better I could write a book about the experiences of a nursing diploma education. I am just grateful to have been trained in that setting, even though these days most nurses I encounter have a Baccalaureate degree in nursing, and diploma school are almost a thing of the past. It was an experience that resulted in a life-time career path for most of us. I will always be proud to be a Deaconess graduate.