ONE night around midnight, a man presented himself at the casualty department at Darlington Memorial Hospital struggling to breath, in obvious distress, and complaining hoarsely to nurse Joan Young that he’d swallowed his dental plate.
An X-ray confirmed the diagnosis, and as the denture was showing no sign of shifting of its own accord, Nurse Young arranged for theatre to be prepared for an emergency operation. The consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon was summoned and the scrubs nurse sterilised all the instruments and placed them on a sterile plate ready for his arrival.
“To her horror,” writes Joan in her new book, “he walked into theatre in his tweed jacket, dived into his pocket and deposited a handful of his favoured instruments on her sterile tray, asking: ‘Since when has the oesophagus been sterile?’.”
READ MORE: HOW DARLINGTON BUILT A HOSPITAL AS A MEMORIAL TO ITS WAR DEAD
Those were different times back in the 1950s when Joan was training at the start of her 40 year nursing career, and she has written about them in her third book, Bedpans and Bottles, which she is selling to raise money for the North East Air Ambulance.
“I was known as the ‘Enema Queen’ and, although I say so myself, I was good at it,” she says of her period on the male surgical ward. “Every time I trundled my trolley into the ward, the men would dive under the bedclothes, hoping it wasn’t them. My technique improved over time, and the old adage of ‘high, hot and a helluvalot’ meant I was 100 per cent successful.”
She recalls some of her most curious patients, like Mr Jones on the orthopaedic ward. “He was a happy soul who spent his time filling an empty chocolate box with small pieces of faeces and offering them to you,” she says.
Or, a regular in Casualty called Edith “who had a habit of laying in the middle of the road with a big of sticks. She was well known to police because of the frequent calls for them to remove her from the road… would you believe, she was killed crossing the road”.
All human life is there, along with Joan’s dedication to her patients in Darlington, Barnard Castle and Stockton – she was on duty in casualty when Cliff Richard, fresh from performing at the Globe, called in to see one of his entourage injured in a car accident.
Every penny from the sales of the new book will go to the air ambulance. “I was the Memorial’s night sister for 14 years and a lot of our casualty work was from road accidents and people didn’t survive because by the time they reached us, they were past doing anything with, but now the air ambulance can reach them on site, deliver complicated procedures and save lives,” she says.
Joan (above, when newly qualified) will be signing and selling copies of Bedpans and Bottles: An Old Nursing Bird for £8 on Wednesday in the Hollies restaurant at the Memorial, from noon to 2pm, and in Darlington’s Crown Street library on Monday, December 11, from 11.30am to 1.30pm.
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