ALCOHOL? THERE'S NO ALCOHOL HERE.

Here's another story about my early nursing years. Hope you enjoy it.

Alcohol consumption was against the rules in the rehabilitation hospital. Still, it frequently appeared and was hard to keep under control. Most of the patients we cared for were young men who had their body images violently altered through accidents and injuries. In those days, doctors didn’t believe in medicating or sedating, so the patients did it themselves with alcohol.


The original buildings were built in 1888 and the wards I worked on were probably built in the 1930’s. They were long open wards with a nurse’s station in the middle, dividing it in two. Each ward held 60 patients. A hallway in the center connected our ward to the one next door and there were outside doors at each end, so it was easy for people to sneak in and out if they wanted to, and the patients had free run of the grounds until bedtime.

If we suspected a patient of drinking, we were allowed to search through all of their belongings and dispose of any alcohol we found. I don’t know how many bottles of whiskey and vodka I poured down the drain during those years, but it was quite a lot.

One man fooled us all, though, and it wasn’t until the day he was getting ready to go home that I got him to confess his secret to me. I joked with and cajoled him as he packed his belongings, and when he started to empty out his nightstand, he pulled out a large bottle of blue mouthwash and handed it to me. The label read Micrin Mouthwash, but when I removed the cap and sniffed, it was obvious it was pure alcohol. All the months he was there he’d managed to continue to drink by adding blue food coloring to vodka and keeping his mouthwash bottle full. No one was ever able to trick me with that one again.

Nine Lives

Today I was discussing the rash of recent kidnappings with a friend and I told her a little about when I was kidnapped. I've told this story in the presence of my husband so many times that he now just rolls his eyes. Dan, if you're reading this, don't roll your eyes.

Anyway, when I was five, we lived in an apartment above the Western Auto Store in Adel, Iowa. I used to play on the sidewalk and all the merchants knew me. My dad worked in the Auto store. One day, two young men were walking along the sidewalk and stopped to ask me if I wanted to go for a ride. I said I did but I had to ask my daddy. I opened the door to the store and said, "Daddy, these two nice men want me to go for a ride with them...can I?"
Daddy didn't answer so I took that as a yes and off we went. They drove me around the town and out to the park next to the river. They parked the car and talked together in low voices. Then they turned around, took me back and dropped me off in the alley behind our apartment. It wasn't until years later I was told a family friend was following behind the car after he'd seen me in the car with the men. Guess I was pretty lucky.

Some other near misses I've had:
1. Almost choked to death on bacon when I was a toddler.
2. Ate a whole bottle of "nerve pills" as a toddler.
3. Fell in the road in front of a tractor and almost got my head run over by the wheel.
4. Flew off an ATV on my head while driving as fast as I could, almost breaking my neck.
5. Car-jacked at gunpoint.

Wow. I've got 3 lives to go. Maybe I'll make it to 100 after all!

Life Lessons

When I was now in the third grade, my new best friend, Karla Porter, happened to live in a nursing home. Her mother, Catherine, owned a big, two story house on the edge of town. The family lived in the upper story, and Catherine housed elderly patients on the first floor. Since I lived just a block away, Karla and I were in and out of the house every day. We’d wander through the hospital beds on the first floor, looking for Catherine or for something to do to keep us out of the trouble we invariably got ourselves into.


Sometimes Catherine would assign us small chores. One of those was to retrieve the eating utensils that Daisy had hidden away in her room. Daisy was an elderly woman with some kind of mental illness. She seemed to have multiple personalities, and spent most of the day carrying on conversations with these different personalities. She lived in a small bedroom that had to be kept locked to keep her from wandering off. When the utensil supply ran low, one of us girls would stand outside Daisy’s big bay window and distract her while the other one ran in the room and quickly grabbed the silverware from Daisy’s many hiding places. The one that was in charge of distracting Daisy had a big responsibility since she’d become very angry at the girl that was stealing the silver, and smack her over the head. I was usually in charge of distracting her since Karla was much faster at swiping the utensils.

Karla’s mom, Catherine, and my mom, Kathryn, were our Camp Fire Girl’s den leaders. The meetings were always held in the nursing home so Catherine wouldn’t be too far away from her charges. We spent much of our grade school years playing in the nursing home and my mom worked there occasionally when we needed some extra money. I wasn’t really surprised when years later my mom decided to become a nurse, and then Karla and I chose nursing, too.

Catherine Porter thought it was important for us to learn about all aspects of life. Later on in my life I grew to questions some of her ideas, but as children, we went along with the ride. One of those rides took Catherine, Karla, and my mother and I to the Clarinda, Iowa mental hospital grounds. It was an all day trip and I remember we didn’t even get out of the car. We parked in a parking lot and a few of the residents of the hospital who were allowed to roam the grounds, peered in the car windows at the four of us. To this day, I don’t know what the purpose of that particular field trip was, but I’m sure Catherine thought she was teaching us something important.

My family attended the First Baptist Church in Indianola, Iowa when I was a child. Church services were conservative and dignified, and our preachers were not of the evangelical type. Catherine seemed to think I was missing out on something, so when the tent preachers came to town, she would take Karla and I with her to the revivals. I guess she thought we would benefit from being saved, but no matter how many times we “went forward”, we never became “one with the spirit”.

The summer of 1962, my family moved to southern California. Later that year, Catherine sold her nursing home and moved her family to southern California, too. Catherine’s had a husband, Russell, who was more than twenty years older than her. She was the one who supported the family and made all the decisions and when she decided to move to California, they moved. Though we attended different high schools, this move made it possible for Karla and me to remain best friends and for Catherine to continue trying to give us life lessons.

She made one more attempt at “saving” us after moving to California. They lived in Artesia and Catherine found an evangelical church there and started attending regularly. One weekend when I’d slept over Saturday night, she woke us up on Sunday morning to get ready for church. We tried to protest but to no avail. We were sent to Sunday School class before the church services, and that went well. But then we were ushered over to the church and the fun began. This particular church encouraged participation by all members, and it heated up into a frenzy pretty quickly. When a very pregnant woman started speaking in tongues and fell to the floor in a quivering heap, it was too much for us. Karla and I started giggling and soon were doubled over with laughter, tears streaming down our faces. An embarrassed Catherine ushered us out as quickly as she could, and never forced us to attend church with her again.

I loved to do hair when I was in high school and soon became the hair expert. I was often called on to help my friends tease and pouf their hair into the elaborate styles of the early sixties. My friend’s mothers would also pay me to comb out their hair, tease it, and restyle it between their weekend hair appointments. By this time, Catherine had found work in a nursing home in Whittier, California. They were having a hard time finding a hairdresser to come in and do the patients hair, so she hired me. For one whole summer I posed as a hairdresser, cutting, shampooing and styling all the little gray heads in the nursing home. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize how illegal it was, but at the time it was just a lot of fun and the little old ladies loved me.

Catherine wasn’t the only source of my introduction to nursing. In high school, I became a candy striper and worked at Whittier Presbyterian Hospital. I started out working in the central supply area, putting together admission kits for patients. The other candy stripers and I would fill plastic bags with wash basins, emesis basins, tissue boxes, Cepacol mouthwash and body lotion. The work was boring but you had to start there and prove yourself or you’d never be allowed out on the floors with actual patients. After awhile, I earned my way onto the floors. I filled water pitchers, delivered dinner trays, changed the water in flower arrangements, and had plenty of opportunities to interact with patients. I loved the atmosphere of the hospital and couldn’t wait to become a nurse.

The summer following my high school graduation was precious to me as it was the last months of my childhood. In order to enter the Registered Nursing program in September of that year, I would have to take chemistry during the summer and I preferred going to the beach and lying in the sun. My mom had gone through the Licensed Vocational Nursing program during my senior year in high school, so I decided that would be good for me, too. Karla and I applied to and were accepted into the Licensed Vocational Nursing program instead of RN training.

I was eighteen and Karla seventeen when we started our LVN training program. We dressed in our white starched blouses, yellow starched pinafores, white nurse’s cap, and white stockings and shoes and were on our way.

I’m amazed now that we were mature enough to make it through the program. Sometimes it didn’t seem that way. We were always professional and worked hard when we were out on the floor with patients, but we were in trouble a lot during our classroom hours. We found it extremely difficult to be quiet and pay attention, and did a lot of giggling and talking in class. Fortunately, each of us was the favorite of one of the instructors. The head of the program liked me, but didn’t like Karla, and one of the other instructors liked Karla, but not me. We were always being protected by someone. It also helped that we were both excellent students and quick learners and the patients we were assigned liked us, too.

One incident could have gotten both of us in really big trouble if we’d been found out. We were practicing injections in class one day. We were using large needles to draw up sterile water out of a vial and inject it into oranges in order to practice our technique. Some of the others weren’t catching on as fast as Karla and I, and we got bored pretty fast. I don’t know who started it, but we started squirting each other with the water in the syringes. I was spraying Karla and she tried to hit me. The needle jabbed into her arm and I was still pushing the plunger of the syringe. It squirted enough sterile water into her arm to raise a lump the size of a golf ball. When we realized what had happened, we looked around quickly to see if anyone noticed, then turned our attention back to the oranges.

Twelve months passed by and we graduated, took our nursing exams, and got jobs. I was nineteen and Karla eighteen then. She took a job in a nursing home and I went to work at a one thousand bed rehabilitation hospital operated by Los Angeles County. My education really began there.

Be Still My Soul

We come into this world with a huge imperfection...an enormous hole in our soul. It is our job to learn how to fill this hole. Some try to fill it with alcohol, drugs, sex, food. Others with mysticism, psychic encounters, meditation, AA, shopping, or self punishment. This book is filled with stories of the people I have encountered in my life’s journey, and how they have helped to fill the hole in my soul.









THE MAKING OF A NURSE



Grandma Grace died on August 4, 1954. I was six years old and stood outside her bedroom with my nose pressed against the window pane watching my Grandpa cry, his face in his hands.

I walked around the side of the house to the porch and found my dad holding Mom in his arms while she cried on his shoulder.

“Your grandma just passed away,” Dad said to me.

“I already know,” I replied,

Dad gave me a puzzled look, turned back to comfort my Mom.

I understood a lot despite my young age, having spent most of that summer in 1954 at my grandparent’s home while my mom and my Uncle Richard helped care for Grandma during her final days battling leukemia. I’d watched my family give Grandma pain medication, bathe her, turn her over, change her clothes, and empty the colostomy bag she’d worn for many years.

I liked that she was in her own bed in her own home. I also liked that my brother and I could go in and climb up on the bed and visit with her on the days when she felt well enough. On the days that she didn’t, I’d stand outside her window and wave. She called me her little butterfly at the window.

As sad as it was for me to lose my beloved grandmother, the way she died seemed so peaceful and natural that I’ve carried the memory of it with me my entire nursing career.

Impotent Fury

Following is a story about my early years of nursing. I'd gone into nursing right out of high school and started my career at the age of nineteen. Here I am, ...years later (lots of them!) still at it.

I was a nineteen year old Licensed Vocational Nurse, fresh out of training and assigned to the amputee and fracture ward of a large rehabilitation hospital in Los Angeles County. One of my charges was an eighteen year old man who was in the hospital to be fitted with artificial limbs following a horrible accident.

His accident happened when he was running away from home and hopped a freight train to “get him as far away as he could possibly go”. At some point in the journey, he fell off the moving train and was sucked underneath the wheels. He suffered a head injury; his left arm was cut off just below the shoulder, his left leg at the hip, and his right leg just below the knee. The heat from the moving wheels cauterized the open wounds so that he did not bleed to death. The head injury resulted in him having frequent, very violent grand mal seizures during which he always bit his tongue and bled profusely. His speech was also affected and he spoke in agonizingly slow sentences.

Following his recovery from the acute injuries, he was sent to us to be fitted with prosthesis for his right leg and his left arm, the goal being to make him a bit more independent. If he could stand on the right leg, he could get in and out of his bed and wheelchair on his own.

John had a temper that frequently exploded. It was rumored that some time earlier, in a fit of rage, he had smothered his baby niece to death with a pillow. I was never able to find out if that had truly occurred or not, but in all the time he was a patient on our unit, I never saw or met a family member.

He would wheel himself around the ward using his good right arm to propel his wheelchair. This resulted in that arm developing into a hugely muscular lethal weapon. We all knew to keep far away when he was having one of his frequent fits of temper. If he got hold of you with that arm, it was extremely difficult to get loose, and often, he aimed for the throat.

Since I was the youngest woman around, and he was a young man, he would follow me around all evening like a puppy, trying to stay in my good graces. I could usually get him to cooperate, even when he was in a foul mood. One night, he was really getting on my nerves and was being terribly rude. I told him he needed to go to the hospital library and check out a book on Emily Post so he could study proper etiquette. Little did I know this would come back to haunt me.

A month or so later, I was taking my evening dinner break in our small break room off of the nurse’s station. Patients knew they weren’t supposed to disturb us while we were on our break, but rules mattered little to John so I wasn’t surprised when he wheeled his chair into the room. I was enjoying a dinner of fried chicken until John spoke.

“Miss...Judkins. Don’t...you...know, you’re not supposed...to eat chicken...with your hands...you’re supposed to...eat...it with a knife...and fork.”

I haven’t been able to eat fried chicken since without thinking of John and the night he one-upped me.

North From Alaska

I'm writing a book of stories based on my nursing career. I've decided to share them on my blog. Here's the first:

June, a 67 year old woman on our hospice program for lung cancer that had metastasized to her bones, was in tremendous pain, both physical and spiritual. The physical pain was due to the cancer, the spiritual pain due to the hole in her soul. She’d had several failed marriages and her three children hadn’t grown to be the successful individuals she’d hoped for. Her oldest daughter, Julie, wasn’t allowed inside her home because she would steal anything she could, including money and the drugs we prescribed for her mother. June had custody of Julie’s three year old son due to Julie being confined in prison for drug abuse and grand theft. Now she was out but apparently hadn't been rehabilitated.


June’s second daughter, Betty, lived with her, along with Betty’s two young sons. Betty also had a criminal record and was on house arrest for one month during the year I was seeing June. Her arrest was for forging checks. The Judge decided on house arrest so she could supervise her two sons and care for her mom. Betty was a pleasant though ineffective caregiver. She probably had attention deficit disorder and didn’t understand the instructions I gave her on how to care for her mom. When Betty’s charming and handsome husband, Eric, was released from prison after his most recent stay, he also moved into the house. Betty’s attention then turned to keeping Eric happy, and she did little to care for her mom.

After much prodding from me and the hospice social worker, the family contacted their brother, Mark, who lived in Alaska. Mark arrived along with his girlfriend, Debbie, and moved into the house with all the rest of the family.

I arranged a meeting with Mark for the day after his arrival. When the door opened, I was greeted by a bear of a man with the most beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen. They didn’t look like they belonged on this man, but if the eyes are the windows to the soul; I was soon to learn this man’s soul was as beautiful as his eyes. His gray hair was long and stringy, rather thin on top, and a huge gray beard that hung halfway down his chest. It stopped at his enormous belly that looked as if he had a full term baby inside. He was fond of going without a shirt and the sight of his huge stomach and tattooed arms took a bit of getting used to.

However, Mark was a natural caregiver. He cooked for his mom, fed her when she couldn’t eat, took her to the bathroom, bathed and kept her in clean clothing and bed linens. He monitored her medications carefully and kept them under lock and key. Though he had spent time in prison on drug charges and was currently on parole, there were never any drugs missing once Mark took over his mom’s care.

Many times I would arrive to find Mark grieving over the impending loss of his mom and the many regrets over the choices he’d made in life. On those days, tears would fill his blue eyes and pour down his cheeks once they’d dropped off his long, curly black eyelashes. All I saw when I looked at him were his eyes and what lay behind them. I knew the rest of the world would probably never get to know what a tender, loving man he really was.

One day I arrived for my visit and Mark answered the door wearing sunglasses. After a few minutes, he asked me to take a look at his eye, saying it was bothering him. When he took the glasses off, I gasped at the sight of his formerly blue left eye that was now completely black. On closer inspection, I found that his pupil was completely dilated. He denied injuring it and when I pressed, he finally confessed he’d put his mother’s “eye drops” in his eye since it was irritating him. Puzzled, I asked him to show me the eye drops. He came back with the bottle of Atropine eye drops, clearly labeled with his mother’s name and the directions for her to take the drops orally for congestion, which is standard practice for hospice patients. Atropine is normally used to dilate the eye for eye exams, but we use it to dry up excessive secretions when people are dying. Knowing that there wouldn’t be any permanent damage to Mark’s eye, I burst out laughing before I gave him the lecture about never using someone else’s medications. I then went on to explain that his pupil would eventually go back to the normal size but it would probably take several days and he’d need to wear the sunglasses until then. Relieved, he finally smiled a sheepish grin. When I visited the next week, his pupil had indeed returned to normal size.

Several times during the months Mark cared for his mom, I wrote letters to the Judge in Alaska to whom he was supposed to report during his parole, telling him about what a good job Mark was doing and how much he was needed in California. I never heard back from the Judge, but he didn’t order Mark back to Alaska, so apparently my letters worked. I wonder now where Mark is and how his life is going. He was truly a special person hidden behind a burly, and pretty intimidating façade. This big grizzly bear man was really a teddy bear underneath.

Ulcerative Colitis Sucks Big Time

This is me. Way back when. Back when I didn't have Ulcerative Colitis and didn't think I'd ever have any illness. My first symptoms started when I was in my middle 20's, after my first son was born. The Dr. treated me with Librax for "nerves" and it went away. Off and on over the years the symptoms came back. Then in 1994, for whatever reason, UC came to stay. I tried every drug and treatment available, and after the last treatment with a chemotherapy drug gave me pancreatitis, my GI Dr. advised surgery. In 1996 I had a total procto-colectomy and J-pouch procedure done (big words, I know--even bigger surgery). My UC was CURED! Gone forever! Or...so I was told then. But now, I have a new Dr., had a thorough evaluation by flexible sigmoidoscopy, and lo and behold, the UC isn't gone after all. Oh well. I still feel relatively good and I do have my life back still. I'm able to do everything I enjoy, and I can travel. Big time important! But, arthritis has flared up along with the UC flare up and it isn't much fun. Now I'm on medications again. Hope not for long. Hope the J-Pouch holds. Hope there aren't more surprises in store. Hope is the thing with wings that perches in the soul......(Emily Dickinson)