My Affair with Florence Nightingale

When I was in my twenties, I worked as a hospital orderly for a period of about three years. This nursing career was not a continuous one, though, because in those days I was incapable of holding down a job for more than six months. I came and went a few times at False Bay Hospital and at Groote Schuur, and I did a stint in the septic ward at Joburg General. Hospital work was broken by intervals of other employment or just plain unemployment.

I can’t say that I enjoyed being an orderly. The work was menial and poorly paid, and carried virtually no status value with it. Only the hospital porter could be considered inferior to me, and I was ordered about by all and sundry. (Porters are the men who push patients about on trolleys, and have been known to molest female corpses en route to the morgue.) So why did I subject myself to those three years of lowly labour?

Well, maybe there was a certain amount of job satisfaction that helped to make it worthwhile. As I rolled a patient from one side to the other, allowing the nurse to change the soiled bed sheets, I used to think, Man, this is more rewarding, more meaningful than … than …. Ah, what the hell, at least I was making myself useful. And that wasn’t really why I was doing it. No, I was doing it to learn about the big picture. This was a crash course in sickness, ageing, suffering and death. It was about observing human behaviour so that one day I might feel sufficiently qualified to make a statement about human nature and the Condition. And it provided me with any amount of material that would be invaluable to an aspiring writer.

Most of the time the ward was busy with a combination of routine and emergency activity. But there were quiet moments, like after meals, when there was a lull and a hush, and I was able to jot down my notes. Using the trolley parked at the foot of a patient’s bed as a writing desk, I recorded highlights from the day. Sometimes it was high drama, but mostly it was just snippets of conversation that appealed to me. And I became something of an expert at getting patients to tell me their life story. It didn’t matter that most of it was bullshit; I was fascinated and entertained, and grateful for the rich store I was amassing. 

When my inglorious nursing career came to an end in 1980 I had a whole shoebox full of notes but not much else to show for the experience. Oh yes, I had also acquired a degree of empathy for the down-and-out, the good-for-nothing and the loser. For the common man.

And people would remark on what an unassuming, self deprecating person I had become, and I would tell them to try wiping a thousand arses, and they, too, would learn a little humility.

Anyway, to cut to the chase and to get to the point of this post, I eventually got round to sorting through my notes, putting them into order and editing them. The result was an 18 000 word eBook entitled Henry Fuckit’s Nursing Notes. It is available from Amazon and Smashwords.