Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [95]
‘Good.’ Staff gave an approving nod of her head. ‘I’m glad to see you’re paying attention, Campion. Dr Lewis only increased the dosage yesterday.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Once Mr Simmonds has had his medication, and you’ve given out the urine bottles, you can go off for your break.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ Grace responded meekly.
The M and B tablets were huge and she wouldn’t have wanted to swallow one herself, but Mr Simmonds, bless him, was as good as gold, winking at her when she thanked him for helping her earlier and telling her that he wouldn’t mind a glass of whisky to help the pills go down.
Grace shook her head reprovingly. He knew as well as she did that alcohol was forbidden on the wards, although the patients were always trying to get some smuggled in by their visitors.
‘Always check the parcels that visitors bring in, Nurse,’ Staff Nurse Reid had told Grace on her first day on the ward. ‘Remove them from the visitors and take them straight to the sluice room for proper inspection.’
‘You’d be surprised the tricks the patients get up to,’ one of the other junior nurses had told Grace. ‘I had one a while ago that tried to sneak in some beer in a hot-water bottle.’
Grace had carefully loaded all the urine bottles onto the trolley and was just wheeling it past the curtained off bed when she thought she heard a sound from behind the curtains. She stopped the trolley and listened and heard it again, a sort of dripping noise. She looked towards the table in the centre of the room where the night sister and the staff nurse were working.
Staff Nurse looked up and, although Grace hadn’t said anything, she got up and came over to her demanding quietly, ‘What is it, Nurse? Why aren’t you giving out the bottles? The visitors will be here soon.’
‘I thought I heard something,’ Grace told her, feeling more foolish and uncomfortable by the second as she looked towards the screens.
Staff Nurse looked too. ‘Continue with your duties,’ she instructed Grace, before disappearing behind the screens, only to reappear again very quickly, so quickly in fact that Grace hadn’t had time to move.
It was an absolute rule that no nurse ever ran in sight of the patients, no matter what the emergency, so as not to panic or upset them, but Grace had never seen anyone move as swiftly as Staff Nurse did now as she went to the desk and then returned to the patient, accompanied by Sister, both of them gliding at such a speed that it was as though their feet didn’t even touch the floor.
Within seconds a doctor had been summoned and within minutes after that, the patient was being wheeled out of the ward.
‘Wonder what’s up wi’ him,’ one of the other men mused as Grace handed him his bottle.
Grace had to wait until she had come back from her break to find out. Staff was waiting for her as she walked into the ward and told her to follow her into the sluice room.
Once they were behind the closed door she told Grace approvingly, ‘That was very quick of you to spot that something was wrong, Campion. The patient had started to haemorrhage. He’s had to go back down to theatre, but with any luck he should be all right. However, next time you spot something don’t just stand there looking green, waiting for someone to notice. The patients get upset if they think that something’s wrong with someone. The correct procedure would have been for you to walk over to the desk and inform either myself or Sister of your concern.’
‘Yes, Staff,’ Grace agreed woodenly.
Bella glowered bad temperedly, as she stared round the shabby-looking school hall, with its smell of cold and damp and its hard wooden benches. She hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place, and she wouldn’t have been here if it hadn’t been for Alan’s mother sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted and volunteering her spare rooms as billets for refugees. Her spare rooms, mind, not Alan’s mother’s own spare rooms. It was because of that that she, Bella, was here in this freezing cold school hall along with all the other householders who had been asked to come