Henry Fuckit's Nursing Notes

By Ian Martin

Ian Martin spent three years as a hospital orderly and kept a ward diary chronicling the sights, sounds and smells that assailed him. Based on this record, "Henry Fuckit's Nursing Notes" is an unflinching account of nursing the sick and dying.

Looking through the eyes of his disreputable hero, Martin uses a brutal blend of cynicism and dark humour to describe a world of suffering and pathos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Martin
• Release date: May 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452384825

Ian Martin

Ian Martin has led UN human rights and peace operations in countries including Rwanda, Timor-Leste, Nepal and Libya. A former Amnesty International secretary-general, in 2011–12 he was Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s post-conflict planning adviser, then UN support mission head, for Libya. His publications on UN intervention include Self-Determination in East Timor.

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Henry Fuckit’s Nursing Notes

From the diary of a hospital orderly, with illustrations by Dan Riding.

IAN MARTIN

Henry Fuckit’s Nursing Notes

SMASHWORDS EDITION PUBLISHED BY:

Ian Martin on Smashwords

Copyright © Ian Martin 2010

Also available by Ian Martin:

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1

Up the long sloping tunnel that connects the main hospital buildings to the nurses' home. The lift to the basement and the linen bank. Low concrete beams and pipes overhead. So much piping, like veins and arteries and nerves and ducts. It is hot and humid.

They issue me with twelve uniforms that are anything but uniform. Ill-fitting white cotton trousers and jackets that have been donned by a succession of orderlies drifting through the big barn. The trousers are too baggy, or too tight, or too short in the leg. The jackets have high, collarless necks and button up at the side and give one the appearance of a chef, or an ice-cream vendor, or a barber.

In the sewing room I look at my reflection in the mirror and fight the compulsion to run. I have difficulty recognising myself. But is that not just what I want? Nothing can be done with this impersonal white uniform. Heavy white cloth to cover the body. This is my identity.

2

Sickness and excrement and the accompanying smells, sounds and sights.

3

The dawn walk starts with the click of the gate. Palmerston Road in lamplight and right at the public swimming baths. A man wrapped in a heavy coat leaves his idling car and closes a garage door, fumbling the cold lock in the dark. Across Queens Park playing field to the start of the path running along the cliff top of Brickfields quarry. Towards the mountain beyond the high mesh fence is Eastern Boulevard arush with early traffic. The uneven grassy path winds up towards the top of Hospital Hill and ahead to the east the sky is lightening and brightening with sunrise colours. I pass the two skeletons on the cliff edge where they stand gnarled in silhouette. The wind is drawing out long streaks of smoke from the kiln chimney stacks and below and beyond them stretch the lights. Two at a time I climb the steps to the flyover bridge and descend on the freeway pavement past the nurses' home. At the stone cairn, memorial to the dead, I slip under the fence and cross the hospital road towards the canteen, past the pool. Down the steps to the chapel and then around to the front entrance, passing the exhausted, inward faces of night staff shadows.

4

I am horrified and revolted by human sickness and old age. Sacks of flesh and bone dying messily in their own shit. Ugly, helpless and undignified. I am drawn to the idea of suicide. There is an argument that stresses the importance of man battling on till the last breath, never giving up hope: but I do not understand or accept it.

Mr Putney is in his seventies, a senile diabetic with pneumonia. He lies in a huddle, a catheter running down to a bag under the bed. He can do nothing for himself, not even turn on his side. He remains in an imbecilic daze, weakening, deteriorating. Why should he be kept alive? Why is this clinging to life so abject and cowardly?

5

The Florence Nightingale Pledge

I solemnly pledge myself before God and

in the presence of this assembly, to pass

my life in purity and to practice my profession

faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is

deleterious and mischievous, and will not take

or knowingly administer any harmful drug.

I will do all in my power to maintain and

elevate the standard of my profession, and will

hold in confidence all personal matters

committed to my keeping and all family affairs

coming to my knowledge in the practice of my

calling. With loyalty will I endeavour to aid the

physician in his work, and devote myself to

the welfare of those committed to my care.

6

How does it feel when you no longer wish to part your teeth, open your mouth? When opening your eyes is too much? Waiting to snuff it, tense and inward as more and more of the body and mind shuts down for the last time.

7

I swear by Apollo the physician, Hygeia and Panacea, and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgement the following oath:

To consider dear to me as my parents him who taught me this art: to live in common with him and if necessary to share my