A Nurse’s story

I graduated high school and began nurse’s training during World War Two. They were training navel cadets at the University of Iowa, and some of the women there decided that there should be dances every Saturday nignt. They called on other places that summer because there weren't any college girls around during the summer. And so my two friends and I drove to Iowa City on Saturday nights to dance with the cadets.

I wanted to go to the University of Iowa and my mother was afraid that I'd marry a cadet, so she refused to let me go. I was determined not to attend Coe, the local college in Cedar Rapids. And, that's why I went into nurse’s training.

When I finished nurse’s training, we had to go to Des Moines for the state boards because that’s where they held it. And it was on my birthday, my twenty-first birthday, and I was looking forward to celebrating afterwards because we’d be in Des Moines — we didn’t get there very often. But everybody was so uptight and nervous. My good friend Judy, Judy Carver, was about ready to crawl out of her skin she was so nervous about the whole thing.

Anyway, came time for the boards and we went into this big room in the Capital Building. And I went through the test, and I answered everything, and I went back, checked everything again, went over it again very carefully, looked around — nobody had gotten up yet. And I hated to be the first one, so I went over it a third time, then I decided, oh, the heck with it, and I got up and left. I found out later that my friend Judy thought, “Uh, oh, she’s flunked.” She thought I just couldn’t think of the answers and that’s why I got up and left.

I didn’t get the test report until I’d moved to New Jersey. Because, I had signed up for a post-graduate course in obstetric nursing. So I was there in the east and I got this nice letter from Sister Maria along with my scores and I had the highest grade in the state.

Did I ever tell you about Dr. Mertz? I overheard a conversation once. He was talking on the phone to a patient and he said, “Well, if you must mortgage the farm, then you must mortgage the farm.” He gave the nuns a million dollars. He never married and he was very popular amongst the farmers. I can remember him in surgery. He had a partner, Vernon that would give the anesthetic. And I can remember Dr. Vernon saying, “Now, now, Doctor, lets just wait a minute ‘till the anesthetic takes hold.”

I remember making rounds with him once and we had a kid from South America, who was here on some work program, and he got sick. Dr. Mertz says, “Yes, it’s undulant fever, from drinking goats’ milk on the mountainside.”

We used to all hide when he came to make rounds because we knew it could take forever. I was doing meds one day and I came to an order from Dr. Mertz for mag sulfate for a post surgical patient so I went to sister and said, “I don’t think I should give this medication.” And she said, “Absolutely not! He meant to say milk of magnesia.” He was really something else, but they put up with him. He was very generous, had no family, gave everything to the nuns. He had a big practice but he wasn’t a very good doctor. He didn’t keep up with current practices. His training was way out of date.