DENA THADEN'S NURSING MEMOIRE

I have no idea when my Mother wrote the following memoire. It was found in a small booklet called “Uniform Method” – the School Series, an Upper Grades Note Book. In extremely faded pencil, you will see:

“D.M. Thaden,

Huron, So. Dak.”

Mom’s handwriting fills the first few pages and after that, all that can be found are drawings I seem to remember Dad making for me when I was sitting with him in church.

My Dad’s distinctive handwriting: “Jean Ellen Plucker” and “M.E.J. Plucker,” homely birds, scribbles, trucks, a clock drawn to show 1:15, funny looking faces – all drawn very quietly while listening to some preacher or other and letting the licorice taste and the smart of Sen-sen grow in our mouths.

When did she write this? What was written before this first sentence? She must have written something about “Night Duty.” Did she do this while wondering if she should have continued her training to become a registered nurse instead of marrying Dad when she only had one year left? We’ll never know...

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          However, the memories of night duty don’t compare with those
of the diet kitchen. If patients ever fuss, you may be sure it is about their
trays. The eggs are either too soft or too hard and what should be hot is
always cold, and what should be cold has had a rise in temperature, and there
you go!

          About the time I began thinking I was a regular nurse and
knew everything, I was put in charge of a floor. I learned the excruciating joy
of being blamed for the other fellow’s mistakes and along with all this came
those frequent visits to the office, for leaving undone those things that
should have been done. But after all, there is a certain satisfaction in being
able to make things run smoothly and systematically.

          Of course, every nurse knows that some time in the dim and
distant future she will enter the operating room. I tremble now when I think of
the day I reported there. I felt like an unnecessary piece of furniture. It was
“don’t touch this,” and “don’t touch that,” until I wondered what there was I
could touch. But finally I mastered the mysteries of aseptic technique, learned
to keep my head when doctors yelled – even though my ears did tingle for a week
– and was able to answer, “Yes, Doctor,” when asked if all the sponges were
accounted for. These days were full of interest and the training was very
valuable for accuracy, quickness and skill, but it was a glorious day when I
went back on the halls and became once more familiar with people’s faces
instead of their insides.

          The bane of my existence was class work. The weary hours I
spent on anatomy and Materia Medica! Such labor never entered my mind when I
was having fond dreams of being a nurse and relieving suffering humanity. Why
couldn’t bones be named something shorter than Ossa Innominata, or a drug
something simpler than Hexamethylamine and why are there so many nerves,
muscles and blood vessels? Indeed, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. And
how discouraging, when trying to make one small head hold all that knowledge,
to have a doctor remark: “They are the brightest looking class of girls to be
so stupid I ever saw.”

          There were days that were a continual grind; when nobody
could be pleased; when life didn’t seem worth living. Ye shades of Florence
Nightingale! Where have all our beautiful ideals flown? We vowed daily to go
home, but why didn’t we? We were held fast by the lure of nursing.

          There is a fascination that every girl feels if she has the
true spirit of a nurse. Can any joy equal that when we have had a part in the
saving of a life? Oh! There are hundreds of rewards for our toil and we are
glad that we are nurses. We want to live up to our clinic ideals as they have
ever been held up before us by our Superintendent, Miss Mabel Heldstab. She has
been our constant inspiration and we think Longfellow must have had her in mind
when he wrote: 

A noble type of good

Heroic womanhood

In the picture to the left, Dena is second from the right. In the picture on the right, Dena is on the right.

  

It is a strange feeling to find something written by a woman who I thought of throughout the years as being "my mother," "my dad's wife," "my children's grandma" and who now can be seen through new eyes as a woman who had deep thoughts and feelings quite apart from all of that.

I thought I knew my mother. I thought I knew what she thought, what she felt, what her life was always like. Those years before she married and had children will always be a mystery to us, but with this small discovery, we know a little more. She had aspirations of becoming a nurse, of helping people, of being useful in society.

And she was! It was just on the farm and in the house, in the church and in the community, not in a hospital.