Nurses Aides and World War II

During World War Two, one of my friends married a soldier and she wanted my sister, Helen, and I to sign up to be Nurses Aids. She, herself took the classes and quit before she ever served but Helen and I stuck it out. We really looked cute in our outfits. Topeka had many hospitals--Stormont, Santa Fe, Christ, St Francis. We took our training and were assigned to Christ (It is now Stormont-Vail). Helen took the maternity floor because she said you do the same thing and don't have to think. I was moved all over the hospital. At that time if we went anywhere our mother would tell us to wear our good underwear and drive carefully in case we had a wreck. When I was assigned what later became the emergency room and had a victim who was in a motorcycle wreck I cut off her underwear and did not judge her. Helen and I worked every Monday night and Sunday mornings. If you worked Sunday they gave you ice cream. That was the only place you get got it. On Monday nights you put the patients to bed for the night. You gave them the bed pan and took all their flowers and put them out in the hall. The flowers would use up the oxygen they needed to breathe. I thought plants gave out oxygen but I minded the rules. Sometimes I was assigned the maternity floor also and I generally had the job of sitting with the patient until she was ready to deliver as few had husbands to sit with them. The worst occasion I had was a male member of my church who was a patient and getting him ready for the night I spilled the bedpan and had to go get a mop and clean it up. There was a shortage of janitors to do the job. It was only as bad as when I was on the operating floor a couple of people who had come to give blood threw up in the elevator and I had to clean it up. I gave blood many times but did not throw up. I was in the gallon club and they finally told me I needed my blood more than they did so not to come any more. Helen and I finished our hours and gave it up and relaxed to just be USO hostesses.