In yesterday’s comments Lizzy asked how such a quiet, clearly gauche young Welshman like me became a psychiatric nurse at the tender age of twenty.
The answer, is probably more complicated than I realised at the time, they always are, but the overwhelming reason was that I was looking for a career was that I hated my life as grade 2 bank clerk in the National Westminster Bank in Rhyl.
I wanted a job with kudos
Something I could be proud of
Something my family would be proud of.
And my decision to be a nurse was thanks primarily to a woman by the name of Nerys Griffith
Now Nerys was a student nurse at Wrexham Maelor hospital .She was and is,very Welsh, was a seriously committed General nurse and briefly was my second or third girlfriend ( I know it was a phase) I was also quite in awe of her general nurse tales of blood guts and gore so thought that I could be a nurse of sorts and psychiatric nursing seemed a logical move even though I knew absolutely nothing of what it would entail.
Up to then my sole experience of mental illness was that I watched the film Ordinary People with Timothy Hutton in 1981
I hadn’t got a Scooby Doo!
And so I applied to three school’s of nursing .
The local psychiatric hospital in rural Denbigh.
The school of nursing based at the West Cheshire Hospital in Chester
And a dreadfully scary gothic looking hospital in Chesterfield of all places in Derbyshire
I was accepted for both the English schools
Now my spoken welsh wasn’t good enough for the local hospital .
And so I chose Chester , a city I revisit weekly even now.
My nurse training was dominated by a camp,multifaceted Quaker tutor by the name of Leslie Brint. He opened my gauche, small town mind not only to mental illness and it’s treatments , but to different lifestyles, cultures, sexualities as well as to aspects of social injustice, pacifism and culture and literature
He was my Jean Brodie.
A man of great charm
Safari suit jackets
And a lover of the Valeta
So , apart from the Valeta what did I learn from my three years at the West Cheshire hospital?
I learned that fragments of human beings that were ravaged by mental illness were still people that required respect and care.
I learned to give physical contact to people before I even leaned to receive it for myself and
I realised that an unhappy childhood was a common experience of so many.
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/Vo6wPTl
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