A Short Stay In A Locked Ward.

In 1977 I was 18 years old. I started psychiatric nursing in Saint Loman’s Hospital Mullingar. It wasn’t my first choice as I wanted to be a general nurse, but as it was only a few miles from home I decided to accept it. The first few weeks were in the classroom, so I settled relatively easy.  

I had been to numerous hospitals around the country for interviews, mainly for general nursing.  My aim being to get a place for a three-year nursing apprenticeship.   

 One of these was Ardkeen Hospital Waterford and a few weeks into my psychiatric training I received word to say I had been accepted.  

My mother arrived one evening in the nurse’s home with the letter and reminded a rather reluctant me that general nursing was my first choice and I really should accept it.  

 Reluctant, because it would have been easier to stay where I was. You see I was quite happy in the classroom setting. Being the youngest it was nice to be near home too. Somewhere in my psyche I felt that my mother would have liked that.  Encouraging me to follow my first love, albeit so far away from home was one, of a life time of unselfish acts she did for her family.    Anyway, circumstances quickly changed my mind. I started my official first week in the hospital, my first placement being in a locked ward 

This is as it says, the doors were locked.  We always had a bunch of keys with us that rattled loudly every time we moved, a constant reminder of where we were …in a locked ward. 

 For 18-year-old me this was a bit daunting. I spent that brief period dreading every new day. Arriving on duty for 8am every morning, locking the door behind me, signalled stepping from one familiar world into another, a world far removed from anything I had ever known.  

 Lingering smells of food mingled with a combination of body odours, cigarette smoke and disinfectant, left me unsettled before I even began each day. Tall drafty windows looking down on an outside world that many of the patients hadn’t seen for a very long time. Polished wooden floors in sharp contrast with the bleak cold space that was home to women for so many years. The older more reflective me often wonders about their individual stories, of the why’s and the what if’s. and the choices they didn’t have. 

Old iron beds with lumpy mattresses and threadbare counterpanes, where sometimes patients refused to get out of, for days at a time. Patients who terrified 18-year-old me, some who, knowing we were new, tried every trick to get our keys which only added to my fear.  

I bravely approached the powers that be, informing them I had been accepted for a place in general nursing and I was leaving.  

 I travelled the long journey from Mullingar to Waterford with my mother brother and aunt, to begin my new life in Ardkeen Hospital. 

 With a flask of tea and a packed lunch for the journey we stopped at Kilkenny castle for our picnic.  Batch loaf ham sandwiches wrapped in their own waxy paper. Mine made with the crust from either end as I lived in hope that crusts would make my hair curly.  They didn’t! All nicely washed down with lukewarm mugs of tea with the milk already added.  My mother reciting the customary rosary on the journey, never missing an opportunity to pray for us all, that day was for me, as I started out on my new life.It’s a long way from the centre of Ireland to the south east. It was even longer in the 70s with limited transport and cars.  I might as well have been emigrating as there was no direct public transport from Waterford to Mullingar.  

 Having no phone meant, weekly letter writing was our way of communicating. I poured all my thoughts and fears onto the pages, regaling her with stories of happenings in my new life. I loved when I saw her familiar looping handwriting on an envelope waiting for me in the nurse’s home. Some worry I would have shared in my previous letter was usually resolved in my own head by the time she wrote back to advise me.

  That snail pace of communication created a self-reliance within me that meant I had to figure things out for myself.My nursing apprenticeship has served me well. Being in the coal face of every possible life experience has given me an understanding and empathy for life where there’s no room for ego and lots of room for humility and love.  

 Do I have regrets? A few maybe, if only we had both kept those letters. What a glimpse into our lives they would be 

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