Oral History Program Sue Evans Naisbitt Interviewed by Marci Farr 15 October 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sue Evans Naisbitt Interviewed by Marci Farr 15 October 2008 Copyright © 2010 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Dee School of Nursing was founded in 1910 to provide training for nurses who would staff the new Dee Memorial Hospital. The first class of eight nurses graduated from the school in 1913 and the school continued to operate until 1955, with a total of more than 700 graduates. A new nursing school and home located just east of the hospital was completed in 1917 and all nursing students were required to live in the home during their training. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the school's alumni before their stories disappear in the same way the Dee Hospital has disappeared. The oral interviews focus on how the women became involved with the school, their experiences going through training, and how they used the training. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sue Evans Naisbitt, an oral history by Marci Farr, 15 October 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Sue Evans Naisbitt Graduation Class of 1954 Helen Farr & Sue Evans Naisbitt September 16, 2009 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Sue Evans Naisbitt. It was conducted October 15, 2008 and concerns her recollections and experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr interviewing Sue Evans Naisbitt at her home in Ogden, Utah. We are interviewing her for the Dee School of Nursing. She graduated in the class of 1954. Will you just tell us a little bit about your life, where you were born and raised and your family? SN: I was born here in Ogden. We moved around a lot in my early years because my father traveled with Scowcroft Foods. Then he owned his own grocery store on 28th and Madison and we settled down on Fowler and 28th street close to the store. When I was probably about thirteen or fourteen he moved his store down to 28th and Grant so he was close to our home. I had three brothers and no sisters. My best friend had five brothers and no sisters. She lived about four doors down the street. So I always thought I had a sister but I really never did. I didn’t ever feel that I was deprived of anything. I was the only girl and the youngest child so my mother really looked out for me. I had a lot going for me. In my junior high school year I really had a lot of fun. I was an officer in the girls association. I had a lot of friends, and was in the school play. The summer after I got out of the tenth grade, my mother died of cancer. I knew she was ill but never realized she could die. High school was really a bad time for me. I didn’t really enjoy high school. I had some great friends but I didn’t really thrive in high school. I liked the studies but I remember being sad a lot. I think I 1 decided to go into nursing in about my senior year. My mother was in the Dee hospital and she was on the surgical unit. I don’t know why I am getting so emotional. She would see all the students come at seven in the morning from the nurses home and she just thought they were so fun. They all wore capes and their hats. In those days nurses dressed in the traditional nurses uniform. The white shoes and the dreaded white hose and all that. She was just really impressed with them. I was young and they didn’t allow families to visit. I didn’t get to see her when she was in the hospital, she was really very sick. I had a couple of friends that were in nurses training, and one of them lived in our neighborhood. She was in our ward. I do not know what year she graduated but she was a Dee nurse. Her name was Rosemary Pantone (1949). She was just a really fun, beautiful, smart girl. She taught our Sunday school class. We were teenagers and obnoxious so she would say, “If you will be quiet then I will tell you a ghost story.” Everybody thought she must be the best teacher because we were so rowdy with every other teacher. She talked about nursing and about what she did. She was in training at the Dee. She was really an inspiration to me. My mother had been really sick so my dad was struggling through that. We talked and he said, “You must go to college!” I found out that I could go into Nurses Training. The tuition was so low, and I could live there and I could work there. So I thought, “Oh I can do that,” I mentioned it to my dad. In those days parents just told you what to do. MF: You just didn’t have a choice. 2 SN: Yes. Just go. Go do it. So I did it. That is probably the big reason I had. I just had a little contact with nurses and my mom just thought that they were great. When I told my dad maybe I could do that he just said, “That is what you are going to do.” So I did. All my friends had gone to work, and several of them got married when they were nineteen. MF: That is true. You didn’t have to take any test as far as getting accepted? SN: Nope. Not that I remember. I think they looked at high school grades. Mine were OK—of course, there was paper work and fees. MF: Yours was a smaller class, right? SN: Yes. MF: September, is that when you started? SN: I remember vividly the day of orientation to Dee School of Nursing I was so excited. My dad drove me to the front door of the nursing home. I was a little frightened and sad not be living at home. When I went into the auditorium it was almost like going to girls camp. The room was crowded with girls and their belongings. We were assigned a room and a roommate if we had no preference. I didn’t know anyone so I lucked out and became best lifelong friends with Glorya Stokes. I was so happy to be there even when they handed out the books and explained the rules. Of course, in preparing to go to nurses training I bought new pajamas. That was a deal for me. That was just really a deal. They were green and we got upstairs in our room and our walls were green, our bed spreads were green 3 and I just thought, “Oh yuck!” because that isn’t even my favorite color. So Bonnie Howard had a lot to say about that. She said, “Oh, how can you even come in here? Those green pajamas and everything is green in here.” That was just a little impression. I was really excited. I had taken a lot of classes in high school thinking that maybe that was what I would do so I was really pretty confident. I had good grades in high school so I wasn’t just “Oh, maybe I won’t make it through this!” I am sure you know this. You have probably heard this from everybody you have interviewed. Your first duties you did a lot of stuff in the lab, the nursing lab. We did have a nursing lab however, we had most of our training with patients. It has been so long ago but I remember we had an instructor LaPrele Neville and she taught us Nursing Arts. Bed baths, bed change, clean the room, make a waste bag out of newspaper and pin to the bed. My first patient was a man. I went in the room, I am sure, just sweating and he was a big guy, a really big guy. I thought then that he was old but he was probably fifty, maybe. He had eye patches on. I can’t even tell you how relieved I was. I just thought, “Oh! Thank goodness he can’t see me.” He had cataract surgery. In those days they put two sandbags by your head, patches on your eyes, you couldn’t move, you couldn’t do anything. You had to use a bedpan. It was bad. So I had to give him a complete bed bath. I had him for three days in a row. So the third day I walked in and he went like this—(lifted eye patches) you know—and saw me. He was so positive with me. He was just a really darling guy. He joked and told me how good I was and how much he liked me and how pretty I was. Just a fun guy so 4 after that I was really set. That was one little impression and the other is trying to get used to all the rules, you know? We had deadly rules—you know all those, I don’t have to go through those do I? MF: No. Unless you have a crazy story you’d like to tell us. SN: Well the only one I have is when we were juniors Bonnie had moved in with us. There are two single beds in a room. So she decided she was going to sleep in my bed with me. So three of us were in the room with all our stuff. Glorya used to hate to get up in the morning. She hated to get up in the morning so she would wear half her clothes that she was going to wear the next day, her underwear and stuff. She would shower at night, and Bonnie and I would just scream and roll on the floor laughing at Glorya would wear her hose rather than have to get up and get dressed. I said, “What is the matter with you?” We were terrible to her. MF: She told us about the cat story. That was the funniest thing. SN: The cat? MF: The cat that you euthanized? SN: Canary. MF: Was it a canary? SN: It was a canary, I had at home. Well nobody was home when I moved, just my dad. He wasn’t going to take care of the canary. I had her for a long time. Canaries—I didn’t think they lived so long but this one was an old canary. You know canaries, they are just a mess. There are seeds and feathers all over the floor. 5 I smuggled this canary in our room. We weren’t supposed to have any pets. The room mother caught me, Mrs. McGraw. I said, “I don’t have any place to put this. My dad is home alone and he is not going to take care of this bird.” She said, “You have got to keep it quiet.” I said, “It doesn’t ever make a noise. It quit singing two years or five years ago.” She started to go downhill and she got these little tumors on her eyes, both of them, and by this time I bet I’d had her probably eight years or so. So Bonnie and I decided that she was suffering because she couldn’t even get on her perch. She was sitting on the bottom of her cage. So we chloroformed her. It was bad. It seemed to me we put her in a match box or something and buried her in the bushes. Years later I thought girls were expelled for less reasons than having a pet. Those days rules were rules. MF: Oh that is too funny. We laughed. She told us, “You better not put that on tape.” SN: Oh yes. It is a great story. I told you about my first patient. I thought the food was so good. The Dee always had the greatest food. MF: They do. SN: It was really fun to be in class with everybody that you knew. It wasn’t very long, since we were all in the same boat, we really bonded with each other. In my first year of training I didn’t have a boyfriend, but a lot of girls did. That always made it difficult because we had to be in at 10:00 pm weekends we could get a pass until midnight. If you lived in Ogden you could go home for the weekend (if you weren’t working). We still had to sign out and have permission. MF: And probably since you were in the later classes…I know everybody said those later classes got away with everything. 6 SN: Yes we did. However we thought the rules were very strict. I would think that in the 40’s you couldn’t even walk out the door past midnight. I bet you had to be in your room. Room mothers had a master key to every room and they could inspect at random. Can you imagine that? MF: Yes it was pretty strict. SN: It was really funny how we all devised unique ways to outsmart the curfew. One of my classmates was really small so she could get through the laundry room little window. However, she had to back in and got halfway through the window when the housemother caught her. Mrs. Peterson paddled her part that was through the window, reprimanded her and sent her to her room. The student had to climb back through the window and go to the front door to get to her room. We all laughed but it really wasn’t funny. It could have been dangerous. We had a couple of girls that decided they would go to Elko and secretly get married. Well that was against the rules. They went on a Friday but they didn’t have a pass to go. I don’t know if you heard this. This is a terrible story. They were in their second year—they weren’t seniors but they were probably juniors. They were in our class and they left, decided they didn’t want to get married, and came home and they were home by Monday. But the administration found out that they were A.W.O.L. and they… MF: Kicked them out. SN: …kicked them out. Yes. They were expelled on the spot. MF: Oh my goodness. SN: Yes. They couldn’t finish. 7 MF: And even though they didn’t get married. SN: No and even though they came home all repentant. They had gone through a lot of nurses training. We weren’t in our first year. The only reason I know that we weren’t in our first year is because the rest of us never would have made a fuss. But our whole class was just up in arms. They were good students. They weren’t wild, goofy girls. There were a couple in our class that were, but they were good nurses. We just thought that was just terrible. MF: That is terrible, yes. SN: I don’t know—let us see—oh, we had one other thing. I had a date and we had to be in early and we were going to Salt Lake to some big dance. Bonnie said, “Oh go.” I was really always conforming. I really wasn’t one that broke the rules—I was really very conscientious. In training I would follow people a little bit but I didn’t instigate a lot of risky stuff that would get you trouble. I have been very compliant. Bonnie decided that if we tied a couple of bathrobe sashes together and tied it to her foot, threw it out the window, then when I got home I pulled on it and she came and opened the door. A miracle we didn’t get caught. When I got there it was kind of breezy. Here these sashes were flapping out of the window. It was really stupid. Anyway, I told you about my roommate. Bonnie just moved in. She has been my favorite friend. We have been really close friends ever since then. We had to take classes down on the old Weber College campus so we walked back and forth— we had a student and her dad was the chemistry teacher. He was very straight. If you could stereotype a chemistry teacher, he 8 was it. Here he had this whole class of nurses who were best friends with his daughter. What could he do but love us—we just gave him the worst time. You know chemistry, you are working with all this stuff that blows up and Bonnie was always getting in trouble starting fires with the Bunsen burner. So the most fun class we had was chemistry, not my favorite class that I did well in, but the most fun class. We just couldn’t wait to get to chemistry. We were all so crazy. I’ll tell you one of the things that Bonnie and I did. We would go over to the hospital drug, which was across the street, and we would have some treat, usually a coke. I was really poor. In my first year you couldn’t really work. After that we could work and they would pay you. So I did that when I could. One of my instructors that am going to mention was Ruth Brown. When we were on—the medical floor. That was my first rotation, medicine. Ruth Brown was our instructor on medicine. It was so fun. We had a good time talking to her. She enjoyed her experience. She wanted her students to know how important it was to know what they were doing as far as medicine. Somebody said they had to go through the medicine cabinet and she would ask them, “What does this one drug mean?” SN: It was so difficult. MF: Then if they would say, “I don’t know,” she would make them go through the whole cabinet again to make sure they knew exactly what this was for. SN: You had to look stuff up for her. She was so… MF: She was very conscientious about what she taught. 9 SN: She was so—and strict really isn’t the word because she was so nice. But man she expected a lot. MF: Yes. SN: She wouldn’t put up with anything less. MF: When she was talking she seemed like she was very conscientious but cared. SN: She just loves students. MF: She was so kind. Her compassion—she was teaching, she loved to teach. SN: Oh but she was so good with patients. She was just such a good nurse. She taught us, and that is probably why you really like the best teachers because they teach you the very best. MF: You have to work but you learn so much because of that. SN: Yes. You have to learn. She was really, as far as I am concerned, she was really my very favorite; we had her for quite a few things. She taught more than just med surg and she was always a killer on pharmacy. MF: We have heard a couple people say that. SN: Our student uniforms were a big deal back then the hospital did them and it took you one-half hour to separate the starch. All the sleeves were starched shut. Everything was starched shut. If you had a sunburn you were in real trouble. But you had to get them open. They were just like a big cardboard box. You had to get them open before you could get into them. But caps and uniforms and all that were real important. MF: Who were some of your favorite doctors? 10 SN: One of my favorite doctors was Robert Kelly. Back here, you know, when we were talking about one of the first things that you did, you had to have a physical. I had never had a physical in my life. Never. I had been to a doctor. I got a barbwire cut in my side and I had to have stitches. I got a dog bite and had my tonsils out. We went to Junior Rich. But he was long gone by the time I was in nurses training. I had never had a physical. Robert Kelly was a resident—or an intern, I guess, then. He was doing physicals. He did the whole ten yards! We had to be naked. He was the funnest, craziest guy. He came in the delivery room once and I wouldn’t publish this because he was a real good Mormon but he used to drink coffee then. He would come in and our aid would make the coffee. Well one night she was cleaning the pot and she put soda in the pot, put water in it and turned it on to boil early one morning after being up all night. He came in to have a cup of coffee, drank this stuff, and went, “Oh,” but he drank the whole thing, he said (her name was Lois), she was darling and she was way overweight and shy and just a darling lady “Lois, this is the worst pot of coffee you have ever made.” And she said, “Oh I am sorry Doctor Kelly,” and went red as a beet, scared to death to tell him that it was the cleaner in there. But he was one of my favorite. After our training I worked with him for years. I spent a fair amount of time—in surgery. And I never really like the surgeons. They were just little primadonnas. I don’t think they are anymore as much as they used to be. I was always intimidated by them as a student. I think they were used to bossing people around. I had some favorite doctors. I worked 11 a lot in OB. I worked a lot in Peds. I don’t know why they kept sending me to these places. But Peds was really a hard place to go. MF: That would be hard. SN: It was really difficult. “Favorite patient, hard patient, your challenge.” On medical I liked Dr. Seager. And I think because he was the funniest guy. He was so nice and so good to his patients. He was so smart. My husband has said a lot of times that Floyd Seager was just so smart. MF: That is good for patients because then they have all the confidence in the world that things are going to go well with surgery, whatever. It is going to be good. That is always nice. SN: He was just always a good guy. He was an internist and he worked on medical. He just had a lot of fun with the nurses. He was just a nice guy. MF: Was your husband there at the time? SN: He was. He was a resident. No when I was in a student he was in his first year of practice. MF: Oh okay. SN: I didn’t really work with him a lot. He wasn’t one of my favorite doctors. He was always really good and really friendly but I didn’t gravitate to him very much and I am not sure why. I think it is because the RN’s liked him. I think it is because he was so fun and handsome. So as a student I didn’t work with him much. You know students were on the bottom of any list. MF: Yes. 12 SN: I worked a lot in delivery room. My favorite doctor there was Vernal Johnson. He is one hundred now. He is a great guy. But he was just a little professional but a great sense of humor. Delivery room was kind of a little casual place. Some of those specialties—the same people worked there all the time. So it was really a little clicky place to go. They were a lot more casual. They were all best friends like family they worked together for years. They were pretty tricky. They would short sheet everybody all the time, the doctors and nurses would, the students. On April Fools, you would always short sheet the residents and put plastic over the toilet seats, sew their scrub clothes together. I am trying to think about really favorite doctors. Doctor Anderson was a pediatrician. I spent a lot of time on Peds and he was so good. They didn’t have a lot of pediatricians in town then. Maybe the reason pediatricians were my favorites was because they were just so good and if you ever had a problem they would always come right over and they were just so good. It was great to have their expertise and then they had the responsibility. Usually when students were on, the doctors weren’t around. So mostly when you saw the doctor on those specialties was because they were on the off hours. They had really sick people if they were there late afternoon and nights. MF: That is true. SN: So most of the time—I don’t think I ever worked many day shifts in Peds. You did an orientation but I worked nights all the time and afternoons. I got along with them, they were nice. I tried really hard and I think if you try hard they appreciated you. 13 My favorite patient. I had a little patient on second medical. He was on medical because he had some heart problems. He was old—he was probably seventy, which isn’t old now. His wife was dying upstairs on the surgical floor. I was working nights on the medical floor. He would come—he was a little tiny guy and he would wait up for me. I worked there a lot as a student he would come into the nurse’s station and that was such a no-no for students to allow patients in the chart room. But he would come in and I would give him his night sleeping pill and he always wanted to talk to me because he always wanted to know about his wife. He said, “I know you will tell me the truth.” And I would have to go up and find out what his wife was doing and she was dying. But he was just darling, he was little and tiny. He had a hard time getting around. I could pick him up. I would pick him up and put him in bed just like a kid. He was probably one of my favorite patients. This young patient, just a darling, nice lady had a mole discovered during her pregnancy while I was on labor and delivery. It became malignant then she came to medical with cancer. She came in and out because she was sick a long time. I just was there quite a few times while she was there. I don’t know whether it was just some kind of coincidence but it seemed like I ran into her a lot. She was just so brave. I cried when she died. My hardest patient probably was on Peds. I was a junior then and we were charging. I went to Peds and it was in the winter, it was in the winter of my junior year and two little boys had been in a car. They had matches in the car. One was four and one was five. They had set the car on fire. The youngest little boy died. The other one was burned over mostly his upper body because he had 14 a fur collar on his coat. He had a lot of treatment but burn treatments then were not much. They had to take him back to surgery all the time for the scar revision. He had a little tiny mouth that had scarred almost shut. His nose and his ears, his eyelids, everything was gone. I can’t imagine his pain. He was addicted to morphine. He is probably the most difficult patient I ever tended. He was one that everybody would just stand by and cry. He lived and he had a lot of plastic surgery done. I don’t know what ever happened. I saw him as a teenager and he was really very scarred. I don’t know what happened later when plastics and graphs were so much better. I think probably the greatest challenge was—and maybe different than other peoples—I just think about medicine then, we were doing insulin therapy, you know, putting people in comas on second medical. There was no—I don’t know if anybody has talked about this but there was no emergency room. MF: Oh really? SN: No emergency room, no psych ward. If you worked on medical you had psych patients. Once I went into the room and the psych patient had put the bed across the door. I had to crawl under the bed. Then I was scared to death because it was night and he was really nuts. There was no cardio, there was no intensive care, there was a little three bed preemie nursery. MF: No. SN: Anyway, here we are eighteen or nineteen years old—the responsibility was awesome. MF: And you are in charge of all this. 15 SN: Yes. You have a well-newborn nursery, they didn’t put sick babies in there. But there might be twenty or twenty-five of them. We had a big nursery. MF: That would be a lot. SN: They didn’t have disposable anything then. They had a huge big window and a lot of light so babies didn’t get jaundice very much but they stayed five or six days. You know, by then you are feeding them, they are really hungry. Those first days, nurseries aren’t really busy, babies are sleepy. These were—and depending on the census you had an aid or maybe two. They were good. I don’t know what new students would do without all the aids. The aids were so good and they knew everything. They knew what was going on and they took care of everything and they advised you what to do but talk about responsibility. MF: That is a lot of responsibility for someone that young. SN: And dumb. You thought you were smart and just because that was the way it went. You thought this is what you do. Ruth Brown was usually on medical but they didn’t have a psych ward so instead of—they didn’t do electric shock but in those days they were doing insulin shock. You would give these patients, all this insulin, they would start sweating and pretty soon they are unconscious and having a little seizure so then you would give them IV with sugar and wake them up. You would have maybe three of them in a day. Parents rarely stayed with kids in pediatrics. MF: Oh really? SN: No, they weren’t staying at night. I worked nights I had a couple aids with me— and in the winter. One night I had five or six croup tents and they weren’t like so 16 you could even see through them. They were blankets with a baby in there. And some of them were just little. They didn’t have great antibiotics. They had penicillin so you would have to run around and give all these meds to all these babies. No mothers, and there are all these croup tents. Besides, I had this burn patient. We had a little kid with one kidney that was in kidney failure. We had all kinds of other stuff and surgical patients. It was something else. SN: My greatest challenge was the big wards on second medical that have eight or nine or ten patients in them. MF: Oh my goodness. SN: They had a women’s ward and no air conditioning. When it was summer and hot and they were sick as dogs. They stayed a long time in the hospital and didn’t go home. There were few long-term nursing facilities. There was a county one out in Roy but they didn’t have all these care centers like they do now. MF: That is true. SN: But they didn’t have as many old people either. You know, people died. MF: You didn’t go places to die. SN: Yes, you died at home. Either that or some were in these big wards in the hospital and a lot of them died there. MF: That is true. SN: One experience I had at the beginning of my second year in nursing was while working in the labor and delivery room. A mother had delivered her baby in the car. A resident and I went out to bring her into the unit. The baby was the tinest thing I had ever seen. Her head was only the size of a large orange and her 17 arms were only as large as my index finger. The attending doctor chastised the mother for not coming in sooner. I felt sorry for her because I knew she would not have deliberately had the baby in the car and especially so premature. The doctor said that the baby was a misscarrage and put it in an ordinary crib. I was getting the patient ready to go to the postpartum unit when the aid asked “Sue, do you want me to take the baby to the nursery?” The nursery!! The baby was alive and breathing normally. I rushed her to the nursery and put her in a warm crib. She weighed 1 lb and 4 oz. She thrived on room air, no digestive problems, or anything else. She put on weight and amazed everyone. She stayed in the nursery for weeks and would smile and “talk” to everyone. I learned in a profound way that no person could predict the outcome of hospitalized patients...miracles do happen there every day. People would defy the odds and predictions regularly. I learned an important lesson. Never give up hope or write people off. I have been thinking a lot about my experiences in nurses training. We had a lot of humerous things happen. We were young and some times things would just strike you as funny. Bonnie and I were taking care of a surgical patient early in our training. We stood him up and he vomited. We looked and his teeth were in the emesis basin, we looked at each other and we couldn’t contain ourselves. We laid him back down and went out in the hall and were hysterically trying to stifle our laughing. Only one of us could go back in to take care of this patient. 18 Another time, I was in delivery room and one of the doctors had received a cigar from a new dad. So this doctor lit up this cigar and another doctor came down the hall. He didn’t want to be caught smoking so he threw the burning cigar on the dumbwaiter and sent it to postpartum. Everyone laughed. Only a few minutes passed and the head nurse on postpartum called and asked what the blank blank was going on. She smelled smoke and couldn’t tell where it was coming from and almost called the fire department. As a student I couldn’t believe this happened but everyone did laugh. We had lots of things happen on psych rotation to Provo. There was an “active womens ward.” I was terrified all the time I was there. My second or third day I was helping another student shower a patient. The shower room was one big room with no partitions. The patient was all soapy and wet. She threw the soap at us and charged across the room and wrestled us to the floor. It was a real cat fight and she won. This was in the winter. By the time the next class that rotated there, medications ie tranqualizers were being used and it was a miracle. Patients that had been in lock down responded to the drugs and went home. After being there we all diagnosed ourselves with some kind of weird psych problem. The nurses home was always an active place to be. We had one of the first T.V.’s so everyone would watch this tiny, black and white T.V. There was always some cute boy or boys waiting for a date in the living room, all under the watchful eye of the house mother. We had classes, dances and always parties on holidays or special occasions there. Always well chaperoned. 19 Most years there were well over 100 students living there. We all ate together, played together and worked together. We worked hard and studied hard. We started out naïve teenagers and as time went on and our experience and knowledge grew, we became more accomplished. Caring for those hundreds and hundreds of people in every condition changed our lives. I can always think of some incident that I remember as if it were yesterday. Critical things, special people and patients, funny things, sad times, and on and on. I remember how proud my Dad was when I graduated. I wished that my mother could have been there. It was an impressive ceremony with new soft cotton uniforms under our capes. Our caps with the stripe around the edge. A dozen red roses in our arms. We were all so happy. Quite a few were married soon after this. I stayed in school part time and worked nights. I married a year and a half later and started my family. I worked full time for a while then part time for years in the delivery room. I loved working there. It was challenging but fun. Bonnie and I finished our Bachelor degree when they brought the program up from the University of Utah. MF: Yes the accreditation. SN: Yes, Bonnie and I decided to go to the U for graduate study. She went into the MedSurg program. I studied in the maternal child program. It was a real sacrifice for my family. This was in 1972. We had to be there every day. There was no off campus study, no lessons on the computer. I commuted from Liberty. That is 50 miles. We both received our Masters degree and I received a 20 certificate to be a midwife. We then worked at the McKay Dee in administrative positions. I remarried after four years. I married Dr. Byron Naisbitt and quit work. After almost 10 years I went back to work as a CNM. I reoriented and worked 6 years doing all phases of womens health care. I worked for six years, delivered hundreds of babies, and loved every minute of my practice. I always remembered how the practice of O.B. had changed since I was a student at the Dee. Technology to numerous to number and unimaginable things for the future. I talk of the “Good OLD Days” and how at the Dee we practiced the best medicine in the universe. Now 56 years later I am so grateful for the opportunity that I had to graduate from the Dee and all the lifetime friends that I have because of my nursing career, and how nursing impacted my family and my life. MF: We appreciate you letting us come to visit you. 21