Oral History Program Clara Mann Sorensen Interviewed by Marci Farr 26 August 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Clara Mann Sorensen Interviewed by Marci Farr 26 August 2010 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 St. Benedict’s School of Nursing was founded in 1947 by the Sisters of Mount Benedict. The school operated from April 1947 to 1968. Over the forty-one year period, the school had 605 students and 357 graduates. In 1966, the program became the basis for Weber State College’s Practical Nursing Program. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the graduates and to add to the history of nursing education in Ogden. The interviews focus on their training, religion, and experiences working with doctors, nurses, nuns, and patients at St. Benedict’s Hospital. This project received funding from the Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Division of State History. ____________________________________ 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: Clara Mann Sorensen, an oral history by Marci Farr, 26 August 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Clara Mann Sorensen Graduation Photo Class of 1950 Clara Mann Sorensen August 26, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Clara Mann Sorensen, conducted by Marci Farr and Melissa Johnson, on August 26, 2010. In this interview, Clara discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Clara Mann Sorensen. She graduated from the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1950. It is August 26, 2010. We are interviewing her at her home in North Ogden. Will you just tell us a little bit about your early life, where you grew up, and where you went to school and a little bit about your family? CS: I was born in North Dakota on a farm at home. I went to a Catholic school taught by German nuns. I went to a one room school house with about thirty other students from the first to the eighth grade. In 1942 I went to high school in Mandan, North Dakota. I stayed with a family for the four years because we didn’t have a high school where we lived. For the four years that I stayed with them, I worked for my room and board. MF: Was that hard being away from home? CS: I went home periodically during the school year at Christmas but most of the time I just stayed right with the family. I left home when I was fourteen years old. MF: That would be hard but for your education that is what you have to do. CS: Well that is the only way we were able to get our education so we did what we had to do. Then, my aunt, my mother’s sister, who worked at St. Alexis Hospital in Bismarck told us all about her experiences at the hospital. That is why I 2 decided to be a nurse. So I had signed up to go to the hospital in Bismarck. Then my aunt and uncle went to California and on the way back they stopped to see Sister Mary Margaret in Ogden at the hospital which wasn’t even open in the summer. She told me what a beautiful place this was and everything. So I wrote to Sister Mary Margaret because my family knew her. That is why they stopped to see her. I wrote to her that summer and asked her if they were going to have a school of nursing and she said yes but it wouldn’t be open for a year because the hospital had to be open for a year in order for them to get accreditation for a school of nursing. I waited for that year and they sent me all the things that I needed to fill out. Then she wrote back and said yes that they would accept me. I didn’t need to come for a personal interview. (Break in the interview) MF: You were just telling us about how you were riding in the train with your aunt and just getting into Ogden. CS: Then we went to the nursing home and the next day I started into training. MF: Did your aunt stay for awhile or did she leave? CS: She came and stayed for a couple days, then she left and went home. MF: What were your first impressions when you first went into the nursing home? CS: It was overwhelming to say the least. I thought, “What did I get myself into?” I knew absolutely no one but all the girls were very nice and everybody was away from home. We all got along real well. MF: Did you have a roommate? CS: Yes I had a roommate. She came from Price. She cried every night because she was so homesick. I was the one who was farther away from home than she 3 was. Finally, about six weeks or so later she went home and didn’t come back. So I was alone for quite some time until another person left so I had a new roommate. She was Mrs. Norris. She was a lady that was married and had two children and a husband. She was in training with the rest of us who all weren’t married. We never could figure out why the nuns took her. MF: You couldn’t be married, right, while you were in training? CS: No we could not be married. Why she was able, I don’t know but we lived together the rest of those three years. I would go to her mother’s home. Her mother took care of the two kids and the husband. She stayed at the nurses’ home just like the rest of us for those three years. MF: That is interesting. I am surprised that they would let her. CS: So she was older because her children were about—well, one was almost a teenager so she was in her late thirties probably. She was almost like a mother to me. So I think that is probably why I stayed. MF: Were the Sisters strict with rules? What were some of the rules you had to follow? CS: Some of the rules? MF: Yes, while you were in training. CS: The nuns were very strict as you would imagine. About twenty-five nuns or so lived on the second floor of the nurses’ home with us. They lived down one wing and we lived down the other. We towed the mark. MF: Did you have a curfew while you were in training? Did you have to be in at a certain time? 4 CS: We couldn’t leave during the week and yes, we had study hour from seven thirty to nine thirty and from nine thirty to ten thirty we got ready for bed. At ten thirty the nun came with her flashlight and made sure everybody was in bed. I kid you not it was like jail. You kids have no idea what it was like. And you didn’t get up or you didn’t study after ten thirty because all the lights were out. I remember one time when Mrs. Norris, my roommate, was gone home. I put my robe which was a red flannel thing over by the lamp and it started to burn. Of course, you only have one robe—and I had a big hole in my robe for the rest of the time until I got home and got another one. MF: That is a good story. Did you have a probationary time? CS: Yes. If I can recall it must have been until we got our caps. MF: Tell us a little bit about your capping ceremony. CS: All the parents could come. It was the twentieth of December in the nurses’ home. We came in with—I still have my Florence Nightingale lamp, see it down there in the… MF: Yes. CS: We carried it in and then they lit the candle. Of course, now you can’t have lighted anything. It was a very impressive ceremony. All the girls went home for a week. I was the only one that had to stay. So I was there for Christmas by myself. MF: You took classes at this time, right? CS: Yes. MF: The doctors and nurses, were they your instructors? 5 CS: The nuns and the doctors. MF: What were some of the classes that you had to take? CS: We had to take all the required nursing classes like medical/surgical nursing— see I even kept this thing too. MF: Oh your file, good. CS: We had microbiology, chemistry, sociology, psychology, history of nursing, nutrition, diet therapy, every required class that the state had. MF: If you had a night off what is something that your friends and you would do? CS: Did we get a night off? When we were first there we went to classes most of the time. We went to class until after we got our—I think it was in several months. We could have a pass on the weekends. MF: Did you go to your friends homes or did you go to the movies? CS: Most of the time we stayed right there because we had to ride the bus anywhere we went. No one had a car. I don’t ever remember the nuns having a car. I don’t know how they got around. I had forgotten about that. We walked everywhere we went. Judy’s down on Harrison Boulevard was our little place we always walked to. Otherwise, we stayed most of the time in the nurses’ home. On the days that we had off we went up to Waterfall Canyon and we had an archery set up. In the summertime we couldn’t ever go out on the grounds to sun bathe so there was a field down off of the hospital grounds and we used to take our blankets and go down there. There were cows down there. It is surprising what you can do. We would take our blanket and go down and—we played softball in the daytime. We helped the nuns’ plant—people would give them 6 plants in the summertime and we would help them plant them around the nurses’ home. They had their grounds. We would help them plant. MF: That is good. What were some of your first assigned duties when you first got out on the floor? CS: Well we would do temperatures and blood pressures. We didn’t do too much. Eventually, we gave bed baths and we had to make our own beds. We had to make sure that we did it right. We had an instructor with us. Sometimes it was a nun. Sister Mary Gerald was always inspecting everything and making sure everything was right. MF: What was probably your thing that made you most nervous when you first got out on the floor? CS: I suppose talking to the patient because we felt very insecure. Of course, we always thought the patient would be very insecure with us because we didn’t know enough. They were used to having registered nurses take care of them and all of a sudden some little eighteen or nineteen year old girl would come in there and say, “I am going to give you a bath.” We didn’t have high/low beds, we had a regular bed. The patient had a stepstool and they would step on the stepstool to get in and out of bed. You had to make sure that they didn’t fall. When there was a really ill patient you had a hard time getting them out of bed. Most of the time there had to be two of us to help them. Every morning after their bath, they had their back rubs and you made sure that the bed was all straight, a fresh bed every morning. In the afternoon, if we worked afternoons, they had to get up and wash their hands and face, they had a backrub and their beds 7 straightened. The instructor made sure that we did everything that we were supposed to. In the evening before they were in bed they again got up and brushed their teeth and washed their hand and face. We gave them a back rub which doesn’t happen anymore. MF: No it doesn’t, not at all. So after you got off your probationary period, when did you start having more responsibility? What were some of your duties after? CS: In our second and third years we could do a lot more than we did before. MF: Did you rotate time that you were on the floor? CS: We worked the afternoons, we worked at night, by ourselves with an aide. MF: That would be kind of scary. CS: Yes because you never knew what was going to happen. MF: That is true. That would be really hard. CS: I was down in the psychiatric ward at Christmas time and we had this patient in the strong room. You had a room where the patient was tied in the bed. He got his hands loose and I thought he was going to get out of his restraints and come after me. He was in the locked room. MF: Wow, that would be scary. CS: And I was there by myself with a nursing assistant. Most of the time we had an orderly. It was really scary. MF: Which was your favorite floor that you worked on when you were in training? CS: The surgical floor. MF: Why was it your favorite? 8 CS: I didn’t like OB—all those babies and women. I liked surgery because that is where I worked after. MF: What do you think was probably your greatest challenge when you were in nurses training? CS: Probably working in surgery. MF: Trying to make sure you are quicker than the doctor. CS: Because you never knew—if you were scrubbing with the doctor and some of them were very fussy about—and they should have been—they didn’t trust us very well because they didn’t want things to be contaminated. You can’t blame them. It is surprising that very few patients ever got infection. MF: You guys were very careful. When you changed someone’s bed out you didn’t even put the sheets on the floor. You guys were very careful with that. CS: They were always immaculately clean. You were always real careful. If you dropped anything or did anything that you thought the patient shouldnt have again you discarded it. You didn’t have a lot of things you have now. You never thought too much about the infection. You were real careful but you didn’t have gloves. MF: Plus you had to reuse all your tubing, right, for IV’s and different things? CS: You can’t imagine—everything is so different now. Everything had to be saved because you reused it. MF: That is true. You were recycling ahead of time. CS: Now you throw everything away or you send it home with the patient. The things that were in the room when the patient came in was the bed pan, an emesis 9 basin, a tooth container, and those got taken back to central services and re-sterilized and somebody else used it again. Now you send everything home with the patient or you throw it away. MF: That is true. Were you in the diet kitchen? Did you have to learn different recipes? CS: Yes you did. The dietician was a nun and she left when there were a couple of us—there were always two of us in the diet kitchen. We had to prepare the special diets. The nun left and we didn’t have a dietician for about a week or so until they found someone else to come and help us. I sent orange juice up to Doctor Howe’s gastric patient. He had just had a gastric resection and you always had to admit that you did something wrong to the doctor. You didn’t call him on the phone, you saw him personally and told him. He was so angry with me because you don’t give orange juice to a brand new patient that had his stomach operated on. But those were the trials and tribulations and we always made it through. But you always had to tell that doctor if you did anything wrong. The head nurse, the supervisor, never took that responsibility. It is your responsibility to go and say this is what happened and I am sorry. Everything usually turned out okay but it was devastating. MF: Were there any traditions that you remember at St. Benedict’s during the holidays or during the school year? CS: At Christmas time we always had a Christmas tree in the first floor of the nurses home. We decorated it and the nuns would bring the decorations. We always had a Christmas party. The first year the kids all went home at Christmas time. 10 The second year only half of us could go home. The other half stayed and we had to work. I never got to go home at Christmas because it was just too far. You only had a week. MF: It was probably good just to stay. When was graduation held? CS: In May at St. Joseph’s. MF: What were your impressions of graduation? CS: I can’t remember a lot. I remember we had to walk somewhere. We were in some place and then we walked from there to the church. I can’t remember where it was. It was a ways but we were the first class—there was a whole church full of people, a lot of the doctors and their wives came. It is surprising how the doctors supported the nuns because they taught us. They were young like the rest of us. I remember we played softball with the doctors. They would come and play softball with us. MF: That was a great day I am sure, to graduate. CS: We would have several parties during the year. The nuns would have us and the doctors and their wives came. MF: Did you stay at St. Benedict’s after you graduated? CS: Yes. MF: How long did you stay there? CS: All my… MF: Your career. 11 CS: I worked in surgery the first year and then after I was married and had my first child I didn’t go back to surgery, I went back and worked on the medical floor. I didn’t like that too well. MF: When did you retire from nursing? CS: After that I quit and had my second child. When I went back after I had my second child I worked on the surgical floor. Then in 1972 Doctor Grua and Mona England, the supervisor of surgery, said, “We would like to speak to you.” I thought I had done something terribly wrong. They said, “We are starting an outpatient surgery and we want you to be an outpatient nurse.” I started as an outpatient nurse department and worked there as a manager until 1989 when I retired. MF: That was probably great. Did you enjoy that? CS: Yes. I set it up and had to do all of the paperwork. Nobody knew what it was going to be like. I had to start the very foundation. Then in the 1980’s they said everybody that goes to surgery the next morning will have to come in the morning instead of at night. They used to come in at night and then in the morning they would go to surgery. Everybody had to start coming in in the mornings so I had to get that operation all set up too. It has been a real experience. MF: I am sure your training from St. Benedict’s helped you when you were in your career as far as the skills you learned. You were on every floor, you learned every type of training. 12 CS: Yes. It was a hands on training. A lot of the girls went on to get their degrees. I don’t think we could have gotten any better training anywhere else. MF: How do you think nursing has changed over the years? CS: We had to write everything. That doctor knew exactly what had happened to his patient the twenty-four hours that he didn’t see that patient because we had to write everything. Sometimes you would write a whole page in your hours of work. Now all you have to do is check it off and that is it. You started IV’s with a needle, now you have all that fancy stuff. You didn’t have CT scans and MRI’s to tell you what was wrong with the patient. That doctor had to be pretty smart to know what he was doing. You didn’t have all these fancy modern things. It is surprising, even today, my friend’s husband just had a pulmonary embolism but even with all this new modern medicine he went twenty-four hours before they finally decided that is what he had. I don’t think that would have happened in the 50’s and 60’s. He even got sent home from the out care center before they did anything. I can’t understand that—before they did the CT scan to find out that is what he had. But he had every symptom. So it is really scary even now. People are human and they make mistakes. MF: Have you stayed in contact with your classmates? CS: Some of them. A lot of them, of course, are in their 70’s and 80’s so a lot have passed on. Have you heard from any in the 1950’s? Have you heard from Hawkes and Buttars? MF: No we haven’t. CS: Well you should have. 13 MF: We sent them all letters but I don’t know if they just haven’t responded or they’ve been on vacation. CS: Well I am going to call them up. Did you hear about my friend Dorothy Williams in Oregon. She is moving to California again. I have a sister that came out in 1953 but she didn’t get a letter because I bet you got her thing back because she moved. Did you take the addresses out of this book? MF: We have done some of those and then we had a list from Sister Luke that we have used. CS: These were the most recent ones. MF: Some of them have came back three times and then we finally got it right. CS: She has moved since this and I am sure you don’t have her address. I talked to her a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t called her back since. She said she didn’t get a letter because I am sure her letter came back. She would be glad because she keeps in touch with a lot and a lot of her class has passed away. MF: What is your sister’s name? CS: Anne Grannon. She lives in Iowa. I know you don’t have her address. I should give it to you. Dorothy Williams moved from Oregon to California just recently because I just had a letter from her. I am sure she would give you some information if you just spoke to her on the phone. I don’t know why Hawkes and Buttars wouldn’t respond. I have forgotten some of their names. Isn’t that terrible? When you get as old as I am you can’t remember. There is one that lives up by Logan. She should too. MF: Did you have anything that you wanted to ask her? 14 MJ: That first Christmas that you were alone… CS: What did I do? MJ: Yes. Did you celebrate with the nurses? CS: I can’t remember what I did. I have no idea what happened. I cannot remember. I remember one patient. Do you want me to tell you about a patient? MF: Yes tell us about a patient. CS: You won’t want to hear this. We had this old man that came in. I can’t remember but I think he was an old sheep herder. He lived up in the mountains all by himself. He had this terrible looking face. It was all eaten away, all his jaw. The doctor said, “You have to come and help me.” I said, “I don’t know if I want to or not.” I had seen what it looked like. He had maggots, they were live worms eating in his jaw. He had to clean all that out. MF: Oh my gosh that is crazy. MJ: Wow. CS: It was terrible. But he cleaned it all out. Of course, he had infection. I can’t remember what they did to repair his jaw but it was the most terrible thing you would ever want to see. Then were was another man that had a heart attack. He owned the Ford Hunter Motor Company in the 1940’s and 50’s. They lived up the canyon. I took care of him several—we would always ask if we had to work two or three days in a row if we could have the same patients. When they had a heart attack they stayed in the hospital for sometimes two or three weeks. Because that is the only way they had to treat them. I took care of him for several times. Mrs. Hunter was there and she said, “Why don’t you come home 15 with me?” She was by herself, they didn’t have any children and they lived up the canyon. So Sister Mary Margaret said yes, I could go home with her one weekend. I went up the canyon and stayed with her. They had a beautiful home. The Ogden River came right by their house. Then when he was leaving—we could not accept any money, if the patient’s relatives brought us a small gift we could keep it. I told him, “No, I couldn’t.” Of course, a lot of the people were not really offended but they felt really bad. I told Sister Mary Margaret and she said, “I will go talk to him.” She was a disciplinarian. She had all those doctors and people under her wing. She knew what she could do and what she couldn’t do. She went and told him that we couldn’t accept but he gave her the money anyway and said to get something for us. We didn’t have dishes up in our little lounge on the second floor so she bought us a set of dishes with the money. We never accepted anything from—it was like them trying to bribe us into doing something we weren’t supposed to do. We didn’t accept it either. All the kids would feel so bad to think the patient felt bad about the fact that they couldn’t give you something. It was one of those things that you just didn’t do. They were very good like after they got home and were well they would call and say, “Can you come to dinner?” And we would go to their houses for dinner. That is how we got out. MJ: I was curious. Did you have any polio patients? CS: Yes, 1948 and 49. The second south which was the orthopedic ward. All the patients that came in and were in isolation for a week were put back there. Then when we got them out of isolation we would take like books—because it was 16 mostly little children—we would put everything out in the sun on the porch to—I don’t know how the germs ever got off of them—or else we had to throw it away. The two hundred ward was a men’s four bed ward, we would put all the cribs in. Sometimes there were as many as ten cribs in that room. Can you imagine all these little kids with absolutely nothing to do, there was no television, people would come and read to them and play with them and, of course, four time a day they had to be put in hot packs—one on their chest, one on their back, one on each leg and one on each arm. They were those terrible, old, army wool blankets. We put them in a thing we called the hot pack machine and got them real warm. Then you would spin it to get the moisture out of it. Then we would wrap them in those things. They had to be in there for about fifteen minutes until they got cold. But four times a day that is what they had to do. Those poor little kids, some of them were like a year or year and a half old. They would be away from their parents. Sometimes they had to stay for three or four weeks. MF: Wow that would be hard. CS: You had to help them eat. We would go over and help—none of the nurses ever got polio. Nobody ever in the hospital, even though we took care of all the patients in the iron lungs. There weren’t very many of those but that iron lung was—they recruited army nurses and navy nurses. I remember a navy nurse came from Washington and they couldn’t leave the patient at all. They had to stay right in the room all the time. One of us students would go in and help her. If she needed anything we would go and get it for her. 17 MF: That would be hard. Did you have any affiliations that you had to go to out of state? CS: No we stayed right in—we had psychiatric nurses and the psychiatric ward downstairs. We had to give the insulin therapy. That was terrible. I think it must have been three or four o’clock in the morning that we started. The morning shift didn’t come on ‘til seven o’clock. We would have to watch those patients as they went deeper and deeper into insulin shock. Sometimes if they had a reaction you had a 50cc syringe with 50% glucose that you gave them IV to get them out of it. We helped Doctor Gorman do electric shock treatments. That was another thing which they don’t do anymore, thank God. MF: That is crazy stuff. CS: It is surprising. It was kind of barbaric really. You never forget. But it helped the patient so I guess you did it. MJ: What about the TB sanitarium? Did you guys go out there at all? CS: No. We went out there I think one or two days and that is all. We didn’t get to go anywhere because we were in the first class and they had to learn what else people needed. As the years went by it got more and more complicated. So they went to Hastings to the psychiatric and they went to Denver for childrens because there wasn’t enough. You had to do the state requirements and there weren’t enough pediatric patients I guess so they affiliated with Denver and Hastings and they went to the TB sanitarium. We went up there but we never really affiliated with any. We all lived through it. It is surprising how many people went on and got their degrees. We got a good foundation. 18 MF: That is exactly what we have found. The nuns did a great job of teaching. CS: I had no idea how to set up an outpatient surgery department. MF: But it turned out good. CS: It is really surprising, one of the doctors took all my material that I had when Davis North started. He took it all out there and gave it to them. I was really upset with him. I didn’t know until after he had done it that he did it. He came and told me. That wasn’t very fair. They didn’t know how to do it, why didn’t they do their own right? MJ: You learn by doing, by getting in and doing. CS: Well that is true. A nurse called me from Nebraska or some place and said that—nobody knew what to do when starting the outpatient surgery. When the patients came in the morning, we took care of them, and then they went home. She wrote and asked me if I had material that I could send her. I sent it to her because it was a new field and people didn’t know what to do. It is surprising what you can do if you don’t know what you are doing. When the inpatients had to come in the morning, I said to the surgeons, “We are going to have this meeting with you in your office nurse.” We had to send out a brochure and everything of what was going to happen. So the doctor said, “Our patients”—at night if our patients were going to have surgery you had to give them an enema or if they were having hysterectomy you gave them a douche and the whole nine yards at night and in the morning before they went to surgery. They said, “The patients can’t do that, they won’t know what to do.” I said, “Yes they will have to but if you don’t think they can do it you can tell them 19 that we will do it in the morning before they go to surgery.” It was a new experience again. You had to re-teach everybody. It is surprising what you had to know to make sure that the patient did everything she or he was supposed to do before they came, especially that no eating or drinking or chewing gum or candy or drinking a cup of coffee before they came in the morning. At night, we would take everything away from them at midnight so they didn’t have to worry because they didn’t have anything. But when they were on their own at home you could get up in the middle of the night and take a drink. In the morning you would have to ask them, “Are you sure you didn’t have anything to eat or drink?” People don’t listen to you either, you know? We would call them the afternoon before. We had to call everybody and make sure that they knew not to eat or drink, that they had all that material that the doctor would send home with them. Every once in awhile somebody did—“Well we just forgot.” Just yourself you could get up in the middle of the night and take a drink. Since I retired I don’t have to worry about that anymore. MF: That is good. Well we appreciate you sharing this with us.