Oral History Program Annette Taylor Saxton Interviewed by Marci Farr 19 August 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Annette Taylor Saxton Interviewed by Marci Farr 19 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: Annette Taylor Saxton, an oral history by Marci Farr, 19 August 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Annette Taylor Saxton Graduation Photo Class of 1962 Annette Taylor Saxton August 19, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Annette Taylor Saxton, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on August 19, 2010. In this interview, Annette discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. Marjorie Porter and Darlene Allen were also present during the interview. MF: This is Marci Farr. We’re interviewing Annette Taylor Saxton; she graduated from the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1962. It’s August 19, 2010, and we’re at the Pineview Rehab Center. Would you tell us just a little bit about your life, where you grew up, your family, and where you went to school? AS: I grew up on Douglas Street, which is just about one block south of 2nd Street. I went to school with Darlene – we went to Lincoln Elementary, Mound Fort Junior High, and Ben Lomond. I think all of those schools have been torn down but Ben Lomond, and it’s basically torn down and remodeled. We survived our schools. There were three children in my family – I was the middle child. I had an older sister and a younger brother. I was kind of the peacemaker in the family. I grew up very easily, I had very good friends that were a good example to me. We had fun together; we loved church activities and school. I always felt very loved and secure. We had a good family. MF: Did you take any classes when you were in high school that made you decide to study nursing? Was it in high school? AS: It was in high school. Actually, my friend, who lived across the street from me, Karen Stouffers, who is also in my class, was the one that said she had applied 2 at St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. I don’t think I had really thought that much about what I was going to do with the rest of my life until then, but when she told me she had applied, it just clicked, like, yes, I think that’s what I want to do too. I put in my application, and it just kind of escalated from there. I know Karen got her acceptance before I did, and I thought, “Oh no, I’m not good enough, they’re not going to let me in.” But then they sent a letter and said that they had had some problems, but don’t get discouraged. Then I got my letter of acceptance, so I was really excited about that. MF: So was this your first time away from home, when you moved into the nurses’ home? AS: It was. It was absolutely my first time away from home, and I was very shy. It wasn’t like in school, I think Darlene joined every club there was. She was a social butterfly. I wasn’t. When I got done with school, I was happy to be home. I just wanted to go home and be around my family, and I was very happy and content. So when I went away to nursing school, I might as well have moved to Nebraska, because it felt like I was a hundred miles away. I could call my mom and talk to her on the phone every day, but it was a rather traumatic experience for me. In fact, I remember being physically, absolutely physically ill. I missed a few of my first classes because I was physically ill, I was so homesick. But I got over it. MF: That’s good. So did you think – when you were there with the sisters – which wasn’t part of your background, was that difficult? 3 AS: It was. It seemed like a whole different world - I’d been plucked out of my nice little safe environment and placed in an alien environment. These girls, some of the older students, were from farther away. We had a lot of girls from Rock Springs, Wyoming, Idaho, and Price, and a lot of them were Catholic girls, and they were really wild girls. I mean, they smoked, they drank, and their language was not always appropriate, and it was quite a shock for us poor little LDS girls. So we kind of just clung together, and we made it through. I grew to like them very much. MF: So what were some of your favorite courses you took while you were in nurses’ training? AS: I think my favorite rotation was surgical floor, because that’s where I spent the rest of my career; I worked on a surgical ward for 31 years; my last four years I worked as a home health nurse. My least favorite was psychiatry; I never could quite grasp psychiatry. I don’t think anybody really grasped psychiatry. AS: I don’t even think the doctors who were psychiatrists understood psychiatry. This was another rotation I was on and the night nurse was sick, and I had to go be the charge nurse at night on a psychiatric floor. I was terrified, because I was just brand-new on that rotation. I had not had any experience at all. One of the aides was a good-looking young man, and he was an orderly. He called, pretended to be a doctor and ordered full restraints, and all these meds, and all of these things that I was supposed to do for this patient that was coming in. I was almost hysterical. When he came in laughing – he thought it was really funny. I didn’t think it was funny. At that time we did electroshock therapy, and we had to just 4 stand there and be with the patients and make sure they were still breathing. It was ugly to watch. That wasn’t pleasant. MF: Were they still doing the insulin therapy at this time? AS: They didn’t do insulin therapy. It was electric. MF: Just the electric shock. AS: That was not fun to participate in at all. My other least favorite rotation was surgery. We had a week of orientation to learn the instruments and how to set up, and then they put you in surgery and you’re supposed to scrub, and assist and anticipate the doctor’s needs. I never did figure out what I was supposed to be doing in surgery. I was a terrible scrub nurse, because it just never clicked with me. I hated surgery. The doctors would holler at you, and throw instruments at you. DA: Well, at nights there was an RN who was on call, and students were first and second call. There was nobody else. AS: So a lot of times we just managed. MF: That would be hard. So with your shifts – did you rotate shifts, like during the day or at night? DA: Split shifts, rotate shifts, a lot of night shifts on the floors. AS: I think Marge and I went through that rotation together – MP: We did all our rotations together. AS: We would scrub all day, and then go to class, and then at night we had to go do all the preps, and we had a lot of surgeries. So if you had an eye prep, you shaved around their eye, and… 5 MP: Everything was shaved, I mean… AS: You did pubic preps – men, women, it didn’t matter… you had to do all of them. MP: Remember one that we did from the nipple line down, and left the hair up here? AS: Yes, and he was not happy, because we had to shave his chest hair. He was just a young guy, and he was not happy. MP: He was hairy. AS: We would not get done with our preps until late at night, and then we’d have to get up early and scrub. It was pretty stressful. MF: I am sure you never slept, with that kind of schedule. Did you ever sneak out? AS: Actually, I was in love. I met my husband just before I went into nurses’ training, and we had dated all summer, so I was in love. That first six months, of course, the only time we ever went home or seen anybody was on weekends because we were just too busy studying and you just had to study until midnight every night. But it seemed like after the first year we didn’t have to study as hard. We would have our split shifts. I would drag myself out of bed in the morning, and we would go from seven to eleven a.m., go to class, go back from five to seven p.m. – they were split shifts so they could get the most work out of you they possibly could. My future husband Gary was waiting for me the minute I got off duty. We’d go out and party, party, party. MP: It wasn’t a real rambunctious party. AS: No, we went to a movie, or went on a date. So eleven o’clock at night or so I’d come back in. I don’t think I ever paid much attention to curfew. I was such a quiet, sweet little thing they never thought I would do anything wrong. So I came 6 dragging in and do the whole thing the next day. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the dorm, because I was always out with my husband-to-be. He was very good about my schedule, because he realized how important my nursing career would be to me later on. He didn’t encourage me to leave nursing. He always encouraged me to finish, and came to see me a couple of times while I was in Denver. Then I got engaged to him my last year when I was at the TB Sanitarium. So I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the dorm with the rowdy girls. MF: So do you remember any patients that you cared for, some that stand out in your mind? AS: I remember one poor Hispanic migrant worker, and he was sucked into a grain auger, and his legs were cut off. That poor man suffered terribly. He got infection in his legs, and they would take him back to surgery and do revisions and debridements of his wounds. He couldn’t speak any English. It was horrible. You would walk by his room, and the smell would just about knock you over. I think we all remember that little Japanese boy. His dad backed over him. Do you remember that? MP: He wasn’t Japanese. His name was Jeff Arbon. AS: His mother was – she was Japanese. MP: She may have been. AS: But anyway, his father had run over him with the car, over his head. He was a patient for months and months and months. MP: He was just a baby when he was run over, and it took him two years to die. 7 AS: I think we all remember him. You know, he had many many surgeries and nothing ever really helped him. His mom would come in and take care of him every single night. It was hard to see her. MP: The dad would sit with him – he was beside himself. They ended up divorcing eventually, but he was beside himself. He so blamed himself, and it was a total accident. He’d gone around the truck to see if Jeff was there, and he hollered at his wife, and she called back that she had him, and all of a sudden he must have darted out or something, because he went out behind that truck and then he pulled out over him. But it didn’t kill him. MF: That’s too bad. MP: Probably one of the saddest ones that we took care of. AS: Then we had the staph infections. It seemed like that was a new strain of bacteria, and none of the antibiotics we had at that time would take care of their infections. That was really scary stuff. MP: We had a lot of isolation cases. AS: We did. MP: On medical floor we had four rooms or something that were set aside to be used for isolation rooms? It was totally gown, glove, mask, everything to go in. I’ll tell you, they didn’t have air conditioning like they have now, and you would come out of there just suffocated. There was no central air in those days. We suffered with the heat in the summer as did the patients. They did put air conditioning units in each window, but they worked poorly. MF: That would be hard. Do you remember any traditions at St. Benedict’s? 8 AS: Not really. DA: Not more than what we’ve talked about. Charting in three colors. AS: Yes, charting in three colors. MP: Blue for daytime, green for afternoons, and red for nighttime. MF: Well, there you go. MP: That’s how you hand-charted everything. DA: And charting was very detailed. Nothing like they do now. You had to almost chart every half-hour, about that patient. MF: What was your relationship with the doctors while you were in training? AS: They were very intimidating. We had some typical doctors, who thought they were God. Or very close to. When they made rounds at night, you had their charts stacked up at the desk, and we had different colors for the different doctors, the charts were labeled, and you pulled the charts, and you walked around with them when they made rounds. They gave you verbal orders, and you wrote them in the charts as orders. MP: And when they walked up to the desk, you were to stand up. You did not stay seated, or you would be called on it. AS: And some that were a little frisky, you had to make sure there was a bed between you and them. Doctor Swindler. I think everybody was terrified of Doctor Swindler. When you could hear him walking down the hallway, everybody hopped to. Some of the doctors were very nice and friendly. DA: Remember the one that wore horn-rimmed glasses, who didn’t have any lenses in them because he had hearing aids? He was from Germany? 9 AS: No, I don’t remember him. But Dr. McQuarry, do you remember him? Now, he was very strange, and he drank a lot. I remember I had to call him up and tell him that the potassium was low on his patient, and they had an NG (nasogastric) tube, so they could not take any oral meds. He said, “Well, mash up some bananas and put them through the NG tube.” Of course, you didn’t write that down, you’d report it to the night shift and they would get an IV order when he was coherent the next day. MF: That is funny. So what were your impressions of graduation? AS: I thought it was very traditional, it was very impressive. I think that Catholic church on 24th Street is gorgeous – the altar is beautiful. You know, it’s just part of the Catholic tradition. That’s the way they did it, so that’s the way we did it. MP: We accepted going there, so we accepted the things that needed to be done. AS: Yes. MF: Did your family come? AS: Oh, yes. Yes, and I don’t think they were very comfortable there, but they came, and it was beautiful, really. MF: So after you graduated, did you stay with St. Benedict’s? AS: I did. I worked at St. Benedict’s my whole career. When I first was married, I worked in the recovery room; then, after I had my first child, I worked recovery room some, but then I worked on a surgical floor, and I pretty much spent my career on a surgical floor, but about the last five years I did home care. I got tired of working holidays. One Christmas season I was scheduled to work New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and I said, that’s 10 enough. I’ve spent enough of my life working holidays and weekends. At that time the hospitals went into home care, and that worked very nicely. Because everyone was very cooperative. Somebody would say, I’ll take from eight to twelve shift call, and somebody else would say, I’ll take from twelve to four, and we split up the shifts so no one person had to work the whole day or every weekend. We rotated through the staff. That worked very nicely. MF: So when did you retire? AS: In 1991. My daughter went crazy and she got on drugs, and I had three little grandchildren I had to take care of, so I kind of just quit my nursing career to take care of those grandchildren and get them settled. I was about ready to retire anyway; my husband had retired. MF: So it was time. AS: It was time. MF: That’s good. How do you think your training served you, from your St. Benedict’s days, through the rest of your career? AS: Because of our training, we were very good nurses. It was very satisfying to me, to be able to give compassionate care to those who were so ill, and be able to help relieve their pain and help them recover. I did a lot of home care nursing with families who had taken their loved ones home, because that is where they wanted to die. They needed a lot of physical and emotional support, and we gave that to them. I sort of stumbled into a nursing career; I don’t think I had ever even been inside a hospital when I entered nurses’ training, but it proved to be a wonderful 11 and satisfying career. I always only worked part time. I usually worked two days a week, sometimes three days a week. Once in a while full time, but mostly I worked just part time. So I was mostly a mom, but I still had a career. And it worked out very nicely for me. MF: That’s good. So how do you think nursing has changed over the years? AS: Well, I don’t think they’re as compassionate as we used to be. I don’t think they’re as personable as we were as nurses. DA: They’re not professional any more. Everybody’s first-name basis, scrub clothes. AS: I’m very glad that I have a knowledge of nursing, because when my husband was in the hospital, I basically took care of him. They didn’t get him up and walking, they didn’t do any of the things that I knew he should be having done to him. You know, people who don’t have a career or a background in nursing, I don’t know how they get through just family surgeries and illnesses. It’s been very helpful to my family to have the knowledge that I have. In my ward, they still come to me and ask me health-related questions. MP: I think technology has taken away the persona of nursing itself, of being a personable nurse. You know, we went through training learning that kind of nursing. I’m not putting them down – I think there’s a lot of nurses that come through it that are still dedicated. But it seems they are more in there to just be in there. AS: They rely on their telemetry and their automatic vital signs, and you know, it’s not the kind of nursing we did. 12 MP: Their notes on the computer – it takes away from that personal contact that you spend time with the patient. Nurses today don’t have the opportunity to stay with the patient. MF: True, that’s true. MP: The aides are the ones that are with the patient. AS: I loved the one on one care you could give a patient; like giving a bed bath, because you have time to observe the patient; how they moved, how they talked. You’d pick up on signs of infection, family situations that would affect them after discharge. MP: You’d communicate with them. AS: Yes. Observe how they move, you know – it was a learning experience – that’s why you gave bed baths, so you could have that time with them to observe them. MF: That’s good. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. DA: One closing remark, as far as these three ladies are concerned. Do not ever go take state boards with three newlyweds.