In nursing, possibly more than any other field, you tend to work with people from quite a variety of national and ethnic backgrounds. This was definitely the case on our ward. We had South Asian nurses, we had Chinese nurses and orderlies, we had Filipino nurses and orderlies: we had everybody.
Interestingly, on some wards we would see the various ethnic groups banding together into tiny cliques. This wasn't the case on our ward, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, we had a nurse who actually was Chinese, but, apparently, looked Filipino. The Chinese nurses wouldn't talk to her because she looked Filipino. The Filipino nurses wouldn't talk to her because she *was* Chinese. So, she had to hang out with us white folks.
The same was true of a South Asian nurse, who spoke English well, but with the thickest Scottish brogue you've ever heard. She was from a wealthy, high caste, family. Because they were wealthy, she had had a nanny, and the nanny had been from Scotland. Hence the Scottish brogue. She was high caste, so she wouldn't talk with any of the other South Asian nurses, who were lower caste. Again, she had to hang out with us white folks.
There was a Spanish orderly. (I suppose I should mention that there was also a Spanish nurse. When she found out that I was a college student, she insisted on calling me professore.) Anyway, the Spanish orderly (and he was from Spain, rather than just being Hispanic) was named Virgilio. Everyone else just called him Virgil, but I, knowing the various corruptions on my name that people address me by, tried to pronounce it correctly. Every time I did, he started speaking to me in Spanish, until he remembered who he was talking to and switched back to English.
I managed to get some specialized training, by working on specialty wards, at Shaughnessy. First of all, I did some time in isolation. I learned about gloving, and gowning, and cleaning wounds, and sometimes dressing wounds, although we didn't have terribly difficult cases. We didn't have any rare diseases, and in those dim and distant days we didn't have much worry about antibiotic resistant bacteria.
We did have some guys from the intermediate and extended care awards, who had developed bed sores, aka pressure sores or decubitus ulcers, from not moving frequently enough when lying in bed for long periods of time. If those wounds opened, and became infected, they ended up in isolation, and we had to be careful about dressing, keeping them away from other infections, and keeping other patients away from their infections.
One of the guys from one of the extended care awards was a bit of a joker. One day, when I came to get him up, he swung his one and a half legs over the bed, having previously put his prosthetic leg in the bed, and announced to me that he already had one foot in the grave. On another occasion, he told me that he was a veteran of two wars. "Oh," I said, in the full flush of my youthful ignorance, "the First World War and the Second World War?" No, he said, the Boer War and the First World War.
On isolation, we did, one time, get a rather non-standard patient: a young lady who had been riding with her boyfriend in an open sports car, and, when he had an accident, had been thrown from the car and suffered quite extensive brush burns, which meant she had large areas of open wounds, and was therefore on isolation to prevent them from collecting any infections. One day as I was walking down the hallway, I heard a loud yell of "No, no, no, no, no!" I realized that it was coming from her room, from which, shortly thereafter, the head nurse exited with a huge grin on her face. As we passed, she told me that she had been examining the young lady's wounds, and reassuring her that they had healed without much in the way of scarring. The young lady was quite relieved, since she had been concerned about having scars on her back side which might not look terribly well in a bikini. The head nurse had immediately replied that, no, she had seldom seen such a lovely rear end. But, being no particular expert in that field, she wondered if the young lady wanted to get an expert opinion, and offered to call the young orderly with the beard. (That would be me.) Hence the scream horrified scream of "No, no, no, no!"
Shaughnessy also got the spinal cord unit, the first time that the province had one. I worked a number of shifts on that ward, on a float basis, when they were short staffed. I had some interesting experiences, particularly shaving male patients who were having surgery in particular areas. I also picked up a lot of information about how to properly care for, and transport, spinal cord patients, which stood me in good stead when, subsequently, I had to rescue a camper, who had actually broken his neck diving into a shallow area of the lake, and transport him from the beach, to the hospital. At the hospital, the doctor on duty at the emergency ward, because the patient showed no loss of sensation or mobility, pooh-poohed my suggestion that he had, in fact, broken his neck--until they took an x-ray which proved that, yes, his neck was, in fact, broken.
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