Nurses on the Frontline

BELL RINGS

BELL CONTINUES RINGING

I remember first of all the red phone rang,

and that was it, disaster phone.

If that rang you knew that something was going to happen.

The awfulness of it.

And you got so angry inside yourself.

What is this about?

And the worst was, of course, if they had limbs,

traumatic amputative limbs,

and it just was dirt and mess and horrible smell.

It's given me great knowledge for starters,

and it gave me a confidence, too, like, and...and a pride.

I had great pride in it. I don't regret one day of it.

You were expected to just get on with so many jobs,

and many of those jobs were not things that you were prepared for.

You were nursing somebody who had committed the atrocity

alongside somebody who'd been injured in the atrocity

and sometimes even on the same ward, and you...you give them equal care.

SIREN

We could hear the ambulances coming, all the sirens going.

And the more sirens you could hear

the more you knew it was really going to be bad.

I was never afraid, never afraid.

The only time I was afraid was when I...was in crossfire.

HE CHUCKLES WRYLY AND TUTS

Oh, yes, there are patients you remember.

Some patients you remember and...and some of them, er,

never go out of your mind.

I seemed to go through an awful lot of aprons.

I still have one.

I take it out and look at it sometimes.

I see the stains - blood, tears, iodine.

I put it away again.

I don't like going back there.

Some stains just never come out.

I left school on the Friday.

And then started nursing about two weeks afterwards.

I just always wanted to be a nurse.

I used to look after my dolls,

in cardboard boxes round the bedroom.

And take care of them, put them to bed every night,

and they always got better of course.

I was a schoolgirl, completing my A-levels in June,

and I went to nursing in August.

The lady who interviewed me said to me, "Why do you want to do nursing?"

I said, "I don't want to do nursing!"

And she said, "That's the first honest answer we've had all day.

"You'll do well."

I was born into a very evangelical family, and it was very restricting

when I was a teenager, and I thought, what can I do to get away from here?

I decided, I'll do nursing.

And I was only swapping one strict regime for another.

When I started nursing, we had come...

A number of us in our class had come from the same background as myself,

a rural community, convent grammar schools,

and we came to Belfast and realised we were actually on the warfront!

SHOUTING, GUNSHOT

I'd never actually been to Belfast before

until I arrived on the Mater Hospital. So, it...

We were very, very unprepared for what we actually met.

I think I even wrote a wee...just a wee four-line poem, you know,

said, "I came from the country to Belfast

"A nurse I wanted to be

"I thought it would just be appendices

"Raw bullet wounds are all that I see."

I was 18 years of age and we...were not prepared.

We were totally oblivious, I think, to what we were going into.

And when we got to the hospital and got settled in the nurses' homes,

we were put right in the middle of it.

NEWSREEL: The Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.

A teaching hospital with a war right on its doorstep.

Medical research was never nearer to a battlefront.

We were quite restricted.

I mean, they expected us to be in at ten o'clock at night,

and I think we got one late pass a week.

And I guess that was how, you know,

they managed 40-odd 17-to-18-year-olds.

The first week we were there, that Sunday evening,

I was wakened by gunfire outside the window in the room

that I slept in in the nurses' home.

GUNFIRE

I certainly recall, as well,

being told that we should always keep two walls between ourselves

and the gunmen, or the bullets, or whatever was going on outside.

My third week on the wards was the bombing of the Red Lion,

and sheer panic then when I heard that there had been a bomb

and that we were going to be getting casualties in,

because all I really knew was how to make a bed.

In the anaesthetic room was a student nurse,

and she would have only been out of school about 18 months.

When the patient was anaesthetised and we removed his jeans,

his lower leg was just held on at that stage by skin and sinew

and shredded muscle.

I take a look out of the corner of my eye to see how the nurse

is taking this, because we are used to these horrors,

er, but she wasn't.

Er, she was only a slip of a girl.

She never flinched.

And...

I never saw one who did flinch.

You were expected to just get on with so many jobs,

and many of those jobs were not things that you were prepared for.

You were only 18, 19 years of age,

and even being left with somebody who's been blown up

and is in bits and pieces and, you know, who's...who's dying,

er, you weren't prepared for that.

Nobody thought how to prepare you for those sort of things.

It wasn't all doom and gloom - we had laughs, as well.

You know, there were funny things happened.

It was from one extreme to the other,

from the bad things to the funny things, you know.

We would have chatted and laughed

and thought it was quite a fun thing lying on the corridor floors,

I guess, and one of the girls in our group, Anne - she was called Anne -

Anne had lovely long dark hair,

and she always put rollers in her hair at night, and the rollers

were kept in place by a pair of knickers,

which was the hairnet of the day,

and Anne would say, "Now, if I get shot,

"please take the knickers off my head before the ambulance comes!"

Dr Grey was the senior consultant in intensive care

and an amazing character. We'd admitted a well-known paramilitary.

This person had been stabbed in the chest

and he had this enormous tattoo of King Billy on his chest.

An Indian registrar had repaired his diaphragm and his lungs

and whatever else needed repaired and sewn him up beautifully,

but Bill Grey went over to look at him

and came back and he says to me,

"Well, Eleanor, Kumar's done a good job on King Billy,

"he's got those sutures really well done right up his chest."

And right enough it was beautifully sewn,

because he had the pattern with the tattoo.

So at times, you know, you had to laugh at things like that

when they happened, because there were so many sad stories,

so many distressing things happened, that there had to be

the fun aspect of it, as well, and Dr Grey brought that perspective.

First of all it was the smell.

The dirt and the remains of the clothing.

But then you sorted through the possessions,

the ordinary things that people carry.

Wallets and photographs of their children in their wallets and

their house keys and...

just everything that you would have in your pockets.

The experienced staff in casualty, the experienced nurses

and doctors, et cetera, were required for those who would live,

and so those of us with less knowledge and skill

were with those...for whom life was not going to continue -

well, for very much longer, anyway.

And so what you had to be was just BE.

Just BE with another human being.

I was on night duty and the sister in the recovery room just said,

"Will you stay with this man?"

He was a young black soldier,

blown up in a bomb very close to the hospital,

but this man was really big, strong-looking, erm...

obviously handsome-looking.

Wasn't really had a lot of injuries on the outside, but...

inside he was obviously very badly injured and wasn't going to live.

Staying with him, talking to him, just washing him,

speaking into his ear, just making him feel that he's not alone

until he died, but it was something I'll never, ever forget.

I was asked to scrub up and to prepare a trolley for amputation

of a leg, or for both legs, and I just still remember somebody just

pushing me back and I realised that the person had died on the table,

and there was absolute silence in the theatre

and all I can remember are sobs from...

A colleague outside was a member of the security forces

and there was a guard outside, and just the sobs.

Erm, obviously had been told that his colleague had died on the table.

I don't even remember anything after that again,

but I've always remembered my first scrub.

A was always full of relatives screaming

and looking for their injured and...

But relatives found out where the lifts to theatre were

and some arrived up as an orderly brought a patient.

They banged on the window.

They had discovered by then that clothes had to be kept,

so they wanted the clothes, but we couldn't do anything about that.

We had been instructed... If the patient was a suspect

we were instructed specially what to do with these clothes.

And so we couldn't... We had to keep them.

For forensic examination.

All right now.

I always remember a young soldier coming in, who had lost a leg,

was coming up from intensive care and I was a student in theatres.

And he was coming in, and it struck me that

he and I were the same age - exactly, by the day.

Er, and he was coming in, erm, unconscious,

er, but really coming in to ascertain whether

he would be able to retain his other limb, and sadly he wasn't.

And as a student I was given that leg

to carry up to the door for the porter to lift,

and I always remember that, because it was the sheer weight of it.

There was I as a 19-year-old,

you know, celebrating... life and all that entailed,

and there he was as a 19-year-old with...

minus two limbs and also with quite horrific shrapnel wounds.

There was a sense that when you were confronted,

particularly by people your own age,

and particularly in relation to the impact that that was having -

you could see that that would have on them - I mean,

that was profoundly difficult.

I think we supported each other.

We didn't have the mechanisms, the support mechanisms in terms of

professional counselling or sitting down at debrief sessions.

Erm, we didn't have systems of reporting serious adverse

incidents, anything like that,

so that's a whole industry now which wasn't there then.

There was no point in waiting on the morning or waiting at night

to tell some of your colleagues about the terrible day you had,

cos they were probably going to have an equally terrible day.

And, you know, it would be lost the middle of the telling,

so you didn't bother.

There really wasn't a formal mechanism, but I have to say,

looking back, tremendous camaraderie.

When you come off shift,

you laughed and cried and talked and had a drink or went out,

but you did it together.

So your listening ear and your point of refuge, really,

were those around you.

We made silly jokes, you know. That kept us going.

But I think we were so busy we hadn't much time to think.

You usually kept going, until you went home

but one of the worst I've ever seen,

I didn't get home till about two in the morning,

and my mother, who was alive at that time, had waited up.

But she didn't say "How are you?" or anything,

she said, "The dog has died."

And that was that - I couldn't hold back...

any longer.

By and large, people were left to get on.

They were left when they were discharged from hospital

with minimal support, and you see now people who still carry

the very heavy burden of being bereaved or injured

in the '70s, '80s, '90s,

and that that hasn't left them.

The lack of counselling and support is astounding.

But yet, with the reality of when one incident quickly followed another,

people really didn't have time to consider and

to think about the impact, because there was that adrenaline rush.

All right?

You keep your head up there.

The psychological aspects, and psychiatric medicine of course,

is always neglected, and one patient I looked after in the 1970s,

er, later went public and praised his physical care

but he criticised his psychological care,

and, giving us his perspective, he had said

we had looked after his physical injuries but we had not looked after

his psychology, and that gave him 40 years of trouble,

including marriage breakdown, so, no,

there wasn't great psychological support for the nurses -

they made their own psychological support - but at times there

wasn't great psychological support for the patients either.

I was blown up in the Glen Inn in Glengormley in August 28, 1976,

so I'm now twice as long on this planet without my legs

as...I had been with them.

I think your first intervention

was to advise me in and around medication,

and, you know, "You don't have to swallow all these pills."

I must have had a handful. Did I really say that?!

Well, no, that's not verbatim! That's not verbatim!

But it was to advise me, you know, "If you don't need the Valium,

"if you don't need the distalgesic, if you don't need this,

"then take it when you actually are in need of it."

The questions that I was seeking answers to

you determined were going to be answered in this book The Survivors

written by, er, Telegraph journalist Alf McCreary. Yeah.

And that was risky, I suppose, giving that to me.

It was more instinct than anything else,

that I thought this book might be useful to you.

You reached out with both arms, seized the book... I remember.

..said, "Survivors! I'm a survivor."

Yeah. I think that is...

You know, that language is much better than "victim".

I felt blessed in some way to at least be alive,

although without legs,

and when you're 18 year old you are looking ahead,

but, as I say, the answers weren't forthcoming,

and it was this lack of counselling,

or lack of trying to address the emotional need

and psychological need, and pure frustration at not knowing

what...lay ahead and what challenges lay ahead,

so a survivor likes to know that

and in some way prepare for the journey ahead. Yeah.

And that... This really did give me the answers.

I'm sometimes asked, from the Troubles period, erm,

who do I admire most?

So, actually, the people I admire

most from the Troubles period are the patients.

I think it's a case of mutual respect.

Because without you guys, we would not have been here.

We were also learning through this process, this was very unique, and

some of the horrendous injuries that you were presented with were unique.

Our surgeons were learning,

but, you know, the surgeons did the work and came on the rounds.

The daily contact was with the nurses.

And it was they that fortified us in our journey.

We treated everybody the same, regardless of their background,

regardless of what they had done,

and at times we had both the perpetrator of the deed

and the victim, and the issue very often was keeping relatives apart

and keeping the peace between relatives.

That quite often was the difficult aspect of all of this.

We had one occasion where we had one person who'd been shot

and another person who'd shot them.

Suddenly this woman appeared with these huge bunches of flowers -

those were the days that we had flowers on the ward.

I said, "Where are you going with all the flowers?"

She said, "I don't know. He's asked me to bring these flowers."

And what he did was he put all the flowers at the bottom of his bed,

on the bed table, so he couldn't see the man opposite.

It was very interesting and sometimes quite tense

but sometimes very, very, very funny.

Erm, in a six-bedded bay with perhaps two people

from the opposite sides, and they were kind of stuck

to their beds for several weeks till they'd recovered.

And over the course of a few weeks, er,

the craic was mighty between these youngsters.

Not all was, erm, repeatable... SHE LAUGHS

Quite irreverent,

but, erm, they did have a bit of a bond by the time they left.

There's no opt-out clause in nursing, so no matter who comes

swinging through those doors, they're your patient.

And you do your best for that person.

But I'm not sure it was ALL left outside the door.

Patients were never left wanting, you know,

but there was the odd occasion

when somebody might have made a remark to you

and it was a very pointed remark that you couldn't help think

that they didn't think the same way as you did.

But at the end of the day you would have known that, you know?

Religion plays such an important role here,

you'd be stupid if you didn't.

I'll always remember looking after a young man who had been

involved in an incident, and he was blinded,

and he was being specialled.

And I was the nurse looking after him.

And, er, he was very frightened.

And I read the paper to him, during the night.

And I couldn't read the first four pages,

because it was about what he had done.

And one of the nurses said to me afterwards,

"I couldn't have done that, I would have refused."

And I thought afterwards, was it right that she would refuse,

if she couldn't give him the best care, or was it wrong?

Because we were under an oath, really, to look after everybody,

regardless of who or what they were or what they had been involved in.

That was a difficult road to travel sometimes.

When in actual fact the person who you were caring for

was the person who you knew was responsible

for death and destruction.

But you knew you couldn't linger on that.

NEWSREEL: Armed security forces occupy the wards of the hospital

when their wounded colleagues are under treatment -

a constant reminder of the Troubles as the day-to-day healing goes on.

The hospital I worked in,

at the front gate you had the, er, republican paramilitaries,

and at the back gate you had the loyalist paramilitaries.

And then sandwiched in between, er, was a British Army base,

actually within the hospital perimeter.

NEWSREEL: No-one can know what the next ambulance will bring

to a hospital in the front line

or whether guerrilla warfare will again

invade the grounds of the Royal, but the Army makes its presence felt.

The war started the minute you went outside the hospital door,

so the war was only the width of a brick away.

Er, it was on the other side of the front door,

and the front door was always open.

Without thinking too hard,

I can think of, er, six people who were shot dead

within the hospital precincts,

er, four by the IRA and two by the Army.

The Royal was very much seen as a legitimate target

and gunmen got onto the roof of the nurses' home, the hospital.

The school of dentistry was one that they quite often seemed to get onto.

And they used, erm...

you know, the roofs of the buildings to shoot at the Army

and police who were in and around the hospital at that time.

So I guess, for us, it was pretty normal from the beginning.

In one way it was normal enough on your ward to go

in and out through the bulletproof doors that were

guarded by police 24 hours a day, and in another, usually at night-time,

maybe in the wee small hours, you'd think, this is a bit odd, you know.

If anybody did come in here, you'd be in the middle of it,

because that's what you were there to do.

I don't think it was ever such a dreadful thought

that I thought, "I'm not going to go into work,"

but every now and again it did strike you.

The Mater itself was in the front line

because we were located where we were

and we were "a Catholic hospital",

and there were a number of staff targeted at various times.

We had a consultant's son who was killed and we had...

another consultant who was shot at

while he was leading his children to school.

His son was killed and another son was injured

and he himself was injured.

We had various members of staff who had been attacked at various stages,

so we did feel very vulnerable where we actually were.

And the violence came to the hospital itself

when, er, Maire Drumm was shot.

NEWSREEL: Mrs Drumm was standing talking to fellow patients

in the ward when the gunmen arrived.

She had been recuperating

after receiving treatment for blindness in one eye,

a condition which led to her giving up

the vice presidency of Provisional Sinn Fein a few weeks ago.

The killers bluffed their way

into the hospital by pretending to be medical staff.

When they got to the ward entrance, they opened fire on her 12 times.

We went up to a ward where the ward had been sprayed with bullets.

Maire Drumm was in a bed bleeding to death

and two other patients had been injured.

And the police arrived, the Army arrived.

The consultants, who all lived quite locally, all arrived

into the hospital and we knew that Maire Drumm at that stage was dead.

We had tried to resuscitate her and my uniform got covered in blood,

but the fear in the hospital that night was palpable.

I actually probably took two to three days to actually

recover from this trauma that...

And yet, as nurses, we were never given counselling,

we were never debriefed, you just went on to the next patient,

you went on with what you had to do.

I think sometimes people expect that when you work in a hospital

that's where everything is going to be seen

and that's the seat of the action.

I discovered when I did my community placement in north Belfast

that that, in fact, wasn't the case.

I was never afraid, never afraid, because people were all very

kind to each other and very helpful in those days.

And...no, I never was afraid.

The only time I was afraid

was when I was in crossfire,

as that happened, or maybe near an explosion.

Or driving along and being in a traffic jam

or sitting at the traffic lights and looking at somebody in a car

or a van or whatever, wondering if there's a bomb in there.

We were in a little lady's house,

she needed her leg dressings renewed,

and we were in with this lady and I was on my knees,

doing the dressings,

and the district nurse was supervising me, and then

all of a sudden there was this nightmare noise out the back,

and the scullery door, as it was called then, burst open

and in came a...hooded gunman.

And he raced past us, through the living room and out into the hall,

making his escape to...through the front door into the street.

So for a nanosecond absolutely nothing happened.

I looked at the district nurse

and she looked at me and we both looked at the wee lady

and she sort of went, "Sure, what can you do, love?"

Bombay Street was a very distressing experience.

It did look like a scene from Gone With The Wind.

Anyone being burnt out of their home is a very distressing thing,

and certainly distressing for the people involved, and I think

it's quite, quite dreadful that that should happen to anyone.

And there they were moving and all their furniture

and their belongings on... on trucks and...top of cars

and they were moving to a hall or a school, just to...to be safe.

NEWSREEL: All day Friday and Saturday

the evacuees from the Catholic ghettos on the Falls and Ardoyne

went north to Andersonstown.

There, six church halls and schools were mobilised for the emergency.

They had centres, they had night shelters.

This was after Bombay Street

and people were scared to stay in their homes,

and they'd provided night shelters, and I was asked to supervise there.

That was a very frightening night,

because I'd taken no first aid with me and then I discovered

I had two very pregnant women with me and no kits of any kind.

I was very alarmed when I looked at the pregnant lady,

particularly the one nearly at term.

She and I had only a pair of nail scissors and my handbag

and no equipment whatsoever...

no first-aid equipment whatsoever.

So I...

There was a lot of men outside and I went out to ask about a telephone.

Er, they were erecting a barricade of burnt-out vehicles

and any debris that there was.

And I said, "Do you know where the nearest telephone is?"

They said, "No idea."

And then I said,

"And how would I get an ambulance in the middle of the night

"if I needed to get somebody to one of the Royal Group of Hospitals?"

And he said, "No vehicle will come up this way tonight.

"We're going to ensure... This is for their security reasons."

And he said, "Just do the best you can."

Yes, with my nail scissors and my handbag, it was a bit...

It was a tall order.

I was on a visit to the Divis Tower, and I had to visit a patient,

probably on the eighth or tenth floor, little old lady,

and she always gave the nurse a packet of ginger snaps.

So I did my treatment in there and got out and got the lift.

And instead of the lift going down, the lift went up.

And there was a soldier, army presence, on the top of the tower.

And all these soldiers got in the lift,

and that was all right, they were pleasant and very, very nice.

And then the lift proceeded down to the very bottom,

and when we got down there, the door wouldn't open -

too many in the lift.

And this little, young soldier, a young lad, lost it.

He turned his rifle up and he attacked

the light at the top of the lift and said, "We're going to be killed.

"This is an ambush, we're all going to be murdered here."

The man in charge of them proceeded to unarm the other fellas.

Then he said, when he had this all done, he said to me,

"Can we have one of your ginger snaps?"

So, yeah, I said, "Certainly."

So we all had ginger snaps as we waited to be rescued.

The worst injuries were those which were the punishment shootings.

And these were young, teenage boys, or boys in their early 20s,

and they would've been shot through

the joints, either through their ankles,

through the knees, through their elbows.

And on some occasions, they would have had six injuries,

both ankles, both knees and both elbows.

What's really, really sad about it, is that the mothers of some

of the young boys went and got themselves a new pair of jeans,

so if they would ever end up in hospital

they wouldn't be disgraced or embarrassed by wearing old jeans.

And I remember one time, I was...

Whenever somebody has been shot,

you have to cut off their trousers, just to check for exit wounds

and this young fellow was 14, and he says,

"Please, don't cut my trousers, my mum only

"bought them me this morning for coming in here,

"please don't cut them."

If you shoot through the calf of the leg,

chances are you won't hit any major vessels

or anything like that, but there were one or two,

or maybe a good few more,

that went through the artery and they may have survived that night,

but you knew they would lose the leg eventually,

because they would have lost nerves in the leg,

might not have been able to walk again and certainly the blood

supply would have been compromised, there's no doubt about that.

On some occasions,

although they'd been shot through their alleged knee,

it was actually through the thigh, and the bone... And the bullet

had then bounced off the bone and ended up in the abdomen somewhere,

resulting in a very serious injury.

SIRENS WAIL

We got a call to say that an ambulance was sent

out for a gunshot wound.

When they arrived at the spot, they were told to wait

and then the shooting happened.

The guy was shot.

GUNSHOT

And he came limping out to the ambulance and got in the ambulance.

The guy says, "Let's have a look," and he says, "You don't have

"to look," he says. He says, "I had bell-bottoms,

"they didn't even touch my leg." They looked.

The bullet went through the side of his trousers.

So the word got back to whoever's doing the punishment beatings and

next thing came out was there had to be a rule that trouser legs

had to be pulled up above the knee before they would do any shots.

So it was terrible.

Kneecappings, they were serious.

And the way it was reported at the time, you would've thought it

was just par for the course.

But it certainly was not,

and certainly not for the young fella that it happened to.

He was probably likely to have a lame leg for the rest

of his life, and he'd be lucky if that's all he had.

Bloody Sunday was the one event that left the biggest

mark on my life and I even can cry when I think about it to this day.

It was the saddest day of my life.

And one I will never forget.

My father's family business was a shop

and it was on Russell Street, where most of Bloody Sunday happened.

His sister was the last to work

the shop, and on Bloody Sunday,

I was very aware of her, so I went to see about her.

I went into the apartment and looked out on to Russell Street,

and I could see bodies lying dead, obviously dead. Totally uncovered.

And the first thing I thought was, the dignity,

the undignified part of it.

Because we were always taught the dignity of the patient is paramount.

SCREAMING

I put my aunt in front of me and I thought,

"They're not going to shoot her, an old woman."

And I crossed the street and covered those bodies with the blankets.

And going back, I kept saying to the soldiers, "Why did you do it?"

"Why did you do it?" But they didn't answer.

Then ambulances came and we put people in,

injured people, into the ambulance.

And I climbed in the front and went to the hospital with the ambulance

and worked all night.

Well, I went down to the casualty now, it was total chaos to me.

But I was passing through, the operating theatre

was on the seventh floor, but there was all these people and there was

patients sitting up against pillars, there was no room for them and that.

I remember all that total chaos.

This has left a huge mark,

and I think it's forgotten a lot of the time.

There was 13 dead, but there was also 14,

if I remember rightly, injured.

You know, those people had to get treated.

I'm not saying it was... It was just one of those things that...

Nobody expected what happened that day to happen,

it was not on anybody's radar.

SIRENS WAIL

Well, the Abercorn was a Saturday, I was on duty,

and we got this message to say that this explosion had occurred

and there were many casualties.

It was just absolute chaos, initially, because there were

so many people came in, there were so many horrendous injuries.

A lot of them were amputations, legs and arms that had just disappeared.

And I remember one woman was lying with the leg of a chair,

a dining room chair, right through her leg.

SIRENS WAIL

We could hear the ambulances coming,

all the sirens going.

And the more sirens you could hear,

the more you knew it was really going to be bad.

When they didn't turn off their klaxons,

you knew it was serious, that the ambulance men were in a state.

I heard this noise and I could hear the screams of the girls

inside the ambulances over the sound of the klaxons.

Then the other thing about the Abercorn was the fact

that they were mostly girls of our own age. We were all young.

The Abercorn was a place...

The first place to be bombed, in my experience,

where I might have been, if I'd been off duty.

Not only did that make it personal, but also the fact that one of our

own staff members, a radiographer from our own department

was killed in it.

And the next time I saw her, I was holding her remains in my hands.

It was a lovely day. A lovely, summer day.

And the baby clinic was very busy, because it was child assessment,

as well, and there was a great buzz in the place.

And then at three o'clock... EXPLOSION

..a bomb went off.

EXPLOSION

And then there was the second and the third...

EXPLOSION

..and the forth and the fifth and six.

And it was just chaos.

EXPLOSION

I went up to the Royal after that.

Casualty was full, there were people crying,

there were people in pain, there were relatives coming up.

There were ambulances still coming in.

Everybody was working flat out and I ended up,

because there were body parts coming in...

..which were just like a pound of meat, frankly,

and they were being put on a trolley.

I just kept looking at this trolley and thinking, "That is somebody.

"That is somebody there."

And I know it probably sounds very, very stupid,

but I just got really defensive about this trolley and I thought,

"I have to mind this trolley." And I covered it.

To me, it was like a naked patient.

And I got very angry.

I stood there and I thought, "How dare anybody do this?

"I wish they could see what they have done."

I just wish they could have seen the distress, the anguish,

the results, which was my trolley.

And for what?

Monday morning, back in the clinic, three days after Bloody Friday.

One mother lost her husband, blown up at the bus station

coming home from work, identified by his hand.

That big coffin for one hand.

One of the things that I taught myself at the beginning

of working in intensive care,

I would never lie to a patient.

I would always tell the truth.

And when someone said to me,

as did one of the patients from the Abercorn, "Why are my legs so sore?

"When will they feel better?"

It was a Sunday afternoon, it was very peaceful and I had gone in

to relieve the nurse for tea

and to look after the patient and I then felt...

She asked me, she wanted the information

and it was my job to tell her that she had lost both legs and an arm.

The first memories I have of the nursing staff was in Ward 17.

I asked this nurse - I think she was a student nurse who was passing -

"Where am I?"

And she said, "You're in the Royal Victoria Hospital.

"You've been in a bomb explosion."

So I think I just went back to sleep again.

I think I was asking that question every day!

The reality started to set in and I didn't realise I'd lost my legs.

You didn't? Cos you still have that sensation. Yes, of course.

My arm was in plaster so I just thought,

"Oh, something has happened to my arm."

I didn't really know the extent of my injuries at all

until the nurses actually told me.

And have you any idea how long that was after the bomb?

I think it could be about a week or so, I'm not really sure.

You know, days just tend to sort of...

Did you remember that Rosaleen had been with you? Yes, I did, uh-huh.

And did you want to see Rosaleen?

Well, when I heard what had happened to her, yes.

A nurse said to me one day, "Your sister's photograph

"is in the paper," and I couldn't understand why! Oh, right!

I said to Mummy when she came in,

"Rosaleen's photograph was in the paper," and she said, "Yes."

I said, "I want to see it."

I couldn't understand why she was in the paper.

And Mummy brought the newspaper article in

and I think she probably thought I wouldn't read the smallprint. Right.

Cos I was still on heavy drugs at that time

and that's how I found out about Rosaleen. Right. And...

Oh, it was devastating.

But even now, I have lost both legs,

but she lost both legs and an arm. Yes.

Although she did eventually walk, it was too much, you know what I mean?

After a while, it was much easier just to be in a wheelchair. Yes.

And do you find that, too? Now that I've aged...

How long ago was that, 1972? Yes.

Yes, I find it a lot easier.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really important to remember that every person counted.

When I talk about a person, I'm back in that room. I can see the person.

I can remember my feelings in that room.

Some incidents were distressing, there's no doubt about that.

I remember one girl, she was shot in the neck

and was paralysed as soon as she came in.

She'd been singing at a gospel meeting in East Belfast

and a gunman came up to the window of the car

and she put the window down and he shot her and I was with her

when she died three weeks later and she had a huge impact on us.

I remember that very well.

One of the first wee boys that would have been brought in shot dead,

you know, a wee fair-haired fella, it was so sad.

Now, he was taken into A and the three lads that brought him in,

one of them was shot later, a few days later.

I remember that young fella's name still and I can still see him.

We got the news there'd been a shooting on the Ormeau Road

and they weren't sure at first how many casualties

and the ambulance came in

and there's a boy there and whenever we took them into the trauma unit,

it was my job to stand and talk to them and hold his hand.

So there was all this madness going on in the room,

everyone was trying so hard to keep that boy alive

and he says to me, "Don't leave me," and...

Sorry, stop.

But I want to say that there was so much hope

and fear in his eyes that day, of that young boy.

He didn't want to die.

There was an incident that had happened and it involved the Army.

I'd never seen anything like it

and they were working very hard to save a young soldier's life.

As I turned round, I saw another trolley

and, on the other trolley, there was a sheet covering the body

and the only thing that I could see were the black boots.

He obviously was proud of his uniform

because his boots were so shiny.

And that was the end of his day. His day ended so differently from mine.

And he had no choice.

One day, two young policemen were going up

to change over in Rosemount Barracks

and they were ambushed at Helen Street

and they were both brought in dead and I always got the worst one,

but the two were dead that day

and I still have their wee pictures in my purse, you know,

two young fellas, 19 and 26. It was sad.

One was married and one was getting married.

In my early days on night duty, a young girl got shot

and her injuries were unsurvivable.

She was petite, blonde, fair skinned.

And she was shot, but she was still pretty.

And she was lying on the trolley, peaceful,

just like she was sleeping.

In the quietness of that resuscitation room,

I have time to sit and look at her

and think, and I thought, "What a waste."

Now, all the deaths were wastes,

but what benefit to anyone accrued from shooting that girl?

A baby had died in the nursery and the ward sister asked me

to go to the morgue with the parents.

I had never witnessed death before and I remember meeting the parents.

I didn't know what to say.

I went with them up the long corridor in the children's hospital,

out to a car, I got into the back seat and there was a white coffin.

I had never seen a coffin. We drove round to the morgue.

I had never been in the morgue.

Then the lid had to go on the coffin.

And the most awful experience, still with me today,

is the screwing down of that lid and that was my worst experience.

It'll never leave me.

A young man had been admitted. He was critically ill.

He had been attempting to put together

some sort of explosive device and it had gone off prematurely.

He was a torso with a head, you know?

His legs had gone, half his face, his ear, his eye, his arm...

And he was a year older than I was.

The lift doors opened at the bottom of the ward and a family came

and I knew this must be his family.

And I tried to explain that he was very badly injured

and his mother came up.

She just emitted this cry...

..and the only time I ever hear that again

is sometimes on wildlife programmes

where you hear this... real cry of pain.

It was shuddering.

And that was her son.

I often think of him. He left us living.

Erm...

I... I think of him.

From an early stage, it's been put into us, you know,

it's not OK to talk about distressing things.

But if we don't talk about them, they're never going to be processed.

But it's OK to feel bad after a traumatic event.

I give the example of bereavement counselling and, you know,

if somebody close to you dies, it's OK to feel bad

and you will feel bad for a period of time and once you get over

the anniversaries and different things, time will be a healer.

But, unfortunately, with post-traumatic stress,

time is not a healer.

26 people have been murdered

by a terrorist car bomb in Omagh, County Tyrone.

It is the worst single atrocity

in 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.

The explosion, at ten past three in the afternoon,

ripped out the heart of a busy town packed with shoppers

and with people simply enjoying

the final day of Omagh's annual carnival...

'Well, I'm from Omagh, so the biggest event I worked with

'was obviously the Omagh bomb in 1998 and the aftermath of that.'

On the day, I ended up here

and I can best describe my role that day as a traffic warden.

It was absolutely pandemonium.

There was casualties coming through this door,

there were concerned relatives and friends coming through that door.

People were congregating around this corridor

cos it's the main thoroughfare to the hospital and we had to try

and keep the passage clear

because there was people being taken on trolleys up to the wards

where they needed further care and treatment and whatnot.

Now that we've moved on a number of years,

there's this view of, like, the Troubles have finished.

Everybody should be OK,

there should be no such thing as distress and whatnot.

'But then when things stop,

'all the things that have happened then just amalgamate

'and cause all sorts of distress, whether it's post-traumatic stress,

'depression and the big thing, alcohol, as well.'

And the big thing for me, I suppose,

is while somebody has witnessed -

and it might be one person or one person's been injured -

it's the ripple effect.

It's how many other people are then affected

by that person's distress, so it's not just one person.

You can multiply that by... I don't know what the number is.

One of the most, I suppose, distressing...

When I say it's distressing,

it's just an image that I had a long time.

It's a wee oldish woman, domestic, with her mop bucket

and she mopped constantly

and it seemed to me that it was never clearing.

But it's one of the images that I have of that day

and when I walk into the County now, there's still times

when I look up the corridor and I just have that image,

but thank God it's not as distressing as what it used to be.

My best days were not the big high days.

My best days were the days you felt, "Right, that made a difference.

"That worked," or, "I was a part of that."

We all felt proud of what we were doing.

Even though we were very young, we felt indispensible in many ways.

That gave a great sense of satisfaction,

that we were involved helping, and ongoing helping,

with those people and many of those people are still alive today

and can testify that those early days of the nursing care

in the hospital was what got them through.

I had great pride in my work.

I had great pride in the services -

particularly in the operating theatres -

and maybe adrenaline, too.

Is that wrong in saying that?

The adrenaline, particularly when you were learning new things.

I probably feel very proud

that I was part of what happened in that hospital.

I feel that we were actually...

Despite the fact there wasn't counselling

and despite the fact it was unsafe in some ways,

that we were in a very, very tight, warm community in that hospital

and I feel that that is missing today in many places

and it was a lovely place to work in.

Oh, it's formed me. It has formed me as a person.

I do not become overwhelmed.

People say, "Oh, you're great,

"you don't allow these things to affect you."

Well, of course they affect you!

Some people who don't know me might think that I'm quite aloof

or quite distant, but they don't know me.

It's because they've seen me with the starch in front of me.

It gives you great satisfaction.

A patient doesn't care what qualifications you have

and, in my day, A, when a patient would say to me,

"Thanks very much, nurse, you were kind to me,"

and that just made my day.

It gave me friendship, first of all, knowledge, confidence

and a sense that we could cope

and that has come even into retirement.

You find yourself not worrying about doing things

because we've been through so much.

What's left to worry about, really?