A nurse named Florence: Her own story

Aunt Florence, who turns 82 today (Jan. 20, 2008) wrote this for the family memory book "An Even Dozen":

By FLORENCE SPRICK BYE

In June 1944, as U.S. troops, my brother Edward Sprick among them, landed on the beach at Normandy, France, I began my nursing education at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. My mother had signed permission for me to join the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, so I had enrolled in the Northwestern Hospital School of Nursing.

115 student nurses from five Minneapolis hospitals were on campus to study basic sciences for three months. 1,500 naval cadets were also there. They were very strict at St. Olaf; we only saw the naval cadets from a distance as they marched. We were all in the dorm by 7 p.m., and lights went out at 10 p.m.

In September, my group affiliated at Minneapolis General Hospital for contagious diseases, caring for patients with everything from diphtheria to polio. We also spent three months at Rochester State Hospital studying psychiatry, a new field at the end of World War II.

We used the Sister Kenny hot-pack technique for polio patients. Many were also placed in iron lungs, the first respirators.

While I was a student, one of the first partial-lung resections was done -- unsuccessfully. During pediatric training, a child died after the doctor removed a tracheotomy tube. We used to hang wet sheets in the wards to increase the humidity. Penicillin was in early use, and we gave babies and children injections every three hours. Cancer patients were considered terminal. In obstetrics, we "scrubbed in" for 13 deliveries; that wasn't a very busy department during World War II.

Our public health nurse, a Japanese-American, had to leave for a detention camp in California. Also, the Marigold Ballroom was out of bounds for student nurses because Japanese-American G.I.s hung out there.

We used to walk downtown to the YWCA and bowl against the other hospital nursing students. We had to set our own pins.

Even when we were on night duty, we had to get up and go to classes during the daytime. We had very little time off for three years, including the summers.

In December 1946, my mother gave permission to the hospital board for me to marry Bill Rafferty, my G.I. sweetheart. During my final six months as a student, I had to room by myself and work in a ward called "Coffin Corners" because the school frowned on marriage.

I graduated in June 1947 and my husband was discharged from the service. We had met in Fort Dodge, Iowa, where I had worked in pediatrics and then obstetrics at Lutheran Hospital. I saw my first severely burned child there, and a 14-year-old girl who died as the result of an illegal abortion.

For the next six years, I traveled with my husband as he did steel construction work. I worked in many small hospitals, using my obstetrics experience. I was licensed in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas. In other states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and North Dakota, I received a six-month work permit.

We moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where I worked as obstetric supervisor in the labor and delivery room at Schotz Memorial Hospital. Our daughter, Patricia Louise, was born on Oct. 1, 1952. After three months, we moved to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, separating in Corpus Christi in January 1953 and divorcing soon after.

Patty and I then lived with my mother in Lake City, Minn., where I worked at the hospital from February 1953 to August 1955. It had only 25 beds. The halls were always full of beds for patients. I remember using chloroform to anesthetize obstetric patients.

In August 1955, I married Chuck Schmidt and moved to Red Wing, Minn., where I worked at St. John's Hospital as a 3-11 p.m. shift supervisor. I then took a job at Interstate Clinic because I wanted day hours to care for our son, Karl, who was born in March 1958. In those days, nurses were replaced when they had babies, so I moved to Red Wing City Hospital, where I worked as assistant administrator for nine years, until the hospital closed in 1967. JoAnne was born in 1960. I used my four-week vacation to convalesce after her birth, then went right back to work.

During my time at City Hospital, we performed a rare but successful aortic aneurysm surgery at the same time the Duke of Windsor had the same surgery. But our patient wasn't famous, so we weren't written up in the newspaper.

In 1962, Karl, our happy, lively 4-year-old son, was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with pseudohypertropic muscular dystrophy. By age 12, he was wheelchair-bound. We all worked together on his care. I took him to Dr. V. Richard Zarling at Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis twice a year for evaluation and experimental medications. We set up a vigorous daily exercise program, and he took lots of vitamins.

Karl graduated from Red Wing High School and worked at Interstate Rehabilitation Center in Red Wing. He received an electric wheelchair from Red Wing Vocational School. I helped push for rights for the disabled for years before a law was passed requiring ramps and parking spaces to make life a little easier for the disabled.

In 1969, after Red Wing City Hospital closed, I went to work at the new Lake City Hospital. I worked in obstetrics and medical surgery for 11 and a half years. While there, I took a coronary nursing course. We began monitoring cardiac patients and started intravenous treatments, as well as monitoring fetal hearts. Hospitals now had their own pharmacists.

After Chuck Schmidt and I divorced in 1978, I moved to Rochester, Minn., and worked in a surgical ward at Methodist Hospital. After six months, my hours were cut, so I returned to Red Wing and in March 1979 became the 3-11 p.m. charge nurse in labor, delivery and postpartum care at St. John's.

By 1982, I needed a change, so I moved to Minneapolis and worked the 3-11 p.m. shift in obstetrics at Midway Hospital. I was laid off after being exposed to chicken pox, which I had never had. [It's very dangerous in adults.]

Among nurses' duties were rupturing membranes, performing episiotimies and monitoring fetuses. I felt this was too much liability after a nurse was targeted by a lawsuit. The liability insurance for obstetrical nurses increased substantially after that.

While I was again seeking employment, Karl, 24, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. It was then I decided to work with the disabled. On March 7, 1983, I began work in the prolonged respiratory care unit of at Bethesda Lutheran Hospital. I moved to Ford Parkway in St. Paul, but soon moved to Roseville because the airplane noise was too much for me.

I worked days-evenings, only four days a week, but the work was physically and emotionally hard. The patients were long-term ventilator patients, many of whom lived on the ward. We were like their family.

In 1984, nurses in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area went on strike for a month. In 1988, five hospitals merged to form HealthEast. Our unit continued as a long-term care unit.

My last day of working full-time was Sunday, May 15, 1988. At the end of my shift after I did my report, I put on my roller skates and skated up and down the halls, into all my patients' rooms. They all just loved it! But it's hard to laugh when you're on a respirator.

I worked on an intermittent basis in June and July. Then, Virgil "Bud" Bye, a man whom I had spurned in 1944 so I could go to nursing school, looked me up. After being apart for 40 years, we started going together again, and we were married on Aug. 6, 1988.

I retired from nursing for good on Jan. 20, 1991, my 65th birthday.

Postscript: The affable Bud, to whom Florence enjoyed a happy marriage, has since passed away. Florence now lives in Maplewood in the summer and in San Diego, Calif., in the winter with her companion Harry Greason, a World War II vet. That's them below at the 2007 Veterans Day Parade in downtown San Diego.