Experiences With Patients

Heroes Remember

Experiences With Patients

Transcript

I had a great report with the, with the soldiers there, the patients who were nuts, on the whole sick, they had and there was one I remember in particular, which was very sad, he'd been riding on a motorcycle and he could see that this car coming, was a car, and the other chap thought it was a motorcycle, cause he only had one little light on, cause back out in England. And, the man saw that they were going to hit it, and they did and he use to have nightmares, awful nightmares. He was um, isn't that awful, I can still, he, he was red headed and he use to throw himself despite the fact that he was impassive from the waist down and had side boards on and he'd through himself out of the bed. Interviewer: Trying to get away from the car? It was interesting, but on the whole, there was seven or eight of them on crutches, ya know, and they were a pretty, pretty good bunch. Then I started working in the operating room and I worked in the operating room a great deal and I worked, I was working in the operating room at the time of Dieppe and we got a lot of casualties back from Dieppe and we worked hard in Bramshot although it was more like civilian life, in many ways. But we only had one weekend, one long weekend a month, is all we had off and we worked from seven in the morning til seven at night. No, I think it was eight, eight in the morning til eight at night and then we'd have either two hours off during the day time or we'd get off at 4:30 in the afternoon, one or the other. Interviewer: And I imagine you were so tired that you. We weren't, we were young and weren't so tired, and then every weekend we'd go away somewhere, up to London, and if, London wasn't off bounds. And we had a garden, and it upset the English, cause the English said, look at those Canadians gardening on that side of the road, why can't we garden on our side of the road. Interviewer: They weren't aloud to Garden It was common land and in England common land is pretty sacred. But anyway, we had a garden, we had gardens, the officers had a garden and the men had a garden, and the nursing sisters had a garden. I was there at the turn of Dieppe and then I went to Africa and Italy and then I came back and I was at Bramshot again, at the time of D Day. And I really can't keep the two of them straight in my mind you know there was just times when you worked hard. One thing I do remember, this is a pretty tragic thing, there was a chap had a gun shot wound in his one leg and only a little wound in the other leg and there had been a bandage put on this little wound, unfortunately the foot had swollen, swollen up so the bandage acted as a tourniquet and his leg was gangrenous so he had to have both feet off. And had it not been for that little, I can still see that little two inch bandage, it was constricting his circulation and It wasn't really anyone's fault but it was just a very sad thing to have happened.

Description

Stationed at a Canadian military hospital in Bramshot, England, Ms. Rogers recalls various experiences with patients while at that location.

Ruby Rogers

Ruby Rogers was born in 1917 in Cherrywood, Ontario. At a young age, she moved to Agincourt. When she was 19 years old, she went into training to be a nurse at Toronto General Hospital. Shortly after the Second World War began, she enlisted with the Canadian Army and was sent to England.

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