Layout and Care within the Hospital

Heroes Remember

Layout and Care within the Hospital

Transcript

The hospital was composed of temporary huts with 20 cots in each side, 20 boys and joined by a covered walkway and there was a pharmacy and at the other end there were the operating rooms, about three, and of course they were going 24 hours a day, 24, and we’d get those boys in and all you could do was... you know muddy khaki, bloody, make them comfortable and on each boy was a card saying the type of wound, had he had penicillin, had he had surgery and had he had morphine - there were about four things that they had so the minute when they were triaged then they knew what happened so we’d get them in the ward and either prepare them for surgery or, of course, look after them once they came back. And, of course, we’d have maybe, it’s hard to think of it now in these hospitals, 7 or 8 post-op and the sides and they had to have penicillin every three hours and penicillin had just been discovered of February that year, I believe Churchill had had one of the first doses so at first it was scarce so the doctors had to first say who, very very bad wounded boys would get it and then we got enough and everybody had it every three hours so that kept you busy because you would run out of needles or you’re too busy to do anything else, you’d wipe off the needle give it to the next boy.

Description

Mrs. Flynn describes the setup of the hospital and how the wounded boys were cared for by the doctors and nursing sisters.

Pauline Flynn

Mrs. Pauline Flynn was born in Port Elgin, Ontario January 23, 1920. Her father was a Canadian Railway Station Master and her mother a school teacher. There are three brothers in her family, she being the only girl. She attended nursing school and in 1938 graduated from Toronto Western. Mrs. Flynn, always having a sense of adventure, decided to join the military. She served as a nursing sister and held the rank of officer. To this day, she holds great pride for the history of the nursing sisters and pride of the blue uniform. After discharge from the service, Mrs. Flynn married and continued to nurse while raising a family in Ottawa. Today, she spends a great deal of her free time volunteering and is very proud of her military connections with other local nursing sisters who served during the same period of time. She is a great spokesperson for the Nursing Sister Association and represents her comrades during many of the Remembrance Day Events in our capital city, Ottawa, Canada.

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