Scarlet Fever Outbreak

I think our general nurse’s training prepared us for almost anything that could happen. Now I was astounded in the first few weeks I was in Regina. There was a very bad outbreak of scarlet fever and it got so bad there wasn’t room in the hospital. There were, these were, the hospital was mostly huts that you see, imagine these old huts still left around, but it was too small and so they opened up, put up double deck bunks in the armoury, on the floor of the armoury, and this is were we looked after these people with scarlet fever. Well, I come from a big hospital that had an isolation hospital and we had gowns and soap and water at every door and they were separated. Well, here were all these young guys out on this great big floor in these double decker beds. We had no, we didn’t have any gowns. We didn’t have anything like that. I thought, how, this is awful, you know, to treat people like this, but you know it wasn’t really. They were healthy, they were clean, they got better so fast, which is incredible. You adapt to the situation. That’s for sure and that was one of my early adaptations to looking after a lot of people in a situation that you wouldn’t see in a civilian hospital.