Typical Day as a Hospital Assistant

At ten to seven you had roll call. You had already had your breakfast and then you went on the ward and you served the breakfasts that had come up from the mess hall, then you had, if you had some bed patients that had to be bathed you bathed them. Some of the patients might be well enough to do their own bath or have a shower on their own and you had to have the beds made and everything neat and tidy by half past eight, at which time they had medical rounds. And there were eight beds in each cubicle so you had eight patients. You hoped some of them were fit enough to do their own.One of my early patients came in about 12:30 this day and I was told to give him a bath and get him some lunch. He had been 23 hours coming from Ottawa in the baggage car on a stretcher, after having been shipped back from England as a burn victim. I was just 18 and a bit, and to start on this man, I went in the room. He had one leg in a cast, one arm in a cast, a bandage on his head and I couldn’t find the other hand, but it was attached to his stomach where they were doing a skin graft. So I bathed him here and there and made him some soup. And I met him at a movie a few weeks later and he looked at me and he said, “Armstrong, you don’t recognize me with my clothes on? ” That was a standard joke!