A FAMILY AFFAIR

Celebrating the vain tradition of Alberta RN continues to feature stories and members chose to share to honour their relatives the contented tradition of the nursing profession.

A 100 Year Legacy of Care

The first thing you examine when you first meet her is in what manner little she resembles someone who has reached her centenary. In fact, Doris Howelll, former registered supply with nourishment (RN), world traveller and soldier doesn't gaze much past 75, slowed by the agency of age but far from ending her shift. on the other hand in April of this year, Doris move rounded 100 and has the framed certificates of congratulation to verify it, chief among them individual from Queen Elizabeth II.

The Queen's useful wishes are a treasured favourite, the single Doris points out first. Perhaps its place of pride upon the wall of her brightly decorated latitude is a touchstone of her Lancashire birthplace. Or perhaps it's because Doris, born in the reign of Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, has lived and worked beneath five monarches - if individual counts the abdicated Edward VIII - no mean feat for someone who survived the London Blitz and nurs injuryed soldiers on troop ships from India to the southerly Pacific.

Summoned to her sweep from the activity centre upon the continuing care unit at Raymond Hospital in southern Alberta, Doris eases into a favourited rocker and carburet of irons herself for another journey end time, another test of memory, still able to find the milestones that mark her nursing career.

She took her nursing training in Britain below one of the time's greatest in quantity honoured systems, one in which flat bed-making was done under exacting standards. She was a bare 18-year-old when she began in 1923 earning the credentials that would work for her well throughout the nearest SO-some years.

"I longed to be a nurse" says Doris. "I had wanted to do it for as lengthy as I could remember."

In 1940 Luftwaffe bomb were falling in earnest in London and Doris ground herself doing what she could to ease the suffering of victims.

"We weren't afraid," she says, with no trace of bravado. "When we were bombed the first time, we were trying to lay out the fires with a little pump"

The recollection of this absurdity makes her smile.

"I was in charge of a first-aid support You couldn't rest during the bombing; you just kept going."

For a twinkling she's quiet, perhaps picturing for the thousandth time the life-blood and the rubble left after the Nazi raids.

"It was surprising to me by what mode quiet the wounded were," she says. "The soldiers - they were amazing striplings 17 and 18, just children really, and they missed their mothers."

Once the Blitz extremityed Doris joined the army, literally nursing her way around the world as the war continued.

"I started in Northern Ireland, then Belgium; there was a destiny of destruction there," she says.

She watched to anyone who required her care and injury up at war's end nursing injuryed enemy soldiers home on hospital ships, an assignment that took her from Europe to Rangoon and Singapore. Ultimately, not lengthy after it was shattered by dint of an atomic bomb, Doris toured the remnants of Hiroshima.

Doris is vague upon her arrival in Canada, on the other hand she remembers why she came. In 1952 she was lur to the Alberta prairie by the agency of an ad in a nursing magazine placed by means of a former Raymond Hospital matron, Hilda Bucknall. With solitary a sister back in England, Doris forged a of recent origin life for herself in southern Alberta, practising until retirement in 1973 Her solitary connection to the old geographical division now is a nephew who still writes regularly and sent her flowers upon her 100th birthday.

Her reputation as a maternity supply with nourishment is of special pride to Doris; many a Raymond resident come intoed the world in her care, including her not away physician, Dr. Wally Tollestrup. And she made an impression upon young nurses who found themselves facing her iron rule

"I remember her as a nurture in the old Raymond Hospital," says RN Peggy Gaszler, now single of Doris' chief caregivers. "She used to scare me to death. It was her army background. She made fully convinced things were done just right."

And, according to Doris, things at the Raymond Hospital are far from right. Oh she has no complaints about the care she receives, the meals or the friendliness and professionalism of the staff. No, for Doris, it's all about colour. supply with nourishments on the continuing care unit, as at greatest in quantity other medical facilities in Alberta, no longer dres strictly in white. It's a breach of nursing protocol that wouldn't have been tolerated in Doris's day, and, in her opinion, shouldn't be tolerated today.

"She raises her eyebrow at us upon occasion," says Gaszler. "The other day she saw me in something other than white and she asked me 'What would Florence Nightingale say about this?' "

But level this complaint is levelled with a softening of the voice and a askew smile.

Asked for her advice for any young individual considering nursing as a career, Doris hesitates sole a moment before: "Be prepared for hard work."

As she strives to recall the cause of death of a former acquaintance, Doris can't quite remember and finally asks Peggy "What am I dying of?"

"I don't think you're dying of anything," replies the RN warmly, proffering a embrace around Doris's thin shoulders.