I received a letter from my alumni a month ago,  reminding me of our yearly reunion. I laid the letter on my desk so as not to forget, and looked at it now and then.  Tuesday a former classmate left a message on the answering machine saying don't forget--looking forward to seeing you.
So today's the day, and I'm here-- and the alumni are there, since I decided not to go. I went a few years ago and saw everyone and that was sufficient. The get together was held in the banquet room of a hotel, and nurses with hair various shades of gray sat at the tables talking. The scene reminded me of a convocation of scribes and scholars, their hoary heads bent in recalling the weight of all they had seen and experienced.
We went to school and got our hands- on training at the hospital on the cusp of a time of historic flux. It was the early 60's when the hospitals were segregated (at least where we were in Mississippi) into wards of White Male, Colored Male, White Female, and Colored Female. We were sent to Florida State Mental Hospital to study for three months. Helped to hold patients begging "please no" on a stretcher as paddles were put to their head and electric shock applied. On time off, we met airmen from Pensacola on the beach and flirted and relaxed.
Three months at Charity Hospital of New Orleans to study pediatrics and communicable diseases. I saw a woman in an iron lung, a living tomb for her since she was a child. How cruel a disease is polio. I saw a man with rabies, tied to the bed with leather restraints, red eyed and foaming at the mouth. There was nothing to be done for him. Saw a ward of blue babies; there was no surgery then to repair their little hearts. Fascinated, watched a bevy of chattering nuns with starched winglike, flying nun headgear cross from their quarters into the hospital. This was back in the days when nuns wore habits.
On our time off, we went to the French Quarter and rode the trolleys around town like the locals. I made sure I rode the streetcar named Desire, just so I could say I had. I loved New Orleans; one of my classmates moved there after graduation.
How much things have changed! For instance, the treatment for ulcers used to be having a patient drink half and half every hour. Now, in most cases helicobacter pylorii, is found and treated with antibiotics. How far medicine has progressed, how much has changed--the future will be so exciting.
susil