A new nurse gets a crash course in compassion

“Nursing students needed to work in the University Hospital. Good pay. Orientation.”

As a rising nursing school senior in the 1970s, I naïvely applied for the job above without getting the full details. No one mentioned that I’d be working in a psychiatric unit housing twenty-five aggressive, catatonic or schizophrenic patients, many of whom had been locked away for years.

The entrance sign, which should have read “Locked Psych/Med/Surg Unit,” said simply, …

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