Jo Brand. Jonathan Ross

Jo Brand

Hello everyone, I’m Jo Brand and I worked as a mental health nurse between 1978 and 1988. I loved it: the camaraderie, the closeness of our team working together, the laughs, the adrenalin, the successes, the friendships, the canteen sandwiches, the cigarettes, Christmas and even the bad bits. And to anyone working in the NHS now, I salute you.

Here are a few stories from my time as a nurse … Yes, it was back in the olden days, even before mobile phones.

emergency

As a student mental health nurse, I inevitably got my turn on the emergency bleep a few months into my training. It bleeps, you call a number, you run to the ward where you’re needed. I turned up at one emergency to find a recently arrived police cadet holding down a protesting, wild-eyed woman in her sixties. Having got to the ward and witnessed this woman shouting and waving her arms around, he immediately and efficiently got her down on the floor and lay across her.

All great, except this woman was the senior sister.

Unexpected

After a gruelling couple of hours on the Emergency Clinic, where we tried to persuade a very ill, threatening, paranoid young man to come into hospital, and in the end were forced to physically restrain him in the Outpatients while people waited for their appointments, I was glad to get him onto a ward safely. The whole incident had been disturbing and upsetting for everyone. About a month later, the young guy in question was unrecognisable when he arrived in the clinic to thank us for looking after him and shook everyone’s hand. This is the reason most people become a mental health nurse.

Teaching session

As student nurses we didn’t think of ourselves as daunting. Until one day, a junior doctor came to give us a lecture in the School of Nursing using a teaching aid which involved writing on an acetate sheet, which is then projected onto the wall. He switched on the teaching aid and, as we waited for him to write, he walked towards the rectangle of light on the wall and started to write on that. Poor sod. I think it took him a long time to live that down.

Under lock and key

On secondment as a student to a mental health unit for the elderly, I was asked to take a woman in her seventies, who I didn’t know very well, home for the day in order to assess her ability to manage domestic tasks and see how she coped generally in the home environment.

Please dump all your preconceptions about the frailness of the elderly. This woman, let’s call her Enid, was built like a weightlifter with the strength to match. And I wasn’t exactly willowy. We were dropped off at 9 a.m. by the lovely minibus driver who was due back at 3 p.m. and then began the strangest of days.

After we got into her ground-floor flat, she didn’t even take off her coat before she started pushing the furniture up against the door. Paranoia was a feature of her illness. My enquiry as to why she had done this caused a furious reaction and she stopped for a second to punch me. Quite hard. It hurt a lot. She was bigger than me, tougher than me and scary. I realised I wasn’t going to be able to stop her without getting a fair bit of grief, so I decided to let her carry on. I couldn’t leave so I just had to make the best of it.

I sat around in this atmosphere of threat for the next six hours, trying to keep it light and chatty with varying degrees of success. The minibus driver arrived back at 3 p.m. and, when we didn’t appear, came to investigate. The door was barricaded but he managed to communicate through a window while Enid smacked me round the back of the head. While I distracted Enid, he managed to force the window a bit more and get in. He knew Enid well and she was only too happy to go with him.

Nurses’ home

One night, I was in my room at the nurses’ home and, I have to say, quite drunk after a session in the pub. I couldn’t sleep and I’m not sure why but I became convinced there was someone outside my door. Unable to ignore the very strong feeling but thinking I was just imagining it, I opened my door. A man’s face was about an inch from mine. Struck with fear, I immediately slammed the door and pushed my bed up against it.

I sat up all night too scared to go out of the room.

In the morning he had gone.

A ray of light

The locked ward could be a harsh place. Most people didn’t want to be there and weren’t allowed to leave. In-patients were expected to attend a group every morning and, as most people were so ill, this could be frustrating and occasionally scary. One morning, into the midst of this chaos walked a well-known actor, brought in the night before by the police. Still in a hospital-issue dressing gown, he climbed onto a table – our hearts missed a beat – but he began to sing ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’, from some musical or other, while conducting with an imaginary baton. Some were transfixed, some indifferent, but most joined in and it was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.

Jonathan Ross

I was born in 1960 so have never known what life might be like without the magnificent safety net that the NHS provides. My time on the planet would certainly have been different – indeed, I would have been different. Chances are, I would be missing the top of the index finger on my right hand.

When I was about eighteen months old, my mother left me in the care of my elder brothers, both being more than capable of looking out for a toddler, as they were nearly four and five respectively. But needs must; we had no food, so my mum went on one of her fairly regular foraging trips to the neighbours asking to borrow some. My memory is, of course, not to be relied on, but I imagine hunger got the better of me which is why I apparently crawled to the bin in the kitchen and dug out an old, opened can of beans. I sliced the tip of my finger off and a doctor, whom I’m sure never received sufficient thanks, sewed it back on. Sewing the tip of a screaming, wriggling baby’s finger back on can’t be easy but he did a pretty good job. It’s wonky, sure, but it works. So belatedly, thank you. My career as a hand model never happened of course, but the surgery was free and the finger is functional and that’s all I really care about.

Without the National Health Service I might also have an enormous growth on my forehead. Fast forward about fourteen years and you will find me sitting on a bus – the 262 I think – heading to my local hospital, Whipps Cross in East London. You will notice I am clutching a milk bottle on my lap and am getting slightly strange looks from my fellow passengers. The milk bottle, capped off with a rudimentary lid of kitchen foil, contains a pint of my still-warm piss. My doctor, Mr Patel, had sent me in after failing to work out what the growth on my forehead was. But he was confident it should be removed.

You will have surmised by now that my parents, though loving, had a casual approach to childcare and I was effectively self-raised. So being told to bring a urine sample on my visit, I had taken the initiative and filled the whole bottle. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and carrying a small pot would have been much easier and much less splashy. The nurse who took the pint off my hands presumably absorbed enough information from my look – ill-fitting hand-me-downs, worn-out shoes and a garnish of piss splashed in my lap (that foil lid was a bad idea) – to have worked out I was not a rich tourist slumming it. She reassured me that a whole pint was perfect and would I take a seat.

The lump on my head turned out to be a benign cyst and was removed about a month later. I spent the night on the ward – the only time in my life I’ve been hospitalised, but I have only the fondest memory of it. The food was good, the people who worked there were universally lovely and my fellow inmates – patients? – who were also having cysts removed were good-natured and funny. I think we all knew how fortunate we were to get this kind of care without needing to pay or get into debt. I woke up with my head bandaged which made me feel roguish and piratical and also lucky – more so when I noticed the two elderly men in the beds that flanked mine both had heavily bandaged groins.

But the point, the simple point, is that someone like me from a piss-poor background – although literally I suppose I was piss-rich, seeing as I could splash free pints around, so cash-poor – could have such complicated and expensive procedures carried out for free. Without wishing to pile it on too much, it’s not an overstatement to say that I knew that, even if my parents weren’t totally there for me, the NHS always was and always would be.

I am lucky enough to have enjoyed good health most of my life, so mainly I have entered A&E due to stupid accidents that were a) entirely my own fault and b) could have been easily avoided. Case in point: a visit made when I had twisted my ankle painfully and needed relief. I rushed down with my wife and our baby, carried safely in her arms. When the junior doctor asked how I had come to be injured, I unwisely told the truth. We had been watching Stars in Their Eyes and I had been so incensed by one of the participants’ poor attempt to capture the idiosyncratic dance moves of Mick Hucknall that I had leaped up to demonstrate how it SHOULD be done and discovered, painfully, that it was harder than I thought. After an x-ray showed that it was merely a sprain, I was bandaged and sent home. They gave me painkillers and the staff decided that, due to my bravery, I also deserved a lollipop and a certificate normally reserved for far younger patients.

There’s something quintessentially and wonderfully British about both the NHS and our ability to take the piss in a kind way. So thank you all.

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