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One nurse’s long career, Hazel Paish, RN Hazel Paish saw huge changes during her very long career in nursing. She began as a district nurse on horseback and by the time she was done, she was working with electronic monitors and serving on a provincial nurses’ negotiating committee. Hazel was born in 1919 in Empress, Alberta and when World War II broke out she was in nursing school at the Edmonton General. She’d gone into nursing despite the objections from her parents who didn’t want her to go into nursing because, as she says, “I’d see what a man looked like without his clothes on.” But she had worked for $5 a month; until she had saved up the $50 she needed for nursing school. The school used the $50 to pay for any breakages and costs but by the time she was finished Hazel had enough left to pay for her graduation gown. Just a couple of years later, still during the War, Hazel began as a district nurse at Blueberry Mountain near Spirit River in northern Alberta. When she arrived in the north, Hazel recalled having a humorous experience with wildlife: “We had to carry the water about half a mile, and I went out the first morning to get a pail of water and I saw this animal standing across the dugout. It didn’t look like a horse or a cow and I dropped the pails and ran. The storekeeper laughed his head off. He said ‘that’s a moose.’” She attended most of the births in the district and helped many children
come into the world. She did it all without the benefit of a telephone
or easy access to a doctor. The nurse handed out the pills herself,
including narcotics. But Hazel remembers the strict limits on
nursing: She asked around whether the children had been inoculated, and they had not. So she made it a point to go to each of the five schools on horseback. Because she had to give a separate inoculation for each disease, it took two months of travelling. The eastern section of the district was Ukrainian, Blueberry Mountain itself was very English, and the outlying area was all aboriginal. In that part of the country the people were quite poor, Hazel recalls, and the district nurse’s work had a full range of responsibilities, including handing out the welfare which was a ration of food, such as so many pounds of potatoes and apples each week. Hazel got married to a Ukrainian farmer in 1945, in Grande Prairie. She stopped nursing and went farming. They raised 13 kids on the farm. It was a team effort she recalls: “I had to drive the tractor and help with the sawing of the wood, clearing brush and all that kind of stuff.” It wasn’t’ until 25 years later, in 1969, that Hazel went back to nursing, this time at the hospital in Grande Prairie. She still had seven kids at home. It was simple economics that took her back to work. “We were getting more and more broke with the hail storms and the freezing and everything.” Returning to nursing after so many years proved to be interesting for Hazel. “ I’d been there four or five days and they had just gotten a heart monitor. Everyone was going off to dinner and they said watch the heart monitor that it doesn’t go to a straight line. Thank goodness it didn’t happen.” Hazel chose to work in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). She remembers using electroshock paddles, a new technology she was quite suspicious of. “The first time I did have to use them… we called the doctor but he was a long ways away. Another nurse helped me and I asked ‘do you know to use this thing?’ She said ‘I don’t know anything about it. Who’s going to hold the paddles and who’s going to press the button…we’ll see what happens.’ We tried it; I really thought it was something to make people think something was being done. Nothing happened. Just as I’d thought. ‘You are supposed to do it three times,’ she said, ‘so, let’s try it again.’ She pressed the button, and this time the most beautiful pattern came on the screen and we saved a life.” Hazel soon became involved in larger nursing issues. The Alberta Association of Registered Nurses AARN asked her to be the district information officer and she put out a newspaper for the north. “I had five kids at home, and they helped me with the Gestetner. I put a few poems in that I thought were apt for nursing in each paper.” She also joined UNA when it started and she was still working for the AARN. She became president of her UNA Local. At one point she published one of the AARN newsletters with a financial statement but the AARN had concerns with it. She left the AARN position and, Hazel says “then I went whole hog UNA and I was president of the local and then of the district. There were 13 hospitals up here and we used to go to a different hospital meeting each month. Most of us traveled in one vehicle. We had a Volkswagen van and we would try to find a hotel where everyone could sleep in one room to save money.” She was elected to several UNA provincial negotiating committees and the provincial executive board. In 1988, she was on the negotiating committee during the 19-day illegal strike. Hazel still had many more years of nursing ahead of her. She and her husband had divorced and she had moved to High Prairie where she was nursing when she turned 65. The hospital “retired” her, against her wishes and Hazel and UNA took the issue to court and finally won on appeal. “I got eight months pay and my job back again, but I had to work on maternity and I hadn’t worked maternity since my training days. I didn’t know anything about the fetal monitor and the incubator and I was afraid I’d make a mistake. It was all this technical stuff.” She also was not well welcomed back in the facility, so she finally quit and moved to Grande Prairie where she had bought a house. But she soon found she did not have enough to keep her busy so she took a job at the Central Park Lodge long-term care facility. Hazel worked there until she was 75, older than many of the residents she worked with. Today (2006) Hazel lives in Spirit River and took time out from picking her saskatoons “before the birds get them” to tell her story. |
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