Nursing in my 3rd year

I can't remember which order I did my last few placements, but I think it was ward A (female surgical), then ward R (mixed medical) and finally ward H which was children's. 
Ward A was great and I remember doing my C assessment, which was total patient care. I chose a lovely lady who had liver surgery and she was also blind and deaf, so I learnt how to do finger spelling on her own hand. 
Ward R was brilliant and I remember some funny moments, especially on night duty. I worked on R with a very good friend of mine from Rhodesia - well that's what it was called in those days! Once during there was one of those scary ward rounds where the medical students all stand around the beds and get questions fired at them by the consultants. I remember 2 particular medical students who both liked each other a lot, but neither of them let the other know about it. So my friend and I crawled under the patient's curtains and tied their shoe laces together, so when they tried to walk away from the patient, they fell into each other's arms. It was very romantic. The whole ward was laughing about it for ages. 
When I did night shifts on R, we had a very nice Night Sister who covered our ward. However there were a couple of moments when I discovered her rough edges. I was friends with the switchboard operator and she taught me how to pull the plugs out and put new ones in - we didn't have computers in those days. R was at one end of the hospital and switchboard was at the other end. The hospital was all on one floor and during the night I used to cycle from R to switchboard (via the canteen of course), but I usually managed to get away with cycling along the corridors in the night, except when I nearly knocked the Night Sister down. 
Ward R had some slightly confused elderly patients and one man was convinced that he had canaries on his curtain rails at about 2 am. So of course I had to get the ladder out and catch them. The Night Sister appeared and asked me what I was doing. I was very honest and told her that I was trying to catch canaries.

moving into my 3rd year as a student nurse

When I did my nurse training, we had an exam at the end of each year, to qualify us to move into the next year. The second year was a white belt and the third year was blue belt and white cuffs. I managed to fail my second year exams, but as my next placement was to be the operating theatres, it didn't matter too much to me, because no-one would notice that I was still in second year uniform. 
I spent 8 weeks in the Queen Mary's operating theatre, which was great fun and I learnt so much anatomy. However I have a lot of allergies and I was allergic to the J-cloth hats, the paper masks and the gloves (all gloves were latex in those days). After a couple of weeks, the rash on my face was so bad and my eyes were so swollen that I couldn't see, so I had to go off sick. 
The other big event that happened in theatres was a flood. Queen Mary's had a stream nearby and one day we had just started operating on a 4 year old's tonsils and all this muddy water appeared under our feet. It rapidly rose to the tops of the surgeon's boots! We finished the operation and then had to close theatres to clear the mess. We used the large portable suction machines to suck up all the muddy water until the fire brigade arrived. We then had to re-sterilise every instrument and put them away. 
I passed my second year resit exam and I'll tell you about my next placement soon