Pushing yourself through the wall of exhaustion, and entering an almost trance-like state in which you somehow manage to keep going for hour after hour, throwing your heart and soul into what you’re doing: that was what Kit Birks did every day for more than 11 months on her gruelling 5,000-mile solo walk from the northern tip of Norway to the southernmost tip of Greece to raise money for suicide-prevention charities.
Enforcing the self-discipline of pushing yourself far beyond the normal limits of human tiredness is also what the average NHS nurse does on every shift. So it figures and fits that Birks is indeed a former nurse.
The worst moment of Birks’s trip – when she plunged 30m down a cliff in northern Sweden with her 23kg rucksack and had to claw her way up again, having already walked 35km that day – was traumatic and physically demanding. But that kind of thing is a doddle if you’ve had to deal simultaneously with one dying patient, one incontinent patient and one aggressive patient in the eleventh hour of a night shift.
At least in a Swedish cliff-plunge, there’s just you and your luggage. In a typical day for the overworked nurse, there’s a crowd of patients whose lives depend on your attention, as well as endless assessment and clinical-documentation forms you must never forget to fill in, even when you’re almost too physically and mentally tired to think straight.
The toughness of British nurses knows no bounds. That distinctive new British attribute – nurse-toughness – came into being in 1854 when Florence Nightingale and her crew of volunteer nurses arrived in a hospital in Scutari to find soldiers lying in agony on the floor among rats and set straight to work.
The key qualities required were vast amounts of stamina, a total lack of squeamishness, and an ability to forget yourself and your own needs while on the job – all underpinned by a fundamental desire to care for others.
Not all nurses tick all those boxes (as anyone who has ever been given a blood test by an incompetent and borderline sadistic one can testify). But those qualities are the yardstick to which nurses aspire.
When I wrote Jobs for the Girls, about how women set out into the world of work in the mid-twentieth century, I interviewed women who’d been nurses in the 1950s and 1960s.
Their backs had never recovered from the heavy lifting of patients they’d had to “turn” every few hours, before the advent of hoists. Nor had their feet recovered from walking miles along the concrete corridors of new-build 1960s hospitals.
Barked at by terrifying matrons, obliged to wear starched collars that dug into their necks, housed in comfortless nurses’ homes where they had to pull a chain which let two inches of water (no more) to trickle into the bath. That was the daily life of the low-paid nurse.
They were thrown into the deep end: one recalled that on her first day as a student nurse “they amputated a leg and handed it to me. I had to take it to the sluice and get rid of all the forceps still attached to it. It was quite a shock. I’d only just left school.”
Nowadays, working in an institution strained to bursting point, under constant pressure, still underpaid, and no longer even allowed to park free in English hospital car parks, nurses soldier valiantly on.
You can see how Birks could cope adequately with a few nights in a tent at -15 C, and a few more nights being bitten to pieces by Mediterranean mosquitoes. This is child’s play compared to being a nurse.