Runaway Nurse

By Doris Knight, ©1968 

An unexpected shock too great to bear sent Nurse Diane West on a frenzied escape. She stopped at a hospital in a small Arizona town and became a member of the staff at what could only be termed the most unusual hospital in the Southwest. She sought to bury herself in her work in order to forget what had happened. But there were too many things to remind her … And there was Jeff Brooks …

GRADE: C- 

BEST QUOTES:
“Well, if you’re going to be run over, I guess it’s better to be run over by a nurse.” 

“Hey, nurse. You’re not supposed to emote.”

“You’re a beautiful girl. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have run me over.”

REVIEW:
As we open Runaway Nurse, Diane West RN has been saved from being a child bride (she’s 22) as her fiancé and her sister had eloped to Las Vegas the night before her wedding. She’s also saved from having wasted all that money going to nursing school, as though she had insisted on finishing her training, her fiancé had demanded that “she was not to practice once they were married.” Instead of being grateful for her near miss, however, she’s leaving town, “driving too fast” to “escape the tears she had yet to shed.” She’s lucky she did insist on graduating, as now she has a profession that can support her, but doesn’t seem to see it that way: “Was she wrong to consider her nursing education over Tony’s”—ahem—“interests?” 

The wild driving leads to tragedy—she hits Jeff Brooks, who is standing in the middle of the road in the Arizona desert in the middle of the night. His fibula is broken and he’s been rendered unconscious for an unusually long period of time, but the next morning he wakes up and drags himself into the back seat of Diane’s car. It turns out they are both headed for El Sol Hospital in Cactus City—she to try to claim a job offer she had turned down, and he because he is “hoping to be a patient.” “Knowing El Sol Hospital had its major section devoted to the treatment of mental and emotional disorders,” Diane is a little wary.

El Sol is an architectural masterpiece rising five stories above the surrounding shanties, with a liveried doorman to boot. She has absolutely no idea what the job entails, and is shocked to discover that the patients are “neurotics mostly, with a large variety of hangups.” It doesn’t take her long to get on the wrong foot, as she tells the charge nurse that she doesn’t think her alcoholic patient is “getting the proper therapy,” which in this case is enough barbiturates to make her lethargic. The mean old head nurse, Miss Marcy—whom Diane maturely refers to as Stoneface—reports Diane to hospital chief Dr. Wallace, because “the doctors know best about the medication,” she says—clearly never having worked a day in a hospital in her life. Diane is called to an informal hearing for “a breach of professional ethics,” but manages to hold onto her job despite Miss Marcy’s recommendation that she be fired.

Miss Marcy doesn’t take this well and accuses Diane of having an affair with Jeff. Well, she is visiting Jeff Brooks on a daily basis, and he “continued to make overtures to her,” calls her “doll face” and tries to kiss her “clumsily because of his immobilizing cast.” Jeff laughs it off when she tells him about the accusation. “Diane, baby,” he says, “you’re such an iceberg that certainly no one will give it a second thought.” He follows this flattering remark by telling her, “You have really knocked me cold.” Diane, though she calls this treatment “kind,” is permanently scarred by being dumped and can’t respond warmly to him. Instead she points out that he has refused to be discharged from the hospital, which was recommended a week ago, and tells him she will not visit him any longer (though she keeps dropping by anyway). He responds by declaring she should quit the hospital, but won’t explain why. He is eventually thrown out, kicking and screaming, and she is shocked and outraged when he grabs her, tells her he loves her, and kisses her goodbye—“right in front of everyone!”

Diane receives a letter from Jeff again imploring her to leave the hospital, which she ignores, but the next day she is called to Dr. Wallace’s office and accused of having a relationship with Jeff and summarily fired. So now she decides to head home, and once there she discovers a big scandal has erupted at the hospital, with the local paper accusing it of fraud—and guess who the reporter is! Diane is outraged: “Jeff had lied to her and pretended to be something he wasn’t,” she decides. “He used me. And he allowed all this trouble to come to me. It’s his fault!” This attitude is a bit surprising, since he didn’t exactly jump in front of her car, he didn’t encourage her to challenge the doctors about their treatment plans, and one might understand that spilling his secrets to a woman he’d just met is a bit risky if a major project that could make the world a better place hangs in the balance.

Fortunately her mother has more sense. “You must grow up,” says Mom. “You are showing a lack of maturity that disappoints me.” Ouch! But needless to say, Mom’s tough love does not work, and her parents are left just hoping “she would not make another rash decision.” Well, she and Jeff both do—he proposes on their first date and she accepts, so I assume their marriage will be equally stupid.

Diane is colossally immature, from her first decision to blow town to the very end of the book, and she shows no evidence whatsoever of growth. It’s interesting to me that the author can see this, as she has Diane’s mother try to talk some sense into her, but does not give Diane any sort of awakening. Diane’s hypocrisy is also bewildering, as it’s hard to understand how she can have the gumption to stand up to the doctors about the patients’ medication, but at the same time thinks, “I must learn not to be such a rebel. Perhaps my independent spirit and rebelliousness are what caused Tony to leave me for my sister.” Jeff is kind of an ass too, so it’s not at all clear why anyone would go for him, even a moron like Diane. She can’t even pull off running away, as she’s back living with her parents at book’s end. You can do better, I’m sure—run away from this book.

Nurse Kay’s Conquest

By Willo Davis Roberts, ©1966 

Armed with their shining diplomas, Nurses Kay Regis and Ginny Attison were out to set the California town of Mayerling on its ear. Kay was well aware that her best friend possessed more than enough charms and feminine wiles to capture the hearts of the two bachelor-doctors in town. And she was almost willing to let Ginny have the run of the mill—until her own emotions caught up with her and drew her irresistably into the arms of the one man she was fighting to ignore.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Kay, darling, you aren’t working at it. Smile. Not a perfunctory little smile but seductive. Manage to touch shoulders or hands when you work with him. The electricity will get through to him sooner or later. No man could look like that and be completely impervious to a pretty girl.”

“The only way he’ll ever see me will be if I have my gallbladder removed, and then he’ll only notice my insides.”

“My father always told me never to look a gift horse in the mouth. When I got older, I realized that this also applied to pretty girls in my kitchen at midnight.”

“I may do favors for old ladies, but any kissing I do is strictly on my own.”

REVIEW:
Kay Regis and Ginny Attison, new grads from nursing school, are moving to Ginny’s hometown of Mayerling, in the central valley of California. They’re moving in with Ginny’s 60-year-old grandmother and working at a 60-bed hospital which has at most four nurses on per shift, covering maternity, pediatrics, med/surg and ED, and sometimes no doctors at all in the hospital or ED—clearly a malpractice suit waiting to happen. They being new grads and all, and no MDs in the building, perhaps it’s not surprising that the first thing they do when three patients who had been in a car crash, one of whom is unconscious with a severe head wound and another who may be paralyzed, is clean them up, flirt with the ambulance drivers, and fill out forms.

Fortunately Dr. Ross arrives. “What’s all the yakkety-yak? Is anybody doing anything for these kids?” It’s a valid question, but the doctor doesn’t do much either, apart from x-raying the possibly paralyzed man; the unconscious kid doesn’t seem to have gotten any imaging studies at all. The best news is that there are two single doctors, Dr. Ross and Dr. Hugh Shand, so Kay and Ginny can each can have one. Dr. Hugh Shand is “such a perfectionist it seems no once can please him,” which is demonstrated by the fact that he is chewing out the nursing supervisor when they see him for the first time, and “looked through them as if they were so many posts holding up the ceiling.” But he is also “tall, dark and fabulous,” and “the best doctor in town, no matter what else they say about him”—and he drives a cream-colored Lincoln Continental, so maybe that’s why “something about him sent a tremor through Kay’s body even as she backed out of his way.” That night, “the face of Dr. Hugh Shand floated before her in the darkness for some time before she finally fell asleep.” Nothing is sexier to a nurse novel heroine than an aloof, shouting man who doesn’t notice you. “So much for that seductive smile. He wouldn’t notice me if I batted my eyes six inches from his face,” she thinks.

Meanwhile, the granddaughter of wealthy Rhoda Mayerling, who endows the hospital, is admitted to the hospital in a coma after being hit by a car. Rhoda blames her daughter-in-law Beverlee for the death of her son; they had been driving home drunk and she had thought there was an oncoming car, grabbed the wheel, and the car had driven into a concrete wall, killing Richard—but the other car had been parked by the road, not a danger to them. Beverlee feels she is too stupid to take up a profession, so she is trapped living with Rhoda, who enjoys keeping the woman on a short leash. Now Rhoda blames Beverlee for stealing a $4,000 necklace she had stupidly given the comatose girl to hold, which has gone missing.

Then Ginny’s grandmother sets up Kay on a date with Hugh Shand. Kay is furious at the woman for meddling, and humiliated—a bizarre reaction in this day and age—because Hugh was pushed into dating her and did not ask her himself. They both seem to have a great time, but Kay can’t be content with that: “Had all of it, the laughter, the excitement of their contact, the fun of dancing, been simply that—obedience to the wishes of a rich old lady?” But the old witch wasn’t completely wrong, because by the end of the night they’re in each others’ arms, talking—hypothetically, anyway—about marriage.

This is only about two-thirds through the book, though, so we have a significant page count—and the foreshadowing line, “How wrong a girl could sometimes be”—to predict that trouble is a-brewing. Sure enough, when Beverlee gets a job in a dress shop and moves out of Rhoda’s house to live with Charlotte independently on her own earnings, Hugh becomes outraged, accuses Kay of interfering, though she has done nothing but listen to Beverlee’s plans and bolster the poor abused woman’s confidence, and calls Kay a half-witted idiot and Beverlee “an empty-headed, immature, thirty-year-old teenager who lives for nothing but pleasure. She has never done a useful thing in her life except perhaps give birth to Charlie, and that was probably an accident.” Wow! When Kay points out that Rhoda is cruel to Beverlee, Hugh’s only defense is that Rhoda has terminal cancer and “can’t live without Charlotte.” Kay rightly ends it with Hugh, thinking, “she could never marry a man who expected her to yield to his opinion on everything, no matter what her own conscience dictated.”

There’s a house fire to help put things to rights, sort of, though Hugh never acknowledges that he has been prejudiced and wrong about Beverlee’s character and Rhoda’s treatment of her, and the question of whether he wants a yes-man or a strong woman for a wife remains unanswered. The writing isn’t terrible, though the plot is a bit thin, and the central question of whether Kay and Hugh will work out in the end is not satisfactorily answered at the end of the book. If Nurse Kay has made a conquest of Hugh, author Willo Davis Roberts, who has not been a particular favorite of mine in the past, has not made a conquest of me with yet another mediocre book. I suspect you won’t be impressed, either.

Nurse Brookes

By Kate Norway
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1957
Also published as Sister Brookes of Byng’s 

Helen  Brookes had left Byng’s Hospital to get married … and come back again, her engagement broken. She had made one distressing, almost disastrous mistake; now she would be more careful, she told herself, more clear-headed about her own emotions. All of which did not prevent her from falling in love with a surgeon who, it seemed, was not free to marry.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“The way she used her lashes was cheap.” 

“Doctors are annoying creatures, and students are worse.”

“Sorry? The most incompetent word in the language.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Helen Brookes is a sister—which means she’s in the nurse in charge—of the men’s surgical ward at Byng’s Hospital in England. She’s a highly capable and kind nurse, always sticking up for the underdog, setting to rights the young probationers who seem like they can never do anything at all when they start their training and turning them into first-rate nurses, even match-making for her ex-fiancé, a nice man whom she never really loved and who never really loved her, with the woman he actually pines for. 

She meets Dr. Hugh Burton-Hall, the resident surgical officer, who is a blunt, brusque man slow to warm, but warm he does indeed, as we know he will. The big hitch is that he has a son, and presumably a wife. Of course, we know there’s more to the story than that, but Helen Brookes, who otherwise can overcome hospital gossip in a single bound, bend recalcitrant patients to her will, and even cure cancer patients is strangely unable to see the obvious. So most of the book involves a lot of stories about the more than 60 other named characters in the book—I tell you, it is a serious chore trying to keep everyone straight—while we wait for the star-crossed lovers to sort things out. And that’s about all I have to say about this book.

I am a fan of Olive Norton, who topped the Best Authors list in 2021 with an almost-B+ average across seven books, but this story is not her finest. It’s not unpleasant, just maybe a little boring, without much plot to be had. You can certainly do worse, but unless you’re desperate, there’s really not much of a reason to read this book.

Nurse of the Crystalline Valley

By Mary Collins Dunne, ©1977
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Meredith Hale looked out of the bus window and gloried in what she saw: beautiful snow-capped mountains, snug little houses tucked beneath snow-covered trees. A virtual paradise! Meredith had left her unhappy home to accept a nursing job at Mountain Hospital in Crystalline Valley. Her mother, Blanche, and her second husband, Warren, had separated, and Blanche relied on Meredith for companionship. But now Meredith was out of that unhappy, tense situation. She was looking forward to a more relaxed life with Jill Nolan, a longtime friend, and three other girls. She would be able to make a living and enjoy the resort area. Skiing had always been one of her favorite outdoor activities, and the prospect of winter sports during her off-hours was very exciting indeed. What she did not anticipate, however, filled her with increasing confusion. Her relationship with Lotus Johnson, one of her housemates, deteriorated, and she became involved with several men: Günther Wahl, the handsome ski instructor; Lyle Slater, a millionaire’s son; and Bruce Engel, manager of the valley’s lodge. Bruce was everything she could hope for, but he did not seem at all interested in her. She had hoped, by moving to Crystalline Valley, to find peace, but instead, all she found was more confusion.

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES
“That’s what caught my attention about you, Meredith. You were different from these bubble-heads. Strong and independent. You could talk about things. You’re intelligent and interesting. Of course, it didn’t hurt that you were a knockout in the looks department, too.” 

REVIEW:
Meredith Hale has left her childhood home in Boise, Idaho, largely because her mother Blanche has separated from her husband, Warren, and is being so whiny about it! Blanche was a shocking seven years older than her 39-year-old husband, and after four years of marriage, Warren had had an affair with another woman. Meredith “had always felt Blanche carried much of the blame, driving Warren into the controversial temporary relationship.” It must be acknowledged: Affairs usually are controversial, and the victim usually carries the most guilt.

So she’s off to Crystalline Valley, where she moves into a three-bedroom house with three other women. She works at Mountain Hospital, but we don’t hear much about that. Rather we learn a lot about the characters populating the local ski resort: Günther Wahl, who drives a Ferrari and yet is strangely working a low-paying job as a ski instructor; Bruce Engel, who grabs her arm the first time they meet and who she decides is a “brash overbearing male,” but in the next minute is pining tragically for; young beautiful Althea Emerick, who is married to an old wealthy man and who Meredith decides is just useless arm candy, but is shocked to discover the woman is actually a talented figure skater and an excellent skier, “not a fragile hothouse bloom after all”!

Meredith soon starts dating Bruce, but early on, after she “tests” him by mentioning that another woman is very attractive, I couldn’t help hoping he would come to his senses and run. After a big dance she attends with Bruce, he doesn’t call, and she’s obsessing about everything that happened to try and figure out what went wrong. So she decides he’s “playing the field” and starts jealously observing her roommate Lotus, who must be trying to steal her man, the minx! Speaking of minxes, she starts dating Lyle Slater, a millionaire’s slacker son who she meets after he’d broken his leg skiing. Meredith uses her high-class date to snub Lotus, but the outing isn’t that great, because she decides that Lyle is just seeing her to piss off another woman. “She was angry at the thought of being used to further a private quarrel,” she decides—again with exactly zero evidence, a habit she displays with alarming frequency. Soon Bruce calls, and pages of moping are swept under the rug. On their third date, she’s in love! But wait, the next day Meredith decides Bruce doesn’t love her and she’s made a fool of herself—there’s that jumping to conclusions again—and now she’s back to moping, but still not finding any sympathy for her mother. 

Then Meredith is on a chair lift with a ten-year-old girl and it stalls! “‘Kelly, sit up straight at all times!’ She had not meant fear to tinge her voice, but its nervous tremors had crept in,” because the only danger on a ski lift is when you’re not moving, and nurses are so prone to panic. More than six long pages later, the ski lift is moving and they get off it and ski down the mountain. Back at the apartment, only Lotus has the brains to see the self-aggrandizing Meredith, who “couldn’t resist making the story as dramatic as possible,” for what she is. “I’m sure nobody else in the valley has your outstanding courage. True grit, if I ever saw it,” she snarks, asking when’s big day? What day is that? “The day you go to the white House to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor,” she replies. I like Lotus!

It turns out that the little girl Meredith “rescued” on the ski lift is Lyle Slater’s niece, and his rich father wants to pump Meredith’s hand. Now Meredith, who had been disinclined to meet the Slaters, is determined to go only to irritate Lotus, without a thought for her own hypocrisy or whether she might have deserved the little poke from “Henna-head,” as Meredith maturely dubs Lotus.

Bruce, still valiantly dating this psychopath even after discovering that she’s also dating Lyle, quizzes her about Lyle and his family. She does little to put him at ease, and the date ended “without much rapport, but she felt a comforting warmth. If he was jealous, it showed he had feelings for her.” She should not be at all surprised, but is, when she learns that Bruce is dating Lotus! “What I’d like to do, Meredith thought grimly, is pull that dyed hair out by its roots,” because it’s all Lotus’s fault!

Now, intent on wreaking undeserved vengeance, Meredith decides that “hobnobbing with the Slaters seemed like a roundabout way of getting back at Lotus Johnson.” She meets with Mr. Slater at his house, where she has sherry and a clam-cheese puff (these rich folks and their gourmet canapes!). Meredith immediately gets on a high horse because Mr. Slater had figured out what day was her afternoon off, and “sat, quiet and sulky,” as Mr. Slater without irony tells her that she has aptitude and perspicacity, and asks her to use her influence on Lyle to keep him from running around with his wild friends and settle down to some purpose. She immediately decides that he’s trying to force her to marry Lyle and stomps out, indignant—but the next day she’s the cat who swallowed the canary, that “the older man had found her fit and worthy to be brought into his tightly knit family. Yes, I’m sure I could get Lyle, she thought without vanity.” I’m not sure what she calls it, but I probably wouldn’t use that word, either. Arrogance is more like it.

She nods briefly to sanity in passing when she realizes that “she had always despised people who used people, and here she was doing it, using Lyle to impress Lotus and to shake up Bruce,” but maybe it’s her lack of success with either plan that really has her rethinking her morals. Because the next day she seeks out ski instructor Günther to play more games on Lotus and Bruce. She scores a date, but on their way to a restaurant out of town, the Ferrari runs out of gas. “How lax of Günther, she fumed, not to check the gas tank before setting out on a long, deserted road.” Needless to say, once Günther gets back after a long, cold walk to find gas, he aborts the date and takes Kay home. Narrow escape!

Perhaps because she got nowhere with Günther, she’s longing once again for Bruce. Then, waiting for him outside his office for their next big date, she sees a woman storm angrily out his door and learns that the woman has just been fired. Bizarrely, though she knows nothing of the situation, Meredith becomes furious with Bruce and stomps off, deciding it’s over! He should be so lucky! When rich old Mr. Emerick is brought into the hospital with a heart attack and his wife is AWOL, she decides—did I mention zero evidence!—that she’s off with Bruce somewhere. Bruce shows up at the hospital, and she’s furious that he dare show his face after he was “out looking for excitement with someone else’s woman.” Honestly, Meredith is a psychotic who should not be allowed anywhere near dangerous drugs, let alone a nursing license.

Bruce explains that the victim of the fired woman’s crime was a poor single waitress with two children to feed, but regardless he’d had another chat with the fired woman who had admitted the theft and was “hostile and defiant,” so everything he’d believed about the situation is proved true. For one quick second Meredith realizes her hypocrisy and decides she will never be jealous again! Then, as she sees the heart attack victim’s wife’s devastated face, she wonders without batting an eyelash, “How could anyone make snap judgments about other people?” But life is going to bloom and prosper for sweet people like Meredith Hale! I threw up in my mouth as I closed the book.

Meredith is a horrible person: immature, selfish and inconsiderate, with absolutely zero self-awareness. Sure, she’s come to her senses at the end, but she’d had flashes of insight at other moments in the book and gone right back to her appalling ways within minutes, so I have no confidence that she will stay on the straight and sane this time. This book is written in a flat, dull prose, with bizarre details that go nowhere (someone steals Meredith’s cake and won’t confess to the crime!). I kept hoping the object of her psychotic affections would wise up, but they only had about five dates, so I guess there wasn't time. The only exciting thing about this book was my realization that the author, Mary Dunne Collins, had written one other fairly bad book, so with this she may be in contention for a Worst Author ribbon come time for the Annual VNRN Awards! Stay tuned!