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.

Volunteer Nurse

By Arlene Fitzgerald, ©1967
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenfeld 

Why had she really come to Silver Creek? She knew she wanted to help people in distress. Was being a nurse the best way? Was it the way to escape Ron? Now she would have to find the answers for two other people: the man who had stolen her heart and the one who had claimed it.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
This book was not bad, but reading a decent novel has seldom left me more disappointed. Author Arlene Fitzgerald has delivered the awesomely dreadful Harbor Nurse, so I had high hopes that I would encounter more fabulously bizarre plot twists like the nurse ziplining out to a fishing boat during a hurricane to help amputate the leg of a fisherman who was attacked by a shark. Alas, no such excitement befalls Nurse Glee Barlow, who has volunteered to spend a few weeks at the JCAHO-certified Silver Creek Clinic in Arizona in a town with a population of 525. Like many VNRN heroines, she has a fiancé she doesn’t think much of, yet cannot bring herself to decide she shouldn’t marry. Ron Snider is a “terribly spoiled” mama’s boy, the apron strings strengthened by the fact that mother is very rich. “Ron had been proposing regularly, and he felt that she would be willing to settle down to a husband and babies.” She, on the other hand, worked hard to become a nurse, and “wanted to be free to do as she pleased as a full-fledged R.N. and as a woman at least, for a while.”

En route to her clinic, Glee’s car is nearly hit by a horse-drawn carriage caroming out of a dude ranch. Slamming on the brakes and not wearing a seatbelt, she takes a blow to her sternum—or rather, “the steering wheel crushed the soft roundness of her breasts,” in typical Fitzgerald fondness for inserting sexual references into irrelevant descriptions. The carriage driver immediately pulls her from her car and starts fumbling with the buttons of her dress, insisting, “I’m not being fresh. I’m a qualified M.D.” Phew! Her relief is enhanced by the fact that Dr. Kirk Tesdal is one of those homely men who is nevertheless “unnervingly handsome,” and she drives off thinking she would like to see him again.

And she does! Because it turns out that he’s in town to interview for a job at the clinic, and though he’s superlatively qualified (his ineptness at unbuttoning blouses notwithstanding), he’s turned down for the job because he’s not married. Hmmm. When Glee arrives at the clinic, she finds that it’s holding a few cases of anthrax. You’ll be intrigued to know that Glee has a photographic memory, and recalls several pages of her medical textbook verbatim, even obligingly turning pages now and then for us, so we can appreciate the intricacies of the disease, which is treated with a lot of scrubbing up and incinerating clothes and bed linens, and injecting Dr. Tesdal with penicillin “into the firmness of his buttocks,” which Glee accomplishes while admiring his tan line and lean waist. 

The medical staff manages several crises including another horse-drawn carriage crash that results in one victim requiring a splenectomy, a car crash in which the driver’s arm is nearly severed and handily sewn back on, and a heart attack. We are treated to some of Fitzgerald’s usual tricks, such as her fondness for “slashing” with a “firm mental scalpel” at any inconvenient thought, and her reliance on “firm nurse’s discipline” to get through difficult tasks like crossing a raging creek (of which there are many in the Arizona desert) on a fallen log. But overall the author’s idiosyncrasies, which have driven me practically insane in some books (see Young Nurse Rayburn), are infrequent here, and the worst sin she commits is the idiotic but unfortunately common trope of giving the heroine an unlikable fiancé yet rendering her completely shocked to discover in the final pages that she doesn’t really love the jerk after all. But there are some plusses as well, such as the fact that the medicine and surgery described in the book is detailed, interesting, and fairly accurate. Arlene Fitzgerald has given us one other B-grade book in Daredevil Nurse, so this completely readable and even entertaining book is not a total anomaly for her. But, paradoxically, I might have enjoyed a worse book more.

High Country Nurse

By Virginia Smiley, ©1970

Lovely young Cass Fleming wanted nothing more than to be a good nurse. But suddenly her work at City Hospital, the suffering of small helpless children and kind elderly people, seemed too much for her. To make matters worse, her fiancé, Dr. Dan Driscoll, could not understand her feelings. Could she marry a man who was that cold-hearted? Cass decided she needed to get away from it all—to sort out her bruised and mixed-up emotions. The remote Navajo Reservation, where her Aunt Norma taught school, seemed the perfect refuge. But “getting away” wasn’t quite that easy. There were the Navajo people whom she quickly learned to love, and who needed her help. And there was the tall, self-assured young flyer, Sandy Russell, whose playful mockery suddenly turned into something much more serious. Cass realized there was no escape from life and its decisions … and the most important decision of all still lay in wait for her.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
Nurse Cass Fleming, apparently just a few years out of nursing school, is already burned out. Working at City Hospital in Phoenix, she has witnessed both children dying of cancer and elderly people dying of old people diseases, and she just can’t take it! Plus she had a fight with her fiancé, Dr. Dan Driscoll! So she decides to take a four-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—and heads off into the desert to visit her aunt Norma, who is a schoolteacher on the Navajo Reservation. 

OK, I know, you’re already bracing for the racist attitudes of the Great White Woman descending into sandy poverty to bring holy healing to the unwashed, and I will in fact be making reparations in the form of a donation to the American Indian College Fund, a truly inspiring organization that has already benefitted from another horrific book I’ve read (Peace Corps Nurse) and, unfortunately, is likely to be hearing from my checking account in the future as well. On the whole, however, High Country Nurse is less appalling than other VNRNs I’ve read, in that our heroine Cass actually seems to respect and admire the Navajo people she meets. She does, however, feel that their lifestyle is backward—never mind that they were forced out of their homelands and marched on the Long Walk to a prison camp, and then to a piece of land no one else wanted, not exactly prime farmland. Can you blame the Navajo for not trusting anything white people brought them?

Initially Cass is reluctant to get involved in the community clinic, run by an aging Dr. Barton, who begs her repeatedly to help out even for a few hours, but she is on vacation, she insists, and still struggling to get over her heartbreak from witnessing bad outcomes in patients she had cared for. But before long a crisis forces her to get involved, helping to ferry a man with appendicitis to the hospital on the local medical rescue helicopter piloted by heartthrob Sandy Russell. The patient sleeps the whole way, but that’s all it takes for Cass to overcome her reluctance, and now she’s showing up at the clinic in a pale green shift because she neglected to bring any nursing uniforms with her on the trip.

She’s also hanging out with Sandy, and increasingly musing over fiancé Dan’s shortcomings in classic VNRN style. “Dan would want a large, well-staffed office in the best section of the city, with patients in the upper-income bracket.” “Dan had always been so very serious, almost to the point of being stuffy.” “Sometimes lately, when she thought of Dan, he seemed shallow and a bit selfish.” So naturally, when Sandy asks her why she doesn’t wear her engagement ring on her hand—she keeps it on a chain tucked into her blouse—she jams it back on her finger, snaps angrily at Sandy, and, when he coolly says goodbye, she decides, “She would return home to repair her relationship with Dan—and just as soon as possible, they would  be married.” Because marriage will fix everything!

Central to the story is a young girl, Daisy, who wants to attend school but is prevented from going by her grandmother. This is one of Cass’s biggest obsessions during her stay, and she tries again and again to befriend Daisy as well as win over Grandmother Many Blankets—who may recall the compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans that attempted to wipe out Navajo and other Indian Nations’ culture, but no one ever bothers to ask Grandmother about her objections.

Cass’s vacation winds down, and with Sandy now a bit more cool, she heads back to Phoenix to her job, but soon finds it—and her betrothed—a bit dull. “Cass did her work efficiently, but it was always the same—assisting the doctors on rounds, routine work, taking orders, endless orders. More and more often, in spite of her intentions to push it aside, she thought of Dr. B. and his clinic. There, she had shouldered responsibility—there she had felt alive.” Furthermore, Dan has not turned out to be all that great, surprise! Furthermore “since you came back, our dates have been a bit on the dull side,” Dan says. So she decides to return his ring, because “the butte country had changed her. There was no use in trying to force him out of her mind any longer,” she says, and then, out of nowhere, “She was in love with the young flyer.” Now she’s mooning over Sandy, but can’t possibly tell him how she feels.

Eventually Daisy, now ill with tuberculosis, runs away from home and collapses on Cass’s doorstep. Sandy’s helicopter, coming to carry her to the hospital, frightens Grandmother, who is hot on Daisy’s heels. Grandmother believes the helicopter and its radio to be “magic,” though it’s inconceivable that she hasn’t seen the ubiquitous chopper before. Suddenly Grandmother is on board with white man’s medicine and education as well: “You take Daisy to place in city to make her well. Then she will go to the school like other boys and girls.” This shockingly sudden about face sweeps Grandmother’s years of resistance away with the backwash from the helicopter rotors, delegitimizing her feelings without even informing the reader what they even were.

Another side story is Navajo Louise Beh, who wants to go to nursing school, but whose father, a medicine man, is against it. Cass visits Louise in Louise’s home, and “there was, Cass noted, nothing in the room to show that an Indian family loved here.” Louise says, “White man’s school has taught me much better ways,” and my heart broke for poor misguided Louise.

This book is fairly simplistic and formulaic, with cardboard characters and perfunctory writing that yielded nothing for the Best Quotes section. While the thinly veiled racism will make you wince, there’s not much else here to either upset you--or interest you, either. If we hear a lot about sand, we really don’t have much description of the southern Arizona landscape.  Like the other two Virginia Smiley books I’ve read (Nurse Kate’s Mercy Flight and Nurse of the Grand Canyon), this book is not the worst I’ve reviewed, but it certainly is a flat and arid desert.

Jill Nolan’s Choice

Book 3 of 4

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1963

Why, Jill asked herself, had she left Bradburn Memorial Hospital to work in the wild and open backwoods country? Was it because she had felt unsure of her love for Giff? Had she hoped, during the year that she would be away from this operating table and his kisses, to test their love? And was that, she thought uneasily, the reason she could turn to Clay Ramsdell so easily—because she did not, truly and deeply, love Giff? Yes, Jill thought, absence makes the heart grow fonder … but of whom?

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:

With this volume, we continue the times of Jill Nolan, RN, as she makes her way toward matrimony; after that point, we need no longer bother with her. In this book, Jill has decided to work at a Navajo clinic in northeastern Arizona for a year, working alongside Dr. John Gray Cloud. John was a friend of Jill’s fiancé’s when the boys were in medical school, and when he stopped in for a visit in Kentucky, where Jill and Giff live, love, and work, his tales of the beauty and hardship on the reservation tugged at Jill’s heart. So she packed her bags and set out for the Southwest for a year-long stint there.

Before she even arrives at the cinderblock clinic, she meets local rancher Clay Ramsdell, and assists a young Navajo woman who is losing a battle to deliver a breech baby. Jill wades right into her scrubs and the woman’s uterus, turning the baby and saving two lives with complete aplomb, and now she is known throughout the reservation as a nurse who has life-saving magic.

Most of the book follows Jill as she navigates Navajo lands, people, and language, and this is the rare VNRN about non-white people that treats them with honor and decency. The Navajo people we meet are poor, but they are largely dignified people facing the steep challenges of prejudice and poverty. Jill’s main struggles throughout the book are, unfortunately, less dignified: She can’t decide if she really loves Giff.

Jill’s decision to leave Kentucky for this year-long sabbatical is never really satisfactorily explained, as even she doesn’t seem to understand it. Now and then, intruding on an otherwise lovely story, are her never-answered musings on the subject, and the corollary, whether she should go home or stay in Arizona, where she is deeply needed and enjoying a very satisfying career—a decision she makes suddenly and without premeditation, much to my chagrin. She is just as uninsightful about her boyfriends: She often sternly reminds herself that she loves Giff, and then wonders in the next sentence why she is attracted to Clay, before she shoves away the entire topic and goes off to set somebody’s broken leg. (I did wish she would spend more of her time doing the latter and less of the former.) Her debate over her feelings about Clay is largely internal, as although he kisses her once, he never brings it up again, and the two just hang out in an essentially platonic relationship. Then, in the end, she makes an unstartling discovery out of the blue about whom she really loves, and the book comes to a disappointing and abrupt close. Now, I recognize that the entire premise of a VNRN is that the young lady is supposed to choose a fella by book’s end, but I’d like to feel that her choice is a sound one, and well thought out. Here her decision, given top billing in the book’s title, is mostly just the thing that came easiest. It’s the most disappointing aspect of this otherwise excellent book—but since Jill really spends little time at all thinking of her love life, this book is certainly worth reading, whether you’ve met her in the previous two volumes or not.

Star Lansing−Arizona Doctor

By Ruth McCarthy Sears, ©1971
Cover illustration by Gordon Johnson

Young and lovely Dr. Star Lansing loved the wild Arizona country where she was born and raised. Here she dedicated herself to helping the poor but proud local Indian tribe, raising needed funds by treating wealthy patients at the exclusive Desert City spa. But Star faced an agonizing crisis of loyalty when dashing Air Force Colonel Whittaker Blake swept her off her feet. Whit was determined to install a missile site in the area, despite heated community protests, and he asked Star to be his ally. Could Star side against her own people? Could she lower her standards as a doctor in the name of patriotism? Was she truly loved, or merely being used? It took a dramatic medical emergency, and a startling revelation of character, to help Star find the answer hidden in her heart.

GRADE: C

 

BEST QUOTES:

“What a gal like you needs is a houseful of rambunctious kids.”

 

“Why would a beautiful gal like you want to be a doctor, of all things? Nurse, maybe, until the right man comes along. But lady doctors scare off the men.”

 

REVIEW:

Star Lansing is a doctor who specializes in tropical diseases. Naturally, she’s decided to practice in Desert City, Arizona, where she caters to the well-to-do folks who come to the area for the spas and golf resorts. There’s a large population of poor Indians on the local reservation, and she moans a lot about the abysmal health care they receive, but she’s too busy cashing checks from her rich patients to help at all on that score; her excuse is that she is burdened with the large, insolvent family ranch that she has to keep afloat.

 

There are two men in her life. Dr. Hugh McEvers is the other local doctor, but he is “disheveled, charmingly irresponsible, and completely incompetent,” not to mention always late, lenient with nurses, and indulgent with his patients. Impossible man! But he’s fun to be with, so she goes out with him on occasion even if “Star wished that Hugh might be more sincere, more reliable, and that she might permit herself to fall in love with him.” Because Star strangely seems to view every man, no matter how unlikely, as a future husband, until circumstances demonstrate what the reader has seen at first handshake, that the guy is utterly and irrevocably wrong for her.

 

Meet the other man in her life: Col. Whittaker Blake, who has come to town to build the missile to end all missiles, or maybe just the world. It’s called, curiously, Baby Doll, and everyone is patriotically gung-ho about the project except Star. Her first objection to the plant is that it’s brought a lot of foreigners to town: “Poles, hillbillies, Puerto Ricans, Southerners, Mexicans, Armenians—” and these ne’er-do-wells just get drunk and beat up the locals. Not only that, but “movie theaters were deserted, except for the missile men and their bawdy women who clapped through the serious scenes and yelled with mirth at the comic ones.” To make matters worse, their jerry-built housing is causing real estate values to plummet, and “even the Indian and Mexican household help had absconded from domestic jobs, lured by the compensation” offered at the defense plant. And Col. Blake just laughs at her when she brings up these hardships! The nerve!

 

But he is awfully cute, so Star quickly gets over her indignation and starts flirting, offering to take him horseback riding out at her ranch, her pulse quickening: “She wanted to know this man in whose hands all the military responsibility rested, really know him.” So she dates him when she can, gets crabby when he doesn’t call, and wonders “when would Whit need and want her as a loving woman? And how long must she wait—wait—until every nerve in her body stopped quivering at the sight or nearness of him and she could utter the words forever crying in her heart: Oh, Whit—love me—love me!” Star is, in a nutshell, a shallow tramp.

 

Anyway, the problem with this little fantasy of Star’s is that every time she’s actually out with Whit, they invariably fight about how hard he drives his crew and how he insists on sham physicals for the workers so as to prevent delays in the schedule, as a regular exam would take everyone off the job for too long. And he thinks Indians are “lazy and incompetent.” But that’s just a minor hiccup for Star, who has visions of nosegays and white organza. She continues to defend Whit, to herself and to the townspeople, telling Hugh that Whit’s “a serious, dedicated person—one who should be an inspiration to all of us,” and never mind about his utter lack of regard for a fellow human being.

 

Then, out to dinner with Hugh one night, suddenly he’s the one her heart is all a-pitty-pat for—maybe because Hugh looked “better groomed.” Amazing what a comb and a tux can do for a guy, “something so tremendous, so steeped in magic that it was almost unreal.” In a twinkle she decides that if Hugh proposes tonight she’ll say yes, and I decide that I am thoroughly disgusted with Star Lansing, and the book’s just half over. But the fairy-tale ends abruptly when the Colonel crashes her date, so she tells him off—and this has nothing to do with the fact that he’s been out dancing at the country club with other women, and she’s been stewing over it for the last two chapters. Whit’s response is to ask her to marry him, but though fickle Star “would have been filled with a joy too great to deny a week ago,” now she’s not sure. “She had waited for him to call, yearned for the sound of his voice—was it only a week ago? What was she made of?” An excellent question.

 

As with many VNRNs, an epidemic pops up to put things to rights. Star and Hugh work relentlessly to track down the cause—good thing she spent all that time studying tropical diseases! It’s leptospirosis, passed around by a litter of puppies sired by her own dog, so it’s curtains for all the canines, including hers—not to mention a few of the missile plant workers, but it’s the dead dog that really puts the kibosh on her lust for Whit, as now she holds him responsible for both the dog’s death and the epidemic as well (though I’m not sure I follow her logic). The rest of the dominoes soon fall neatly into place: A new health clinic for the Indians, a happy ending for Whit and Star’s childhood Indian friend, and—best of all—an engagement ring for Star! So everyone is finally happy at the end: Star can die a happy and complete woman, and we can put away for good this overly long novel about a man-hungry, shallow, and annoying doctor.