Was nursing and midwifery really like call the midwife??

[Goingforplatinum]

I've been rewatching call the midwife on Iplayer and would love to have been a nurse like they show on screen.
As a nurse for the last 10 years I hate my job, I spend 5 minutes with a patient and 20 minutes writing about them, that's not why I went into nursing. They seem to have so much time for each patient they see and not overrun with paper work and constantly covering their back.
Was that really what nursing was like back then??

My grandmother was a midwife and district nurse in the east end at that time. Her stories were mainly harrowing and about the extreme poverty and suffering she saw.

I love watching CTM but isn’t the whole point of it is that it’s looking back on the time with nostalgia and recounting the story? My mum had her four children from late 1950’s to mid 1970s, I remember that she was very proud that she didn’t ‘make too much of a fuss’ in labour, as this was apparently frowned upon, and that she didn’t have any sort of pain relief as if it was a badge of honour.
A friend of my mums who had her eldest in the mid 60s had a stillbirth, after which she was transferred to the postnatal ward with all of the new mums and their babies and she was told to shut up and not carry on about it. No support or aftercare post birth, just told to go home and that it was just one of those things. She didn’t get to hold or spend any time with her deceased son. Everyone has their own view / story to tell, I’m sure CTM hits on some bits that are very accurate (sense of community, midwives / doctors / nurses having more time for their patients), but it is meant to be looking back at that time as seen through rose tinted glasses.

My mother had a full term stillbirth in 1962, a year after I was born, and she didn’t get to see the baby. We don’t know where she’s buried. Then when she was having her next baby she was taken into hospital for six weeks bed rest prior to having my brother. Children weren’t allowed to visit in the antenatal ward and I have a vivid memory of my father taking me and my older brothers and holding us up to the window, where she was knitting a balaclava, and us waving at each other. I was four at the time. My brother was delivered safely, but her next baby was another full term stillborn. This would have been about 66/67 and he is buried in the family grave.

When I was badly burned at 11 months old I spent two months in hospital and my parents were only allow to visit for an hour a day. I was traumatised and had many nightmares as a young child, screaming for my mother and her not coming.

It certainly wasn’t all roses in the 60s.

In saying all of this, I remember getting my tonsils and adenoids out when I was five and in those days you had to stay in hospital for a week. The younger nurses would pile a load of children on to a trolley and zoom them up and down corridors, with children squealing with excitement 🤣 This was all good until they piled the children on to a trolley and took us to a playroom near the theatre. A nurse would come in and say your name and you had to go with her. When I saw the children’s slippers in a pile at the theatre door I bolted, with nurses chasing me down a corridor, was then dragged into theatre and pinned down into the table so they could put the mask on me to anaesthetise me. I never went back on one of the trolley rides, no matter how much they told me I wasn’t having another operation - they weren’t catching me out again!

I had my tonsils out in the 60s too. As you say, brief visits from parents. Bizarrely, my Dad had to smuggle toothpaste into the ward as I wasn't allowed to brush my teeth. What on earth was that about??

so sad for our mothers' generation and what they went through

I know someone who is pushing 100 who used to be a midwife.

They share similar stories to Call The Midwife, both positive and negative.

I also had my tonsils out in the early 60s. They used to give you ice cream afterwards in those days. When my son had his out in the 1980s, it was cornflakes!