Brother’s book pays tribute to war hero nurse

Irene Courtney was a true war hero, a Canadian nursing sister who survived a sinking in the Mediterranean Sea and brutal warfare in Italy and yet she died, nearly alone, in a Windsor hospital where some staff regarded her as a time-consuming burden. Her much younger brother, Vincent Courtney, himself a combat veteran of the Korean War, has been doing a slow burn for a decade over the care, or lack of it, his elderly sister received following a fall in her Riverside Drive apartment that left her a quadriplegic.

Now, in a cathartic exercise, the sharp-witted 83-year-old cancer survivor has selfpublished a book, The Good Nurse, a Woman’s Heroic Service during World War Two, that constitutes both an indictment of our overburdened health-care system and a loving tribute to a sister he idolized. Courtney, a former Detroit News staffer and longtime public relations executive, categorizes his book as a historical fiction novel but concedes it’s primarily an accurate biography of a woman who was left with deep emotional wounds — we would call it PTSD — from her war service but went on to devote her life to nursing. The sad irony is that this tough, demanding individual, a former nursing professor at universities in North Carolina and New York City who was twice honoured at the White House for her service, ended her days in the hands of a dysfunctional system that had little to offer a whipsmart 89-year-old trapped in a body paralyzed from the neck down. Courtney, who visited his sister nearly every day and became her ardent defender and advocate, documented her jarring medical odyssey and was tempted to make that the book’s subject but decided there was more to Irene’s life that needed telling.

On Nov. 6, God willing, Courtney will mark the 75th anniversary of the night Irene and 100 of her fellow Canadian nursing sisters, along with more than 1,800 Canadian soldiers, ended up in lifeboats following an attack by German aircraft that sank their transport ship, the S.S. Santa Elena, off the coast of Algeria. What had been a glorious adventure, sailing from Britain to Naples, Italy, turned into a night of sphincter-loosening fear as the German planes launched radio-controlled bombs, the first cruise missiles, that sank or damaged six vessels. Miraculously, nearly all of the 6,000 men and women who abandoned ship were rescued.

But even in those grim circumstances there was humour. Courtney, who got his sister to open up about her wartime memories in her latter years, describes how Irene and her fellow Canadian nurses had to take over the lifeboat oars because the ship’s crew, Puerto Rican sailors, had never rowed a boat. Singing lessons followed, with the Canadian nurses belting out that old tune: “Roll out the barrel. We’ll have a barrel of fun,” before their rescue. There was no barrel of fun that Christmas. At the Battle of Ortona Canadian infantry battled elite German paratroopers for control of the Italian coastal city. Irene, who had volunteered for a front-line surgical unit, witnessed unspeakable horrors as mutilated young men from both sides were rushed in for treatment as artillery shells screeched overhead. Vince, who served with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Korea as a 16-year-old, where he and his comrades battled the Red Chinese Army in the 2nd Battle of the Hook in late 1952, clearly writes from experience when he describes bloody wounds, dead bodies and the devastating impact of shrapnel. He’s been there. The book draws a deeply disturbing contrast between the compassionate care Irene received at Detroit hospitals and that allotted to her in Windsor. And yet he doesn’t blame the doctors and nurses here. He describes them as “dedicated professionals constrained by the deficiencies within their underfunded workplace.”

Much has changed over the past decade, including hospital locations. But Courtney places most of the blame for the issues he witnessed on inadequate funding that causes rationing of medical and hospital services and “tragically long waits for surgery.”

This is a fascinating read, but a deeply unnerving and even infuriating one for anyone over a certain age anticipating medical issues. It’s available on Amazon and at Biblioasis.