Retired nurses pay tribute to frontliners

It was 51 years ago, my student nurse classmates and I spent the afternoon excitedly preparing for the first formal ritual of our school days.

Having just completed the second of three years of nurses’ training at Metropolitan General Hospital School of Nursing, our capping ceremony was that evening. It was a beautiful rite of passage ceremony that ushered us into our final, apprenticeship year.

The capping ceremony was a kind of coming out ritual, the accompanying symbol of which was an updated student uniform.

During the ceremony, our nursing director “capped” each of us by placing our all-white graduate cap on our head. As third-year students we’d also be permitted to wear white shoes and stockings, a status symbol we’d been denied for the last two years.

Every member of the Class of 1970 was thrilled to have reached this milestone and delighted we could once and for all discard the ugly black shoes that had been mandatory footwear until that day.

Fast forward to 2020: we proudly graduated and had lengthy careers as registered nurses. Each of us has personal memories of patients we met, cared for and remember to this day.

Not all our memories are happy ones, but each of us knows that we made a difference in patients’ lives.

Our experiences may not have been as harrowing as those we see now during the COVID-19 pandemic, but we understand and empathize with nurses on the front lines risking their own lives to save others.

As retired nurses now, we are still proud to stand with our brave colleagues and try, in some way, to ease their work burdens. Many of us have made and donated the masks and scrub caps they need to protect themselves.

With compassion and in unity, we’ve also prayed for them. We have prayed that grace, faith and perseverance be granted to nurses all over the world and to their patients.

We, the Class of ’70, would have celebrated our 50th anniversary together in June. That being impossible now, we offer this letter as a celebration of nurses and the nursing profession in its place.

Judith Brown, Judith Creedsalisbury, Vickie Haley, Mary Killewild, Lynda Lang, Sandy Mcmanus, Thery King, Penny Perrin, Kim Peschiutta, Susan Rock, Lorraine Sweet, Barb Tiessen,

Barb Tetrault.