Half-century of serving others
Retiring nursing stalwart has just about seen it all
WHEN registered nurse Gobbie Miles, 68, started nursing, patients were still smoking in their beds and even had ashtrays on their side tables.
“One of my most vivid memories was of this man, Mr Rose,” she said.
“He had a double amputation because of gangrene and was on oxygen because of problems with his lungs.
“He was in the intensive care unit. Suddenly I smelled cigarette smoke and there he was, with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his oxygen mask.
“‘Just give me that cigarette before you set the whole world on fire’, I said to him,” she said, laughing.
Next week Miles, one of the founding members of the first intensive care unit at Provincial Hospital as well as one of the first nurses to work on an advanced life support ambulance, will retire from Life St George’s Hospital.
Impeccable in her dark-blue uniform and steel-rimmed glasses, Miles – who was also a teacher and an ICU nurse – was humble about her long service to the Port Elizabeth community.
“The other day they had a party for me here at the hospital. They told me I must give a lecture and I spent hours on it,” she said.
Miles, who grew up in Molteno, said she had come to Port Elizabeth for the first time a day or two before she was due to start her training at Sharley Cribb Nursing College in 1966.
“I really wanted to study history and literature, but my parents didn’t have money to send me to university,” she said. “I had never been to Port Elizabeth before.
“At the time, Provincial Hospital was the training hospital in Port Elizabeth.”
She was part of the team of nurses that set up the first ICU at the hospital.
“We had a three-bed unit for heart patients and a three-bed unit for patients with respiratory problems.
“From then on I always worked in ICU, but I started there because they were looking for nurses.
“We had just started ventilating patients and often we would just do it behind a screen,” she said.
“Back then you could see how a ventilator breathed for a patient.
“It wasn’t like today [where] you only see the numbers and press a few buttons.
“The doctors set our first intensive care nursing exam. You had to do your oral exam, like doctors do. They filled a room with doctors and they all asked you questions.”
It was during this time that Dr Ray Bosman, who started the ICU unit at Provincial Hospital, started the Echo 1 ambulance service.
“We just named it after the call sign. We used to go on calls with portable ventilators to help patients. It was very exciting,” Miles said.
“It is the children we looked after I remember most fondly.
“I can’t often recognise my patients on the street, but sometimes people come back to say hi to us.
“Our patients are sedated and very ill when we take care of them. Even if you recognise someone you can’t exactly walk up to them and say, ‘I know what you look like without clothes’,” she said.
Miles left Provincial Hospital about 20 years later to teach fulltime at Sharley Cribb.
She later joined the intensive care unit at Netcare Cuyler Hospital.
She has been working three days a week at Life St George’s Hospital since 2008.
“I have loved my job. Every day I could go back and say I was still learning and still enjoying it.”
She said the fast advances in life support technology had been a bit tough on her – especially as they had started without computerised machines and the nurses had to do everything themselves.
“The patients’ beds had these lit- tle monitors at the foot showing the vital signs and you would sit with opera glasses [small binoculars] to make sure you could see all of them,” she said, laughing.
Miles forced herself to learn how all the new machines worked.
“I would sit with the handbooks and the printouts from the machine, saying: ‘I am not sure what this machine says, but it looks just like this picture’. ”
Miles’s plans for her retirement include managing the indigenous nursery she and her husband run. “I won’t be back again,” she said. “I have taken a decision – 50 is a nice round number.”
‘ Suddenly I smelled cigarette smoke and there he was with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his oxygen mask