My biggest thing about Philadelphia was when I was Nurse of the Day (NOD) for the whole hospital. I was just a lieutenant! I will never forget because it was my birthday, December 1. It was a common statement made by folks who had nothing to lose to say, “Well, they can’t take away my birthday.” On this December 1, I kept saying, “People are wrong, they can take away your birthday.” I was the NOD and it started snowing on the evening shift. The military nurses had to come in but the civilian nurses were calling in sick. I had to rearrange the staffing in order to prevent a shortage. It worked out because I kept a couple of OB nurses over to work a double shift. I told them they could sleep as long as there were no patients coming in. If one more nurse had called in sick, I would have had to work that whole shift too.
I was transferred to Cherry Point, North Carolina, in 1977 and was the charge nurse for family medicine, basically females and pediatrics. It was a good experience. I was the only military nurse on night shift in the whole hospital. We had corpsmen and the civilian nurses that were on OB and in the nursery. It was full service but we had only 90 beds. If there was a “double header” in the OB, you would have to go and help with the second delivery. If there were more babies in the nursery than they could handle, you would have to go and help with that. On the weekends you were literally the OR nurse. If a patient came in and needed that OR, you did all the prep work, the circulating, and then you recovered the patient. Because I had the ICU experience, if we had an ICU patient, then I would end up providing the care.
I attended pediatrics resuscitation codes. One was a four-day-old baby and one was a twelve-month-old. CPR really works because both of the babies pinked up as we provided it. They wouldn’t breath on their own and the minute you stopped, they stopped. We lost both of them. The four-day-old was a T4 deficiency and the mother had lost a baby earlier to the same thing. At that time they weren’t doing genetic testing or counseling. They were assuming that probably all of her babies would end up with this deficiency so she wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant again. The second baby was a 12-month-old that came in as an abused child. The father said that the baby had hung herself off of the crib railing. The railing was an inch wide and there was no way she could have got it caught behind her jaw. That baby didn’t survive either. The father was arrested.
At Cherry Point I lived in the community. I bought a home because there weren’t any apartments there, and they all had waiting lists. I tried to “augment” a couple of times while I was at Cherry Point so I could go back to school. I was turned down for all of it, so I had a decision to make. Do I re-enlist for another two or three years or do I just get out? I spent two weeks crying while trying to make that decision. One day I woke up and I said, “I know exactly what I need to do. I love teaching corpsmen and I wanted to teach.” So I decided to get off active duty and I applied and was accepted to UCLA in the master’s degree program. I went to UCLA and received my master’s in nursing as a clinical specialist in acute care, adult medical-surgical nursing with a focus in nursing education. I contacted a reserve unit to try and get in but there were no billets. I then thought nothing of it. I didn’t realize I was still part of the Navy. I was just IRR.
* * *
Odette graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in 1981. She stayed in the Navy reserve and eventually became a lieutenant commander. During Operation Desert Storm she was recalled to Oakland Naval Hospital for ten months. After she returned from her mobilization she continued with the reserve and was involved in a number of military field exercises, helping to put together 196 care-plan algorithms that were computerized and placed on the corpsmen’s PDAs so that the corpsmen could use them to care for patients in the field. Odette was stationed at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C., as the reserve corps liaison. She acted as the commanding officer of several naval reserve units and retired from the Navy as a captain. As a civilian she has worked as a systems analyst and nurse educator, and now holds a full-time faculty position in the School of Nursing at George Mason University.
References
Doyle, E., and S. Lipsman. 1982. Setting the Stage: The Vietnam Experience. 25 vols. Boston: Boston Publishing Company.
Hovis, B. 1992. Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 1963–1964. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
Nurses in the Vietnam War. 1995. Nebraska Nurse: The Official Publication of the Nebraska Nurses Association 28 (2, no. 2) (1995): 1, 4.
Roark, J. L., M. P. Johnson, P. C. Cohen, S. Stage, A. Lawson, and S. M. Hartmann. 1998. The American Promise: A History of the United States from 1865. Vol. 2. Boston: Bedford Press.
Ruff, Cheryl L., and K. Sue Roper. 2005. Ruff’s War. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press.
Rushton, P. 2010. Gulf War Nurses: Personal Accounts of 14 Americans, 1990–1991 and 2003–2010. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Rushton, P., L. C. Callister, and M. Wilson. 2005. 1998. Latter-day Saint Nurses at War: A Story of Caring and Sacrifice. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.
www.vietnam-war.info/facts/facts3.php. Accessed August 27, 2011.
List of Names and Terms
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)
Air Evacuation Reserve Flight, 66th
Air Evacuation Squadron, 902nd
Air Force Bases
Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine
American Nurses Association
USS Arizona
Armstrong, Margaret
Army Medical Centers
Army Nurse Corps Candidate Program
Army Student Nurse Program
Association of Military Surgeons of the US (AMSUS)
Baczkowski, Jim
Bailey, Pearl
Barton, Clara
Bataan Death March
USS Benevolence
Bien Hoa
USS Bountiful
Brooks, Mary
Brown, Jerry
Bulshefski, Veronica
Cam Ranh Bay
Camp Bullis
Camp Eagle
Camp Pendleton
Can Tho
Cannon, Mary Ford
Case Western Reserve Francis Payne Bolton School of Nursing
Cat Fever
China Beach
Chu Lai
Conder, Maxine
Davis, Tim
Department of Health and Environment
Dickinson County Memorial Hospital
Dix, Dorothea
Dong Ha
Dragon Mountain
Duerk, Alene
Dustoff
Eagle Beach
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
Emil, Jan
Engle, Joan
Enterprise (space shuttle)
Erickson, Ruth
Evacuation Hospitals
Feeney, Bess
First Marine Air Wing
Flynn, Errol
Flynn, Sean
Fort Belvoir
Fort Benjamin Harris
Fort Bliss
Fort Bragg
Fort Des Moines
Fort Jackson
Fort Ord
Fort Sam Houston
Freedom Gate
Freedom Hill
George Mason School of Nursing
George Washington University Hospital
Godfrey, Walt
Gostlin, Bill
Hanoi Hilton
Harken, Dwight
USS Haven
Hayes, Anna Mae
Hemorrhagic fever
Higgins, Margaret
Hiroshima
Holme, Jeanie
Hospital Corps School
Hovis, Bobbi
Hue
Humphrey, Hubert
Idaho State University
Infantry Division, 4th
James Walker School of Nursing
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Johnson, Lyndon B.
Ken
nedy, John F.
King, Martin Luther
LaVenture, Ed
Lincoln Memorial
Long Binh
MAG 16 (Marine Air Group)
USS Marigold
Marquette University
McCumber, Sue Ann
USNS Mercy
Mercy Hospital School of Nursing
Miller, Jean
Montagnards
Mount Sinai Hospital
Nagasaki
National League of Nursing
Naval Air Station, Albany
Naval Clinic, Reykjavik
Naval Hospitals
Naval Station (Hospital), Da Nang
Navy Nurse Corps Association
Navy Nurse Corps Candidate Program
NBC
Nha Trang
Nightingale, Florence
Nimitz, Chester W.
Nixon, Richard
Nurses Association Alumnae
Oakland Athletics
Office of Naval Intelligence (NCIS, ONI)
Officer Indoctrination School
Operation Homecoming
Pack, VaLaine
Parks, Rosa
Pearl Harbor Day
Peter Brent Brigham Hospital
Pfeffer, Henrietta Herman
Phu, Sgt.
Phu Bai
Pinkerton Academy
Platoon
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Quang Tri
HMS Queen Elizabeth
Qui Nhon
Rach Gia
Radar Hill
Raye, Martha
USS Repose
Ricks College
Rolling Thunder
Rutgers University
St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing
St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco
St. Therese School of Nursing
St. Vincent’s Hospital
USS Sanctuary
Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals
Seattle University
Shellback
Sisters of Mercy
USS Solace
Stack, Robert
State University of New York
Surgical Hospital, 18th
Swedish Hospital School of Nursing
Tet Offensive
Texas Woman’s University
Titulinka
Todd, C. Edwina
Truman, Harry S.
United States Agency for International Development
University of Arizona
University of California at Los Angeles
University of Maryland School of Nursing
University of Michigan
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health
University of San Francisco
University of Utah
Veterans Hospital, Minneapolis
Victory in Europe Day
Vietnam Veterans Association
Vietnam Women’s Memorial
Vita Blue
Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing (WRAIN)
Wangensteen suction
Wathen, Jane
Westmoreland, William Childs
White House
Whitecell, Margaret
William Beaumont General Hospital