50 Years Of Caring
Dorothy Dyall decided the double celebration of her five decades in nursing and the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth deserved a book on this tough but highly rewarding profession. Her anthology of 50 short stories describes exploits such as creating makeshift teddy bears for anxious patients and warding off a knife-wielding assailant. Dorothy Dyall’s mum and dad clearly weren’t thrilled when their daughter told them she wanted to be a nurse. “To them, nursing was one of the worst jobs, as I would have to take care of sick people,” she writes in the introduction to her amusing and sometimes touching tale of her half century in the profession. “They wanted me to take up a career as a teacher or office worker. (But) at age 16, while I was an inpatient in a hospital, I sneaked out for my nursing application interview.” She turned 17 on January 2, 1970, and started nursing training at Singapore General Hospital a month later. After working in Singapore, Papua New Guinea, the Northern Territory and Victoria, she arrived in Perth in 2005. Dorothy still works 32 hours a fortnight at Fremantle Hospital where she has been since 2007, because, as she says in her book: “As I venture into a season of semi-retirement, I am still a nurse and will always be one”.
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western nurse March – April 2020
Dorothy enjoying the Victorian country area while working at Bunyip Hospital in 1979 as a triple-certificated nursing sister
