A nurse discovers a terrible secret

“If walls could talk”, oh boy have I heard this a few times! If this were possible I would tell as many as I could! I often muse this to myself as I see the people wonder this hospital I am in.

You see this city hospital in Central England is one of great note, one of the largest, helping thousands daily, and I see everything.

If the people could hear the size and weight of what I have seen, I doubt they could truly fathom it without questioning their sanity.

One nurse however has tried recently though and you’ll see what I mean by this burden being heavy…

She, Becky, has worked as a registered nurse specialising in paediatric care and has recently joined the department as of a month ago. Every day has been an eye opening experience for I can see how it affects her, tears and moments to the side happening more often than most for new staff. I had initially wondered if she was really cut out for this. The university training and degrees she must have obtained to get here ideally would have prepared her somewhat, for what follows. But I’ll bet you that that studying life was, for the most part theory and this one is around 95% context and ever changing. Some naïveté was at play here but still, reality has its way of hitting you in ways you can’t predict I guess.

The first sense I got from Becky having an inkling to an understanding was seeing her notice just how the patients rooms are looked after. No one else, not even the ones whose role it is to ensure I am clean and ready for the next patient, had that look she had that first day. I could sense she was thinking, on some level about what had happened here before, and in other patient rooms. She appeared to be thinking about the great joys, and great sadness that had happened in these rooms, from the look on her face.

If only she had known crimes were happening as well, she may have turned away, blind eye and all that.

Are you intrigued as well?

Becky sure was.

During the first week she was beginning to ask questions out loud, to herself when she was alone, sometimes though to colleagues, all of whom brushed her off as weird and peculiar.

I wasn’t brushing her off though. I noticed something special was happening with her.

The second time I noticed her was after seeing to a patients care (the child happy and comfortable), she was beginning to run her hands along the walls, an off look in her eyes, like she was searching to understand some history she couldn’t grasp.

What was she trying to do here?

This question I found myself asking often and let me tell you, no one has made me do this yet!

I tried my best to follow her gaze and to see how well I could lip read her.

What has happened here? What have you seen? Should I know?

This was the best I could manage which certainly matched the look of continued confusion she had across her expression.

I didn’t though, know where to begin with answering her for there was too much to unpack. Great joys are happening here, yes, but make no mistake, great wrongs are too. The pressures I see the staff going under here is unimaginable. How is the human race supposed to deal with its own miseries and stress levels when they get this high this often? This is the cause of the downfall of many, either with drug use, gross incompetence that risks patients safety, to outright maliciousness. Remember I said crimes earlier?

Becky however was continuing ever on in her quest despite my lack of preparation in knowing what the origin point was.

Why her? Why now?

This hospital and I have seen the darkness within the human soul many times. For over 50 years I have been nothing more than an passive observer….but Becky and her inquisitiveness were beginning to stir something in me that I have never felt before.

A fortnight in and all of this doubt and wondering was making me ask;

Is there a purpose here? I have been comfortable in this position, for a long time, for a reason. Who is this young woman to change this now?!

This was dangerous territory.

But who for? Becky or myself? Or both?

I didn’t know.

The more I saw her, tending to other children and their concerned family members and then looking pensive again the more I recalled places in this hospital that might give her some answers. Might even stop some of those crimes I felt that were growing more and more in my mind as terrible.

They had to be stopped… something about what I had seen didn’t seem…right. Especially in the East Wing.

Why would the humans do these things?

Never has an answer shown itself. I try and try to understand why you all are masters of your own demise at times with the ups and downs you go through, but I just keep coming up empty.

There’s no logic to it.

Was this Becky’s doing though, making these doubts come to the surface?

Why have I started becoming the one doubting my own position! I am the observer, I can’t make change!

Despite my own confusion however I felt compelled to do something.

Anything.

In all the time I have ever done more than observe, all I have been able to do is change the mood of the room, change the lights, make the doors move. All that has ever done is frighten the humans. Talks of ghosts haunting the place is all I hear (I see them often enough near the morgue, but I don’t classify as those things!) and because this has always been futile I have given up ever trying it again.

Thinking about Becky though, made me feel she might be able to understand.

At the start of the third week I decided to try a connection. When she would ask a question, I would give a nudge. When she was in room 202 seeing to lovely Tommy with his sprained ankle, Becky began asking more questions, to herself when she was alone.

“Am I going insane? Why do I feel there is something wrong with this place?”

Her smile she had after seeing Tommy off was now gone and deserted, now in place a look of great worry.

“The stories can’t be true can they?”

What did she know?

To this, I tried getting her attention by gently flashing the light in the room…

…tensing for her reaction…

…which was as I knew it would be, as others before her, with a quick head turn.

“Someone there?” Came her gasp as she looked frightened for the first time.

I didn’t push it; I really didn’t want to scare her here…the result of where her questions would go would do enough of that. I needed to gauge the room, literally.

So, I waited for her to ask again.

“Is someone there?”

A very gentle pulse of the light this time. Warm lighting, attempting ease.

This worked, as her arms fell slowly to her side.

Is she ready to understand now?

Using further testing I made a trolley outside the room slowly move down the corridor, passed her door…hoping she would catch sight and follow.

With edgy breaths…she did.

I needed her to go to East Wing. She needed to see what was happening. I needed to show as much as she wanted to be shown.

A flurry of some unknown feeling was coursing through me in this moment as for the first time ever, I was being listened to.

Becky was either transfixed by the surreal experience herself or genuinely determined to see what was at the other end, either way it was enough to quell her fear that inanimate objects were moving around her.

We had arrived.

The East Wing of the paediatric ward was quiet. Only a few nurses were milling around at this late hour. All the children within were silently sleeping.

“Oh hey Becky, what brings you here, didn’t your shift finish hours ago?”

I then saw one of the nurses has spotted Becky walking alone next to a empty trolley, the sight making her brow furrow into confusion.

This particular nurse I needed gone right now!

“I was just having a wonder around, trying to get a map of this place a little more you know. Such a large place after all.”

“Uh huh.” The nurse had clearly found Becky’s response odd, “you guys work enough hours getting to grips with things, so you need your rest. Go on, get yourself home girl!”

“Yes you are right. When my partner is ready to come pick me up in twenty I will do just that.”

“Well ok then, see you soon.”

Go away now Nurse Gregory we do not need you interfering!

To ensure I had this distraction distracted I made the lights down the corridor she was heading flicker enough to catch her attention away from Becky.

Becky was hoping for the same, I could tell, as she swiftly turned away from Nurse Gregory, now though unsure as to how proceed.

To this I let a single room down a different corridor of rooms stay lit, as the others were dark.

Getting ever closer I felt more and more anxious, like this moment was going to slip and Becky was just going to walk away.

But on she persisted. As she got closer to the room she became more aware that this was not a patient room but instead a room for the secure location of the drugs used on the ward.

“Why here?” She said out loud this time, as if expecting a reply from a colleague.

The room was dimly lit by a single lamp within, which I had aimed at a single fridge, seen through the door window.

I allowed her access to this room.

No words from Becky followed this as she went inside, silently closed the door behind her, and then crouched to open up the fridge to see a selection of drugs she knew were used on the wards, much like the ones she did.

Only this was different. This fridge was showing a near empty amount of insulin, a hormone used to treat diabetes.

“How can they have so little amount?”

Becky was again talking to herself with questions that I burned to answer.

Because someone is using too much of it, that is why!

Seeing Becky, trying to understand but still clueless was making me start to feel desperate. All of the times I had seen doctors, nurses and other hospital staff abuse their position against those they were supposed to be caring for was monumental. Here was my chance to really stop the one nurse I had seen doing harm to others like I had never seen before.

With a decision that I feared might send Becky over the edge I made a clipboard fall to the floor.

The clipboard that showed who was signing out what drug and for what purpose.

Finally Becky saw it.

A nurse who was using way more of the normal drug use from this fridge than others were using.

A nurse was giving suspicious reasons for the drug so therefore was potentially using it to cause harm.

A nurse currently in the hospital alone with her...

Nurse Gregory!

Becky then fell on to the floor from her crouched position as she held her hands to her head.

“My god no!”

In a desperate flood of panic, she rushed to get her phone as a memory I could guess was beginning to take hold. I soon saw she was researching events that had occurred at this hospital, ones she had to have read earlier.

Abnormal rates of children collapsing, others going into cardiac arrest, suspicions mounting onto what on earth was causing such things as this. Police presence was beginning as well.

And here was Becky with a firm finger to point at the very nurse was using a rate of drugs beyond the needs of anyone else!

Thankfully I was able to get Becky safely away, having guided her to the nearest exit to her secure journey home with her partner.

Leaving Nurse Gregory alone in the hospital, with me and my new focus…

I knew it wasn’t a solid case but I had planted the seed. Becky knew what she was going to do. The following police enquiry began with this and further evidence I was able to nudge in her direction.

This hospital wasn’t going to have any more evil, and I was going to do my best to stop another Beverly Allitt even if it meant driving myself insane in doing so!