Since we started this week with nursing memories let us continue since it was about this time that i started the Army Nurse Anesthesia Program. I had returned from Viet Nam in January 1973. I was assigned immediately to the Fort Ord Hospital but was then notified that I had been accepted to the anesthesia program that was beginning in May. I drove from Monterey California to El Paso Texas. I remember entering the Fort from the west gates. I was surprised to see a lot of road and building signs in German. Fort Bliss was a NATO training site and I had driven through the Luftwaffe gate.
The Anesthesia Program was a two part program starting with these 7 months of didactic study.
The first day of class we entered into a low green building and met our director, LTC Ruth Saterfield
with her assistant Major James. The LTC was tall lady and Major James was short stocky man.
We were assigned desks on which were a stack of text books. Some of the titles were Adrianis "Text of Anesthesia Physics" Guyton's "Medical Physiology", Goodman's "Pharmacology", Wylie & Churchhill-Davidson's "Practice of Clinical Anesthesia", Smith's "Anesthesia for Infants and Children" and "Interpretive Blood Gas Analysis" to name a few.
The stack rose 4 feet above the desk and Major James informed us that "by the end of your 7 months WILL have read and you WILL know the content of this stack before I would allow any of you to get near a patient." Perhaps that is why I still recall the titles so vividly.
"ab initio ad finis"
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