Description
Mrs. Butler talks about her patients and the toll that war had taken on so many of them.
Nancy Butler
Mrs. Butler was born in Ayr, Scotland on April 19, 1926. She did her basic training as a nursing orderly in Kitchener, Ontario. From there she went on to the St. James Military Hospital in Saint John and in 1945 she was sent to the Sussex Military Hospital where she tended to some of the most seriously injured men.
Transcript
Well some of them were in casts for months, like body casts, like all the way down and very hard. Well, we had lots of occupational therapy and then of course you had your regular therapy where they had to go down to different rooms and do their exercises, the ones that could because they, a lot of them were either in wheelchairs or crutches or whatever on these wards till they got better and it took, would take a long time you know for them to recuperate. And at that time we had some of the patients, some of the boys come back from Hong Kong on another ward that were the Hong Kong prisoners and I worked with them for a little while and it was sad some of their stories, really. I became very close to a Bob McGinn from Fredericton, I often wonder if he is still living. He was a very nice chap that I had met in Sussex at the hospital and he just seemed to take a liking to me and we'd go down to the show, a small theatre that was in Sussex every now and then, you know. Some of them were so thin. Of course they didn't have that much food or anything when they were in the, in the prisons (Interviewer: They'd be like 80lbs or something? ) Yeah, that's right. We have a picture of a chap outside there, Charlie Mahoney. Of course Charlie's passed away, I knew him well and when he came back he wasn't too, he was quite skinny when he came back, I'll put it that way. And it was such a shame to see, you know, all these people come back that, they'd been through so much and a lot of them they never specified too much anyway. It's like my husband, he went all through France, Italy, Germany, Holland and all those places but they never spoke too much about any of their ordeals, just a few. Cause my husband and his brother were in Italy at the same time only they didn't know that and his brother got shot. In fact he lives in Aurora, Ontario just outside Toronto, and he still has the bullet in him but he's confined strictly to the wheelchair now but when he was younger he used to try to get around on the crutches.