Not Your Average Nurse

The Entertaining True Story of a Student Nurse in 1970s London

By: Maggie Groff

Narrated by: Catherine Milte

Award-winning novelist Maggie Groff shares stories of her richly varied and at times unusual former nursing career.

'Over time, I nursed victims of war, the posh, the poor, the famous and the infamous.... Oh, the stories I can tell!'

To a young girl, the life of a student nurse sounds exciting, but with long hours and short shrift it's never easy. So when Maggie Groff embarks as a student nurse at London's King's College Hospital, she must quickly get to grips with the demands of her chosen career. It's sink or swim.

In a delightful romp through time, played out against the march of feminism and the fashion, music and movies of almost half a century ago, we follow Maggie's highs and lows as, with trial and much error, she becomes a highly skilled nurse and sets sail for a new life in Australia.

From the watchful gaze of stern ward sisters and the ordeals of nursing at a poor housing estate to becoming an industrial nurse at the iconic Sydney Opera House, Maggie shares her stories of mistakes and mayhem, tea and sympathy and the life-affirming moments that make it all worthwhile.

©2017 Maggie Groff (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Excellent, touching, funny and heartfelt

Wonderful account of life of a NHS student nurse and her very varied travel , work and life experience starting in 1970’s in UK!

Interesting step back in time

I enjoyed this audiobook, especially since I was a nursing student in America in the late 1970's and am an Anglophile. This was a well written story, partly very funny; partly sad, but always true to reality regarding the nursing profession from my perspective. I noted similarities and vast differences in my own experiences as I listened to her antics and stories about her student years and beyond. Interestingly, the author relates all that is noble in nursing to the NHS and fails to do the same regarding poor working conditions and low pay, both of which dismayed the young nurse upon entering the profession. I’m not sure why she felt the need to malign the historical viewpoint, still shared by many, that nursing is a calling or vocation, but she did. Despite these facts, I would buy another of her books should she write again.

Excellent

Her account of being a nurse to a full fledged nurse is lively, humorous at a fine pace. The performance was well done. I recommend this book to anyone loving medical stories. A thumbs up!

Wonderful. Nursing has come a long way!

Any additional comments?

I loved this story. I learned a lot about how far nurses have come. There was no drama-just a peaceful telling of the life and strides a nurse took from the beginning of her career. Now the author's daughter will have everything important about her Mom's nursing career down on paper to pass down to her own children.

Boring, Uneventful, and Privileged

Not Your Average Nurse, certainly not your average book. Your below-average book, more like. The whole thing is uneventful, boring, and shallow. There are only a few stories of nursing that are a little interesting and worth reading. The rest of it is superficial, with overly exaggerated humor every other sentence that became boring after a short while. Sadly, such exaggerated humor is the only thing in the book that would even keep your attention at all.

She talks about conversations in the pub with her friends, going to the beach on vacations, wearing tight jeans to concerts, drinking at parties, boyfriends and patients she's attracted to, and the such. You'd think that if these things are worth her putting into a book, she'd have nothing good to say.

And she didn't.

Memoirs usually aren't literal memoirs, but this is just that. If you want to read the diary of a 18-22 year old girl, this might be the thing. The entire first 5 hours - half of the book - were about her first 2 years in nursing school. With no organization of particularly touching stories or any categorization of information. It just follows her from ward to ward, a few months each, as she does her rotation. They're different alright, but none of them stand out particularly. I'm just not really into this, as I don't personally know her, and none of her life stories are that interesting, so I'm not attracted to her diary.

If you're looking for a book with real interesting, heart-wrenching, emotional stories of not only nursing but the state of the society as a whole, from a broader and maturer point of view than a girl in her early 20s, check out Call the Midwife. If you've finished Call the Midwife and are here looking for something similar, you will most likely be very bored.