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  CHERRY AMES, STUDENT NURSE

  CHERRY AMES NURSE STORIES

  CHERRY AMES STUDENT NURSE

  By

  HELEN WELLS

  Copyright © 1944 by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 2006 by Harriet Schulman Forman

  Springer Publishing Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Springer Publishing Company, Inc.

  Springer Publishing Company, Inc.

  11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor

  New York, NY 10036-8002

  Production Editor: Print Matters, Inc.

  Cover design by Takeout Graphics, Inc.

  Composition: Compset, Inc.

  06 07 08 09 10/5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wells, Helen, 1910–

  Cherry Ames, student nurse / by Helen Wells.

  p. cm. — (Cherry Ames nurse stories)

  Summary: An excited, eighteen-year-old Cherry Ames enters the training program at Spencer Hospital that will lead her to a nursing career in just three years.

  ISBN 0-97715-970-1 (pbk.)

  [1. Nurses—Fiction. 2. Hospitals—Fiction. 3. Medical care—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W4644Ch 2005

  [Fic]—dc22

  2005051739

  Printed in the United States of America by Bang Printing

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  I

  CHERRY STARTS OUT

  II

  NEW FACES

  III

  MISS MAC

  IV

  NURSE! NURSE!

  V

  ALIAS MONA

  VI

  THE PROBLEM OF VIVIAN WARREN

  VII

  AMES’S FOLLY

  VIII

  EMERGENCY!

  IX

  CANDLE WALK

  X

  FOUR A.M. MYSTERY

  XI

  THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

  XII

  FAREWELL AND HAIL!

  Foreword

  Helen Wells, the author of the Cherry Ames stories, said, “I’ve always thought of nursing, and perhaps you have, too, as just about the most exciting, important, and rewarding, profession there is. Can you think of any other skill that is always needed by everybody, everywhere?”

  I was and still am a fan of Cherry Ames. Her courageous dedication to her patients; her exciting escapades; her thirst for knowledge; her intelligent application of her nursing skills; and the respect she achieved as a registered nurse (RN) all made it clear to me that I was going to follow in her footsteps and become a nurse—nothing else would do. Thousands of other young people were motivated by Cherry Ames to become RNs as well. Cherry Ames motivated young people on into the 1970s, when the series ended. Readers who remember reading these books in the past will enjoy rereading them now—whether or not they chose nursing as a career—and perhaps sharing them with others.

  My career has been a rich and satisfying one, during which I have delivered babies, saved lives, and cared for people in hospitals and in their homes. I have worked at the bedside and served as an administrator. I have published journals, written articles, taught students, consulted, and given expert testimony. Never once did I regret my decision to enter nursing.

  During the time that I was publishing a nursing journal, I became acquainted with Robert Wells, brother of Helen Wells. In the course of conversation I learned that Ms. Wells had passed on and left the Cherry Ames copyright to Mr. Wells. Because there is a shortage of nurses here in the US today, I thought, “Why not bring Cherry back to motivate a whole new generation of young people? Why not ask Mr. Wells for the copyright to Cherry Ames?” Mr. Wells agreed, and the republished series is dedicated both to Helen Wells, the original author, and to her brother Robert Wells who transferred the rights to me. I am proud to ensure the continuation of Cherry Ames into the twenty-first century.

  The final dedication is to you, both new and old readers of Cherry Ames: It is my dream that you enjoy Cherry’s nursing skills as well as her escapades. I hope that young readers will feel motivated to choose nursing as your life’s work. Remember, as Helen Wells herself said: there’s no other skill that’s “always needed by everybody, everywhere.”

  Harriet Schulman Forman, RN, Ed.D.

  Series Editor

  CHAPTER I

  Cherry Starts Out

  CHERRY SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON HER SUITCASE AND tugged. There! The two stubborn locks finally clicked shut. This would make her new uniforms look like accordions and she mourned for the new blue dance dress. But at least they were in. Cherry puffed and with a toss of her head sent the dark brown curls off her glowing cheeks. Then she sat bolt upright on the suitcase and gasped.

  “How do I look?” said Midge from the doorway. Billowing over her small figure was Cherry’s gray probationer’s uniform and crackling white apron, miles too big for her. From around the collar, her freckled face peered out, grinning impishly.

  “Midge Fortune!” Cherry exploded. “You thirteen-year-old hazard! Unhand that uniform right away! Do you want to make me miss my train?” She darted after Midge and wormed her out of the dress. “And now I’ll have to battle with that suitcase again!” she groaned. She gave the squirming Midge a little shake. “Honestly, if you weren’t Dr. Joe’s daughter, I’d cut you up for stew and feed you to my worst enemy!”

  “You haven’t got a worst enemy,” Midge pointed out calmly. She folded the garments with care and bravely attacked the suitcase. “And besides,” Midge went on, with a fine disregard for any connection, “your new red suit is the best-looking thing in Hilton.” She looked at Cherry admiringly.

  And Cherry was well worth admiring. She was slender and healthy and well-built; she moved with a proud erect posture that made her seem beautifully tall and slim. Her eyes and her short curly hair were very dark, almost black—the clear-cut black that glistens. Groomed to crisp perfection, Cherry was as vivid as a poster in her red wool sports suit. And her face fairly sparkled with warmth and humor.

  She pulled the little matching hat over her curls, just as Midge banged the suitcase closed. They both hastily sat down on the lid while they pressed the locks shut.

  “What’s left out,” Cherry said grimly, “doesn’t go traveling.” But she knew she had not forgotten anything. Cherry might not always be prompt but she was neat and she did get things done. “My lone virtue,” she thought, “neatness.”

  “Aren’t you women ready yet?” It was Cherry’s twin brother, Charles, racing up the stairs and into Cherry’s room. Strangers found it hard to believe that Charlie was Cherry’s twin, for he was as fair as she was dark. He was a tall athletic boy with ruffled light hair and alert blue eyes. Charlie was entering the State Engineering College this fall. He flashed Cherry an understanding grin and picked up her bulging bag.

  “Well, it’s a good thing I’m strong and healthy! What do you have in this thing?” he asked. “Half a dozen of your future patients?”

  Midge rushed to Cherry’s defense. “She’ll be the best nurse that ever——”

  “Of course she will,” Charlie interrupted, his blue eyes amused. “In fact, Fortune, Nurse Ames will be even better than that.”

  Cherry laughed at being called Nurse—she had no right to that title yet—but a little thrill shivered down her back just the same.

  Charlie pretended to bend his broad shoulders under the weight of the suitcase. “They’d never let you on a plane with a ton like this.”

  “I knew yo
u’d find a plane in here somewhere!” Cherry laughed. “Why don’t you learn to be a pilot and get it over with?”

  “That may not be a bad idea,” Charlie replied. “Well, come along, Fortune. Train time is no time to sit down and discuss our careers.” He swept Midge and the suitcase before him down the staircase. Midge wailed back over her shoulder:

  “I wish you weren’t going away!”

  Cherry looked around her familiar room. “I almost wish it myself,” she thought. At the window, crisp white ruffled curtains were gracefully looped back with red ribbon. Her little dressing table wore white dotted swiss skirts and saucy red bows. The oval hooked rug was one her great-grandmother had made. Her bookshelf held the books she had carried to school and now was leaving behind. She wondered what her new room at the Nursing School would be like.

  Cherry swallowed hard. She did not feel eighteen and through with high school and almost a student nurse. For all her dreams and hopes, she still was not entirely sure nursing was for her. All the tales she had ever heard flashed through her mind—you see so much suffering, you scrub floors, you might give the patient the wrong medicine, and all the other nightmares. Probably nonsense, the whole lot of them. Cherry wanted a profession of her own. More than that, she wanted to do vital work, work that the world urgently needs. She honest-to-goodness cared about people and she wanted to help them on a grand and practical scale. But did she have all that it takes to be a nurse? Could her dreams survive three stern years of training? Well, she would learn the answer very soon.

  Cherry walked lightly to the window where the very top of the lilac bush brushed against the screen. It was the first of September and late summer flowers bloomed in the yard—asters, marigolds, vibrantly blue delphinium, and her mother’s favorite though struggling dahlias. “I won’t be here this fall to see how the dahlias make out,” she thought. She looked down the tree-shaded street where she had so many friends. A giggle leaked out as she remembered the Hallowe’en their crowd had rung all the doorbells for streets around and solemnly handed their neighbors pumpkin faces. The good-humored neighbors had responded by giving them apples to bob, corn to pop, and Mrs. Pritchard had provided a feast of homemade pumpkin pie and cider. It was a good thing the neighbors had a sense of humor. And she remembered that never-to-be-forgotten outdoor party she and Charlie had given two summers ago, with lighted paper lanterns strung across the shadowy lawn and forty of them playing “Hide the Moon, Sheep” and that bottomless freezer of her mother’s peach ice cream for an inspired home base. Well, good-by to all that!

  Cherry sighed and resolutely started for the hall. She took one last peek into Charlie’s room, plastered with models and photographs and blueprints of airplanes. She looked into her parents’ large serene room with the blinds drawn green and cool against the sun and sparrows chirping on the window sill.

  “You can’t be homesick already,” Cherry told herself with a grin, and went down the curving staircase. “Sick rooms won’t be as attractive as these but a lot more exciting things go on in them!”

  “Cherry!” her mother called from the porch. “Only five minutes more, if you want to stop at Dr. Joe’s!”

  Cherry answered vaguely and stole another minute to say good-by to the house. She wandered through the pleasant mahogany-and-blue living room, through the sunny dining room with its bay window banked with waxy green plants, her mother’s tiny sewing room, and the gleaming white kitchen. On the shady back porch, she took one last deep spicy whiff of homemade corn relish and sun-preserved strawberries, stored in the cool cellar. Now she was ready to go.

  Her mother rose from the porch swing as Cherry came out. She was a youthful, sweet-faced woman, with the most understanding eyes in the world, Cherry thought. Cherry put her arm around her.

  “Glad you’re going?” her mother asked.

  Cherry nodded. Her eyes shone like black stars but she did not trust herself to speak.

  “Honey, there’s one thing I want to say before you go,” her mother said. “If you—if you find you don’t like nursing or if it’s too hard for you, you won’t be too proud to come home?”

  Cherry tossed back her curls and laughed. “No one’s going to make me say die! And I have a dreadful suspicion that I’m going to love it! But seriously,” she said gravely, “unless I’m good at it, I’d have no right to stick it out.”

  Mrs. Ames smiled. “Well, Dad and I feel you’ve chosen just about the finest profession there is. And just about the most necessary one in wartime. We’re mighty proud about it. And we are both sure that you’ll do good work and win your cap.”

  “I certainly hope I win my cap,” Cherry responded. “Because if I should not——”

  An impatient whir from the car sent them running across the front lawn.

  “Dr. Joe?” Charlie asked.

  Cherry nodded. Dr. Joseph Fortune had ushered her and her brother into the world, and Cherry had always loved him. And then, during her high school years, when she was growing up, two things had happened. Molly Fortune—that laughing, competent, tireless woman—had died, leaving Dr. Joe alone to battle with a doctor’s poverty, an unmanageable daughter, and a dwindling practice. Hilton said Dr. Joe was either a genius or a fool. For why would the town’s best doctor neglect a thriving practice to fiddle around in his little homemade laboratory with some experiments? But as Cherry grew up, she—and only she—really understood what he was doing. Those long weeks and months when his house went undusted unless Cherry herself straightened it up, when Midge’s high jinks led the Ames to take her delighted prisoner in their home, when Dr. Joe forgot to eat unless Cherry forcibly fed him, he was leading a lonely crusade.

  Singlehanded, with quiet courage, with endless patience, Dr. Joe was finding new ways to help and save human lives. After the night Dr. Joe explained to her what his precious drug was, Cherry for the first time took a deep interest in her biology and chemistry courses at school. And to her amazement, she was good at them, once she really tried. And after the long golden Sunday when Dr. Joe performed the miracle of the drug on Tookie the cat, Cherry knew she, too, must play some role in the world of miracles and life.

  They pulled up now before the Fortunes’ white frame cottage. Cherry alone went up the overgrown path and past the door that needed paint so badly. “Some day this shabby little house may be a shrine,” she thought. She hurried through the living room, all topsy-turvy as usual, but dusted in Midge’s own fashion. Cherry automatically straightened the curtains as she passed by. She did not call out to Dr. Joe—he would be too absorbed to hear anything less than a four-alarm fire.

  Cherry stood poised in the doorway affectionately looking at him. Dr. Joe was delicately preparing a slide. His sensitive face was deeply seamed but somehow it was a beautiful face, with a child’s wondering eyes. His shock of thick gray hair and slight figure were like a boy’s.

  “Dr. Joe,” Cherry said softly.

  He looked up and smiled and set down the slide on the microscope’s shelf. “Is today the day?”

  Cherry nodded and came to sit down on the tall stool beside him. He scanned her face with penetrating eyes.

  “I suppose I ought to say certain things to you—about working hard and intelligently—especially since I feel responsible for your going,” he said in his deep halting voice. He smiled his reticent smile. “But I think you know all those things, Cherry.”

  “I hope so,” Cherry said. Suddenly she felt more sure of herself. “Yes, I do know them.”

  Dr. Joe patted her hand and beamed at her in silence. They never had to talk very much in order to understand each other perfectly.

  “How’s it going?” Cherry asked.

  Dr. Joe drew a tray of test tubes toward him. “The experimental part is going along beautifully. But I don’t know how well it would stand up in a real laboratory. Your hospital has a magnificently equipped laboratory.” His tired eyes shone. “And of course all this should be tested on patients—if anyone would ever give me the chan
ce and believe in what I’m doing.”

  “I believe in it.” She wished with all her heart that she could help him.

  “I know you do, Cherry. But until it is tested, it cannot be accepted and—and vice versa.” He tried to grin but it was a shaky grin. Dr. Fortune rose and paced slowly around the cluttered laboratory. “Once I prove this drug, I want to return to my practice. After all, this drug research is for my patients. And for the patients of other doctors! This drug could save so many lives!”

  He held up the precious test tube. They both looked at it with respect and hope, for this was Dr. Joe’s dream trembling on the brink of fulfillment.

  Cherry felt very young and inadequate. “Do you think that—that I could ever save anybody’s life? Me?” She looked at Dr. Joe humbly. “You, Dr. Joe, you know so much—and I guess your enthusiasm’s catching—” she grinned, “but I’ve got to start learning—from scratch—maybe I’ll never——”

  “Child, you will learn! And some day you will be able to say to yourself, ‘This man or that woman is alive and well because of me.’ Cherry, child, just you wait until that woman who was past caring whether she lived or died gets well enough to ask for her mirror—and the little boy who lay listlessly in his bed for weeks demands seconds on roast beef—because you worked and cared for them!”

  Cherry’s cheeks flamed and her dark eyes sparkled. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her red sports suit, and hoped Dr. Joe was right about her.

  A door slammed and Midge bounced into the laboratory with her hair on end. Cherry thought she looked like one of those imps who never walk sedately like ordinary people but land in places unexpectedly by flying or leaping.

  “Oh, my heavens,” Midge panted, tugging at her father’s white coat. “I forgot to get you your lunch! I just remembered because my own stomach is speaking up. Come on, I’ll——”