Laughter is the 'best medicine' for Birr nurse

A chronic and sustained bout of homesickness threatened to completely derail Mary Breen's plans to become a nurse when she left her home in Birr in March 1974 to make the 90 mile journey to Ardkeen Hospital in Waterford to begin her training.

“When I think back on it now I have to laugh,” she admits. “I might as well have been sent to outer Mongolia as to Waterford, I was just so homesick and if there was any way I could have got back to Birr that would have been the end of my days in nursing.”
The young Birr woman was so homesick that she admits writing to each of her parents, Roy and Theresa, separately at their home in Newbridge Street in the town to plead with them to bring her home!
Despite the inauspicious beginning to her career, Mary Breen did indeed graduate in nursing and went on to work at the coalface of the medical world for 45 years - 40 of which were spent as a staff nurse at the Midland Regional Hospital in Tullamore.
“All through school I either wanted to be a nurse, or to teach Irish,” she says. Even before completing her Leaving Cert in 1973, she had applied for nursing but was too young to start, so she learned shorthand and typing and applied for a job in the Civil Service. 
“When I got a letter from them saying I had been accepted I threw it in the bin because I knew in my heart of hearts that I was going to be a nurse.” 
Having finally decided to bow out from nursing earlier this year, Mary admits that she is “thoroughly enjoying” her retirement and is delighted to finally be able to go where she likes “at the drop of a hat” without having to first think of her work schedule!
One of the most instantly-recognisable faces on the corridors of the Midlands Regional Hospital in Tullamore for four decades, the former staff nurse says she was “blessed and privileged” to have been able to work as a nurse for so long, but quickly adds, “whether the other staff and patients were blessed and privileged to have me is another story entirely.”
Like her approach to life in general, Mary Breen's approach to nursing was always to greet everyone with a smile and a joke and she says she has “got back more, in spades” from her patients than she feels she ever gave to them.
“I have said it thousands of times throughout my life that laughter really is the best medicine, and it has always been my mantra that a laugh and a joke can help to diffuse even the most difficult of situations,” she says, lamenting the emergence of “political correctness” which she feels has “taken a lot of fun out of life.”
In her role as a mentor to student nurses in Tullamore over the years, Mary Breen says she always told them that all patients really want when they are in hospital is to be “met with a smile and a reassuring word, and to be treated with kindness and compassion.” Despite the many changes she has witnessed in the medical profession over the past 45 years she reiterates that “the basics of being a nurse always stay the same.”
Mary says her training regime was “light years away” from the experience of today's student nurses. “We had to live in the Nurse's Home in Ardkeen and every night the staff nurse and the porter would come around and shine a flashlamp into our rooms to see if we were all in our beds, and we had to have written permission to get a late pass,” she recalls.
After completing her training in Waterford, Mary Breen went to Scotland with four other nurses she had become friends with, and worked in midwifery at a maternity hospital in Fife for a year. “The five of us girls went through births, deaths and marriages over the years and thank God we are all still great friends to this day.”
While Mary says she “loved the babies” during her midwifery training, she wasn't sure that she wanted to actually work as a midwife. However, when she started working in Tullamore Hospital at the beginning of 1979 one of the first places she started working was in the maternity wing and she continued working there as a staff nurse until maternity services closed in Tullamore in the mid-1980s. She then worked in the medical unit until 1998 before moving to the Day Ward where she remained up to the time of her retirement.
“When I was working in Scotland the hospital was very modern and all the staff seemed so young, and the first time my mother rang me after I got the job in Tullamore I told her the hospital was full of aul wans, as I thought all the staff were so old compared to the modern and youthful set up I had come from in Scotland, wasn't that a terrible thing to say?” she remarks.
Over her lifetime in nursing, Mary Breen has witnessed many changes. She says the advent of a new uniform which included trousers was “a big game changer” and it took her a long time before she finally decided to “give in” and swap her well-worn white uniform in favour of trousers! 
“Of course the trousers are much handier and more practical, and the hat was a pure scourge when we were pulling screens around the beds because it was more often off than on, but I have to admit I loved my white uniform and hat,” she says.
Mary still laughs when she recalls the day she arrived in Waterford to start her training and was presented with “eight snow white uniforms, and they were so long they came half way down my leg.” The wearing of jewellery was strictly forbidden and the student nurses also had to wear skin coloured tights and white shoes. “Our uniforms had to be clean, white and crisp at all times,” she recalls.
Among the many other changes which Mary Breen has witnessed is the advent of new technology in hospitals; the closure of the maternity unit at the old Tullamore hospital, and the building of the new hospital; the advent of a nurse training school in Athlone IT; the emergence of very strict guidelines and protocols in the health service and the huge numbers of consultants and other ancillary staff now employed in Tullamore.
Making the decision to retire was not an easy one, but once Mary made up her mind there was no going back. 
Her only sibling, Seamie, who lives in Clondalla, Birr with his wife, Rita, and family, always advised her to get out of nursing with her health, and she said she had “a lightbulb moment” one night she came home from work with an aching back and was too tired to stay up to watch one of her favourite TV programmes. When she went into work the next morning she announced her intention to retire.
“I can truthfully say I enjoyed every day of my working life and I was lucky to work with the loveliest of people at every level, so what more could anyone ask for?” she ends.