Home from work

Every morning Witt Caulkins wakes up, he’s in the same place where he once removed gall bladders and repaired flagging hearts. His former operating room at the Waynesboro Community Hospital is now his bedroom at Summit Square.
Dr. Caulkins, who spent his entire professional career (1955-1988) in Waynesboro, came to the brand-new hospital from the Medical College of Virginia because he believed a new hospital like Waynesboro’s would invite other professionals committed to keeping up with medical advances.
He’s not the only current tenant of the retirement community who remembers helicopters landing outside and beds crowding the halls during a flu epidemic. Other staff members, who spent decades together as trusted colleagues, chose the converted hospital as their home.
Helen Gallaher, the admissions clerk from 1962-1985, remembers a time when she escorted new patients to their rooms.
“Of course, it was always the night before surgery,” she said. “We didn’t do surgery the same day as admission in those days.” Gallaher makes her home where the laboratory once was.
Lyn Short, who began as a secretary and became a certified histologist, goes home at night to the former morgue.
“Actually, I used to spend quite a bit of time in there,” she said. She prepared slides and frozen sections from 1975 to 1985.
Edna Bays, a nursing supervisor who worked there from 1960 to 1984, lives in a patio home in the former parking lot; and Pat Fracher, the director of nursing from 1968 to 1989, said her apartment is a former patient room.
All take pride in their long service and the level of care they provided their patients, most of whom they knew personally. Families and neighborhoods were close-knit, hospital staff members were easily recognized as they did their errands around town, and everyone knew who was in the hospital.
Pat Fracher said her office was in a busy corridor where patients were admitted from the emergency room, so she kept an eye on what was ahead for her staff.
Being in a small community did have some drawbacks, Dr. Caulkins acknowledges.
“Sunday nights I’d make my rounds and the patients were exhausted. If someone was in the hospital, it was reported in The News Virginian and it [was] also announced in the churches. So everyone visited Sunday afternoon and no one got any rest.”
Bays talked about nursing in the 60s.
“We wore the caps of our nursing school,” she said. “When we put them on, it was like we were putting on our dignity.”
White stockings and white starched uniforms completed the outfit of the hospital nurse, although this began to change in the ’70s and ’80s. The nurses credited Dr. Caulkins with being a nurses’ advocate.
“Not all doctors appreciated the nurses,” Bays said. “But we had good ones here.”
She also mentioned Dr. Thomas Gorsuch, who trusted the hospital nurses with life and death decisions.
“He had the rescue squad pick up a nurse before going out on a call,” she said. “So often it was a heart attack, and we could shock the heart back into rhythm.”
Before the age of specialization, doctors took turns handling the emergency room.
“It didn’t matter whether you were a surgeon, an obstetrician, a pediatrician, or an eye doctor, if it was your turn, you were there,” Caulkins said.
That was how he came to deliver a baby in the hospital hallway when he saw the mother couldn’t wait for an obstetrician.
“I knew I was doing okay when I saw the nurses nodding their heads,” he said.
Later, the different specialists worked it out so a representative from each was always on call.
Bays said that Caulkins rushed to the lab one time when a man giving a blood sample went into cardiac arrest.
“He did open heart surgery right there in the lab,” she said.
In the days when health care was less formal than today, the hospital kept patients who were too ill to go home, or had no one at home to care for them.
“One gentleman was here for almost a year,” Fracher said.
They kept chronically ill patients for a short time so their families could get away, took in Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center patients over the holidays so that staff could take off, and were the first in the area to offer hospice care.
Caulkins said a hospital pharmacist came up with the idea of unit dosing – pre-measuring prescribed medications for each patient to reduce the chance of error – an idea that was soon adopted by other hospitals all over the country.
Other memories had to do with working together during emergencies. Three of the old friends were on staff during the snowstorm of 1963, when 33 inches of snow closed everything down. Doctors and nurses who were at the hospital stayed for days; others – like Bays, who lived nearby – walked in to provide some relief.
“I clearly remember doctors serving breakfast to patients,” she said. “We were that short staffed.”
Before beepers and cell phones, staff kept their ears tuned to the public address system in every room and hallway, listening for a “code blue” or a lesser emergency.
Computers and modern pharmaceuticals have changed medicine a great deal and so has managed care.
“We used to make the decisions, based on the welfare of the patients,” Caulkins said. “There are a lot of restrictions now.”
The former colleagues and friends all agree the transformation of the old hospital they loved into a retirement home has been a wonderful thing for Waynesboro.
“It’s a terrible thing for a big old building to remain vacant in a residential neighborhood,” Caulkins said.
“This was a wonderful place to work, and now it’s a wonderful place to live,” Short said.
“All the memories here are good ones.”