Lissa Colhoun is hoping to find the families of the patients her mother Jeanette Flora Pyke-Duthie (pictured) wrote about when she was a nurse in Napier. Photo / Warren Buckland
Lissa Colhoun is hoping to find the families of the patients her mother Jeanette Flora Pyke-Duthie (pictured) wrote about when she was a nurse in Napier. Photo / Warren Buckland
Nurse Flora Pyke didn't just give her patients care and compassion - she gave them life on the page, through poetry.
Her daughter, Napier woman Lissa Colhoun, was sorting through boxes salvaged from her shed after the Napier floods, when she found poems her late mother had written about patients during her time as a nurse at Napier Hospital.
Now Colhoun is hoping to connect with the families of patients her mother Jeanette Flora Pyke-Duthie, best known as Flora Pyke at the time, wrote about.
Colhoun's mother was a nurse at the hospital in the 1980s-1990s and had a penchant for poetry.
"I just thought, those people that the poems are written about, if I was a member of their family, to know that one of the nurses really, really genuinely cared, cared enough to go home and write about them, that would be so heart-warming," Colhoun said.
A few short yards Down along the street Dream comes crashing down Joy ride, incomplete
Your cries are as broken As your young and tender form I hold you tightly in my arms Another heartache shared Another burden borne.
"I think every parent can relate to the one about Peter ... what kid hasn't done something they shouldn't have?" Colhoun said.
The second poem dated May 28, 1986, is about Mike, a married man with two kids who worked at Tomoana Works and was in a motorbike accident. It reads:
What a cruel twist of fate would reduce you to this, A once strong totara tree, felled by stunning blow. You move about trance-like, childish in response, But your beauty shines through just the same, Simple, trusting acceptance. Mike, you move my heart.
The poems were found after the Napier flooding damaged boxes in Colhouns garage. Photo / Warren Buckland
Colhoun always knew her mother wrote poetry, but until she dug through the boxes, she hadn't realised some was about the patients.
They were in a folder labelled Hawke's Bay Community College, with notes from her studies.
Colhoun said what first struck her was notes about anaesthetic nursing which she read with her daughter Peyton, a trainee anaesthetic technician.
"I read out both poems and Peyton's eyes just filled up.
"It doesn't surprise me [that she wrote the poems] because when you're doing night shift like she did, you really connect with the patients during the night when they're their most scared and vulnerable."
Pyke-Duthie left school at 15 before going back to study and then training to be a nurse, graduating in 1981.
She was a nurse during the1980s, but an injury meant she had to leave the profession in the 90s.
The mother of four became a nurse because "naturally she was always very caring and very empathic" and she was "hugely intelligent" and when she hit her 30s had the "ambition to really make something of herself", Colhoun said.
She overstudied, buying extra textbooks to learn about the profession.
Jeanette Flora Pyke-Duthie, best known as Flora Pyke at the time, pictured when she graduated as a nurse in 1981. Photo / Supplied
In the early 80s when her mother was on early shifts and Colhoun got up early for her job as a postie, she would listen to the good, the bad and the funny stories her mother told her about the profession.
Colhoun remembers an anecdote from the time her mother cared for a friend of hers who had Aids.
With other staff being ignorant and judgmental about the condition, Colhoun was glad her friend was in her mum's ward.
"She'd go and talk to him during the night because he was terrified, as you can imagine."
The folder also contains several poems Pyke wrote about her own life experiences, family, and before she passed from cancer in 2004.
There are other boxes Colhoun intends to go through, and she hopes to find more poems.
If anyone recognises who the poems may be about and wants to get in touch with Colhoun, they can email Hawke's Bay Today at news@hbtoday.co.nz to have their message passed on.
