NURSE Dawn Griffis sent shock waves through her hospital when she arrived for work with orange hair.

The sister on duty at the Horton General Hospital at Banbury couldn’t believe her eyes.

Mrs Griffis, then Nurse Alsford, recalls: “I foolishly decided I wanted to have my hair bleached blonde. Goodness knows why, but I finally convinced my mother to do it for me.

“Mum tried to tell me it would be very hard to get it blonde, because I had so much natural red in my hair.

“Eight hours and many treatments later, I had the most orange hair you could ever wish to see.

“I thought I would pick up a rinse and put it on my hair to tone it down, before I went on duty. I got a pink rinse, the worst possible colour - it made it worse. There was nothing else for it. I was going to have to go on duty as it was.

“I knocked on Sister’s office door, poked my head in to tell her I was on duty, and left rapidly!

“Nurses with her said her mouth dropped open and she said: ‘What was that?’ They told her they thought it was Nurse Alsford. It apparently took her some time to regain her composure. My life on the ward went downhill from there.

“For the next week, I did not hear a civil word from Sister. I received a load of innuendoes, to suggest I was a prostitute. She nit -picked everything I did.

“The final straw came when she accused me of taking a patient’s walking stick. I told her I had no use for the stick, and that I had hooked it on the radiator behind the patient’s bed. I later found it had fallen off the radiator and was leaning against it.

“I was so angry with Sister, tears were running down my cheeks and I told the other nurses I was going to report it to Matron.

“I did the unthinkable thing and marched straight into Matron’s office with only a brief knock on her door. There I stood staring straight at her, with my orange hair, and told her I was there to put in a formal complaint about Sister.

Oxford Mail:

“Matron told me to calm down and to go back to the nurse’s home and rest before going on duty. When Sister returned, she could not have been nicer to me.”

Thanks to mum, the orange hair was quickly dispatched and dyed brown, but Mrs Griffis, who now lives in the United States, isn’t allowed to forget her faux pas.

She tells me: “At our nurses’ reunion in 2008, I was asked if I remembered my orange hair episode!”

Memory Lane this week

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