Getting back in the swing of things...
Describing the residential setting of Hyde in great detail.
Describing the policy and proceedure in regards to the following:
Dining arrangements
Showering
Laundry
Medical Aid
Student Jobs
If any or all of these items can be affected by staff or fellow students please explain how and cite a personal example.
Laundry: Not sure if I remember this with utmost accuracy, but I do believe that
most of the dorms had a couple of machines. If your dorm did not, you used the machines at one of the other dorms. I am thinking something on the order of 2 washers, 2 dryers per...
Kids generally did their laundry on weekends, there being so little unstructured time during the week. An exception might be if machines were in your building and you could just manage to coordinate being there when they finished, etc., but this would be rare.
Medical Aid, Sports Injuries, etc.: In my time, there was no resident physician, nor regular visits of such. There
was a designated doctor the school sent the kids to
off campus in town, and to pay
him a visit you needed prior approval from the school nurse. You would be transported and accompanied by staff from the school.
I didn't particularly care for this physician, he seemed to have a rather cynical attitude towards us kids. To my knowledge, there was not an option to see a physician of your choice. During my time, the school nurse was employed by Hyde by virtue of her being the wife of one of the faculty members.
There was virtually no medical instruction or education as to the nature of your ailments and/or medications. And there was absolutely
nothing forthcoming from the school proper as to sex education and common sense procedure re. disease control. There were periodic outbreaks of some sort (e.g., strep throat) which would run their course multiple times throughout the school body, with several kids being re-infected multiple times. No word from the school nurse, nor the designated physician, nor the school administration as to how to mitigate these kind of incidents.
Perhaps even more disturbing, given the potential longterm consequences, were how
sports injuries were dealt with. Sports reigns as king at Hyde, as they consider physical striving and competition to be key to their "character development" program. No argument with me there, but you are treated like a total wuss if you receive an injury that might prevent or temporarily curtail said striving for your personal best. The injury needs to be brought up to your coach, most likely also discussed with your teammates in seminar-like confrontational discussions, and if they do not believe you... Well, you run the risk of not only not receiving medical intervention, but also of having to make reparations of some sort for your "attitude problem," not to mention having to live with that stigma in other areas of school life. A lot of kids are too afraid, or perhaps too brainwashed, to risk that 'till permanent damage has already been done.
During my time there, there was a gal who skied over her thumb somehow. The digit swelled up to twice its normal size and turned bright blue. I saw her with a makeshift split she had constructed herself, the nail being long lost. To my knowledge, she never received medical attention or advice for this. Myself, I suffer to this day from leg injuries that were sustained over the course of a full year of repetitive injury before being lent enough credence. By this time, I had been experiencing significant difficulty just in walking more than six feet. There was another classmate who had had rheumatic fever as a child, with subsequent heart damage, and this classmate's efforts in cross country were always considered "suspect."
And if you had a
weight problem on top of everything else, you were
really up the creek. Talk about evidence of a
major character flaw, ha! Being fat at Hyde is a special hell all its own. Because it is not a question of your having a
weight problem, it is a question of your having an
attitude problem! You just don't have enough commitment! To say that bulimia/purging was an "issue" at Hyde is a laughable understatement. You
learned how to purge at Hyde. Requisite self-image issues are understandably heavily intertwined.
In short, there was no access to impartial third party medical care, at least during my time. Medical care, such as there was, was heavily filtered through a "character development" mindset.
