It ended up costing way more than a dime!

When I was in middle school, the mimeographed attendance list was distributed each morning during homeroom. Kids would fight each other over who would be first to sniff the purple ink-- back in those days, little was known about the effects of sniffing chemicals.

Besides the 'rush' that the ink provided, the attendance list was also popular with the 7th and 8th grade girls because of the "Nurse's List." This was a box in the upper right hand corner of the list which usually contained three or four girls' names. The names would be read out loud with hoots of laughter. I asked someone what the Nurse's List was, and the answer surprised me: It was a list of the girls who owed the school nurse money for a pad or a tampon. In our school, you had to pay the nurse five cents for a pad or ten cents for a tampon-- if you didn't have the money with you, your name went on the "Nurse's List" until you gave her the money. It seemed to me to be an incredibly cruel way to squeeze nickels and dimes out of girls who were already embarrassed at having had an 'accident' at school!

I found out during the last quarter of 7th grade just how embarrassing it was to be on the Nurse's List-- my 'friend' arrived unexpectedly on a Friday afternoon during my American History class, and the walk down to the nurse's office was the longest I'd ever taken because I realized I didn't have any money with me. All I had was a lunch ticket in my pocket-- now my name was going to be on that damned Nurse's List for the whole school to laugh at!

Sure enough, on Monday morning, there was my name in bright purple letters. The girls in my homeroom snickered, but thankfully there were other names besides mine in the box-- other girls more worthy of derision. Before lunch I stopped at the Nurse's office and handed her my dime. I vowed never again to ask her for any sanitary supplies-- from then on, my pocketbook was stocked with tampons I filched from my mother's supply, because the gargantuan Kotex she bought for me used a plastic belt that pinched my legs, and they were too big to fit in my pocketbook. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember the plastic belts-- and I also remember the horrifying times when the pads slid out of the belt and down my pant leg! You can see why I wanted to use tampons in school!)

I'd like to think that the nurse created the Nurse's List as a way to remind girls to reimburse her for the supplies, but it ended up becoming a way for girls to pick on each other-- as if they needed another reason to do that! It made me feel as if the nurse was condoning the teasing, as long as she got her money.

It would be impossible to have a "Nurse's List" in schools today-- privacy issues carry much more weight than they did in the 1970s. Today's girls are more likely to have their own spending money and are better informed about menstruation-- periods are no longer a 'surprise.' It's tough enough to deal with becoming a biological adult without having to worry about things like this... thank God for the end of the Nurse's List.