She arrived at the hospital seeking a job in 1970 and was asked if she could begin the next day.
A mother of four at the time, Mrs Fletcher told the chief nursing officer that she could not start for a couple of weeks because she needed to make arrangements for her family.
Then, when she started, working three nights a week, she was asked to do extra work because the hospital was short-staffed.
"Nothing's changed," Mrs Fletcher said.
At that time when she turned up to work at 10.30pm she would be directed to work wherever there were shortages in the hospital.
While some might find such work unsettling, Mrs Fletcher enjoyed the unpredictability.
Mrs Fletcher (then Wilkins) always wanted to be a nurse and began her training at 17 at Wellington Hospital, one of an intake of about 35 trainees in 1958.
Everything about nursing was more formal then, including uniforms which had detachable collars and caps that trainees had to get starched.
Nurses were not encouraged to talk to the patients, unless it was about the weather.
"We were told not to talk about sex or politics and not to get involved in any lengthy discussions about anything.
We were there to wash and clean, give care and do injections.
That was the job."
Trainees often had to do battle with sterilising machines which had a habit of malfunctioning and leaking water all over the floors.
Mrs Fletcher recalls using bed pans (clean ones) as galoshes on such occasions so she could make her way to the machine and sort out the problem without getting her feet wet.
One hygiene practice involved throwing wet tea leaves under beds to reduce dust.
She remembers one ward nurse fondly from her training, but not all ward sisters were benign.
She was "absolutely terrified" of one, and once climbed on to a shelf in a linen room to hide, too frightened to come out because she knew she was going to be told off for not weighing a couple of patients before breakfast.
She only came out when discovered by a ward orderly who said: "She can't kill you".
Another time when making the ward sister's sandwiches for morning tea she did not cut the crusts off.
The sandwiches were thrown out and she had to make new ones.
Nobody would dare call a doctor by his Christian name - if "a doctor was in the office doing notes, we were not allowed in there.
It was ridiculous."
Mrs Fletcher moved to Invercargill after marrying Dunedin man Grant Fletcher.
After taking some time off to have her first two children she returned to work in 1962, taking on a few night shifts a week at Kew Hospital.
The attitude to drinking and driving was different then, she said, and she saw a lot of terrible alcohol-related car crashes there.
For about the past 12 years she had been working at the emergency department in Dunedin where she had noted more young people needing treatment after getting " totally smashed".
Working in a busy hospital could be like being in another world.
Sometimes she had no idea what the weather was like outside.
If a patient arrived wearing shorts, she knew it was a hot day.
On the night of the Abbotsford landslip a man came in crying and upset saying his house had fallen down a hill.
"I looked at him, thinking: 'What is he on?"'
It was only after she spoke to ambulance staff that she realised what had happened.
Mrs Fletcher thinks in future there will be few nurses who will spend as many years in the profession.
There were many more options for women now and they tended not to regard it as a lifetime career.
In her career, nursing had become busier and busier with more technology and an unwelcome increase in paperwork, but patients' needs had remained the same.
"They still bleed, vomit, cry. They still want someone to 'Please look after me' or take away the pain."
It has often been a stressful job and Mrs Fletcher said she had learned life was too short to take her work home with her.
"Anything that happened, I left it there. I didn't take it home."
Sometimes, this was easier said than done.
Once after a hard day when a patient had died she went supermarket shopping on her way home.
When she arrived at the checkout with her cart full of groceries her eftpos card was declined.
The shop assistant told her she would have to organise payment for the groceries.
"I remember looking at her and thinking no, I don't really want groceries. I have seen more today than you'll see in your lifetime."
She told her to keep the groceries and walked out.
"What had gone on that day in the ward meant more to me than groceries in a cart."
Nursing had given her an appreciation of ordinary life.
"There's nothing I like more than coming home, putting my feet up with a wine or a cup of tea. I might ring my daughter or go out to the garden, stick my hands in the dirt and pull out a few weeds.
"I sit and look around and think how lucky I am that I have got this, not like some people who can't get out of bed."
Mrs Fletcher is not used to retirement yet, still slightly surprised that half a century has flown past in a career she had thought might have lasted only five years.
She hopes to have more time to catch up with her five children and 10 grandchildren, who are in Dunedin, Auckland and Switzerland.
