They look okay but deep down they want a nap and a foot rub.
I have been staring at my nursing license. I seem to be doing a lot of staring lately. Where nursing is concerned, my eyeballs have unmatched propensity to pop out of their sockets. As a matter of fact, I might end this blogpost by staring once again at my license. That is not the story.
The story is, I wanted it to speak to me. To answer my questions. To positively say something that would make me happy to be a nurse. I grew up without any nurse role models or mentors. I didn’t even think nursing was a career. It was a preserve for the nuns according to my green brain and there are many things I would have killed to be; a nun wasn’t one of them.
Talking of which, my maternal grandfather, a skilled hunter and beekeeper; held a firm belief that one of us, his naughty grandchildren would be a priest or a nun. By the time I was eight, my truancy and hard headedness had safely eliminated me from the equation. That left my elder sister, Shii and my cousins.
I can’t speak so much for my cousins .My elder sister however, would never make a good nun. She likes watching over my back. Nuns are supposed to be watching over the back of some holy saint. Nuns can’t spend all their life wondering what their baby sisters are upto.
I have no idea what ran through my cousins’ minds. Take Bobo for example. Do you know right now as we speak she is a nun? True story. Right this moment, as Nairobi’s traffic slowly becomes spaghetti, Bobo my first cousin is a nun. I think my late grandpa smiles down from heaven and pats his shiny bald-head with self contentment.
The Good Lord heard his prayer. Bobo is a happy nun. A nun that told me she wanted to be a nurse just like me. See how close my grandfather’s dreams keep coming at me! Not today gramps, not ever. That plus I miss the scoops of honey from you…
Back to nursing. It felt like I was in a one sided love relationship with this profession. Try as I might to give it my best, it just never loved me back. Falling out of love with it was fairly uncomplicated. Unrequited love, said a writer somewhere, is a bore.
In these times of self-doubt and pseudo imposter syndrome, I sought answers from my license. I wonder whether “saving lives” is worth the pressure, misunderstanding, resentment, constant back pains and mysterious stains on my uniform and shoes that accompany nursing all over the world. What lives do we really save? Is it not more of “prolonging life” than actually “saving” it?
The Kenyan license states back at me. My UK PIN eyeballs me. There is a stalemate. Both daring me to walk away. Perhaps knowing I’m in too deep to let go. Nursing is home albeit in a profound, almost comical manner. I have been initiated into this. The adrenaline rush and sugar crashes are all part of the caffeinated entanglement of this profession that neither sleeps, nor slumbers.
They came, they nursed, they documented it.
Nursing is one of the oldest professions even before Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. About Mary Seacole, I had to research about her. History denied us a golden opportunity to celebrate a Black person as a foundress of nursing. When we talk about Florence Nightingale and the Crimean war, we never mention Mary Seacole yet this British-Jamaican Nurse was there making lives bearable for the soldiers injured in the war.
But that is a Black Asian and Minorities (BAME) conversation we are not willing to have at the moment. We are too busy dealing with the second wave of Covid-19 and if you’re in Great Britain, prepare for another round of rainbow paintings and claps for your service.
I had a lengthy wordless conversation with my license. In that impenetrable quietude, nursing became clearer. It stopped being limited to the (un)sterile corridors of the hospital. Nursing, like a determined baby dragon, broke from her eggshell and emerged to show herself to the world.
She went into theaters to make films and write plays. She became the screenwriter Safina Iqbal from Kenya. Nursing struck the shells and he went into politics. He wanted to make it count. He became Mheshimiwa David Ole Sankok from Kenya. Nursing wasn’t done, she leapt off the pages of my diary and formed paragraphs in the heart of the author of Nurse on a run; Christine from Kenya.
Nursing went into the modelling industry to show the world what beauty with brains looks like. You should have seen her sashay her petite hips on the runway. You should have seen her match with a stethoscope around her slender neck. Oh you should have seen her tell them that she is proudly a nurse.
He went into sales and marketing and became a gem in notable pharmaceutical companies. He managed winning teams and innovative teams. He became a clinical research nurse. He started working with research institutes.
The timid dragon took off into the great unknown and became a clinical specialist and an advanced practitioner. He started playing in the same league with other medical professions. No longer unbowed. No longer intimidated. No longer silenced. Untamed.
She became a teacher to teach the public and others about their health. They all mistook her for a doctor. With practiced patience, she reminded them all that she wasnt a doctor. She was a nurse.
And because once is not enough, she studied aesthetic nursing and started performing minor plastic surgeries and cosmetology. She went to the United Kingdom/America to study this precious course. She never once forgot who she was. In fact, she became everything she could be because of who she was; a nurse.
She solved the problem of desertion of the frail and old and terminally ill by society through creation of Chesed Home Health care. This agency specialises in home based nursing in Kenya. She started from a scratch.
As my eyes watered from staring so hard, nursing smiled at me and showed me how great he actually is in private and public partnerships in health. He showed me Alfred Obengo,president of the National Nurses Association of Kenya and his diligent agitation for nurse representation in the table of public health decision making. About partnerships with banks to raise the profile of the Kenyan nurse.
Nursing pointed me to Nancy Wang’ombe, president of Kenya Nephrology Nurses Association and her peer reviewed articles on kidney transplantation in International Journals of Nephrology. As I started to put my license away, I saw Nurse H, my mentor in the United Kingdom and she who has produced protocols and competencies for nurses in the dialysis unit. She who is quoted by nurses new and old in the profession.
At that moment, nursing was elevated to a sacrament. Ah, I was content. Thoroughly satiated that what looked so bleak held so much promise.
I will look at my license again, this time not to seek answers but to marvel at the solutions already given.
To every nurse reading this, wewe ni shujaa (You are a hero).