When Nurse Shelly Hinds now enters a minibus in her uniform, other commuters immediately shift to the other side of the seat. Initially it made her sad but more recently she has not allowed it to bother her and even finds it comical.
Nurse Hinds works at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH), and like many of her colleagues, since the Covid-19 pandemic became a reality in the country she has faced subtle and sometimes open discrimination.
She explained that she usually travels to work in her uniform but changes into her scrubs before reporting for duty and following her shift she showers and returns to her uniform. “To be honest, …it’s really comical because you are moving away from me… but you are going and brace on the surface of the bus that everybody else would have already touched and I would have already showered, lysoled my entire clothes, my shoes everything is sanitized and I am here. I am actually clean…but after a while I just stopped taking it on,” Nurse Hinds said.
The attitude of the public has not made her waver in her decision to work with Covid-19 patients. She works in the ‘tent hospital’ where suspected patients are initially placed to await their results. If they are negative, they are allowed to leave but if positive, a decision is taken as to where they would be hospitalized, at the GPH or sent to be isolated at the Diamond or West Demerara hospitals.
Her decision to take up the challenge was bolstered by the fact that her team was headed by Ward Manager Sister Althea Bristol, someone she says looks out for her nurses and according her she knows that “she would have fought the battles that had to be fought and I had no fear after then”.
She shared that her patients are often scared but that it is the quiet ones whom she is most concerned about and as a result she tries to engage them. They open up and she then would have to reassure them even as some shed tears.
“It is just a process that you have to get them through…and if you attack the mind then people’s outlook change because if I can get you to feel good about yourself, you feel so empowered that you think you can overpower anything. So that is where I focus on to get you…thinking that yes you can overcome this thing,” she told Stabroek Weekend in an interview.
She recalled a patient who was very nervous as he awaited his results and he told her he did “a lot of stupidness in this life” and then he started to fervently pray. He got the negative results and in a matter of minutes he had packed and left the hospital. “I was really happy for him, seriously I was,” she said.
Concerned for her nurses
Nurse Hinds was right about her superior because initially when the team started to manage suspected patients in the ward before the special facility was established, Nurse Bristol told Stabroek Weekend she was more concerned for her nurses than herself since she was not sure that they were fully aware of what needed to be done. It was because of that passion that she believes her supervisor put her in charge of a team at the ‘tent hospital’ and also the screening site at the hospital.
Unlike her junior, Nurse Bristol, who most times is driven to work, has not had any negative reaction on the occasions when she has used public transportation.
“For the fun of it I took public transportation, dressed in my uniform, and for me I guess I am a bully so persons wouldn’t bully me that easily,” she said.
But no one tried to bully the ward sister. However, she said the buses and conductors continue to pack the buses as they have this attitude that “something has to carry them down” and the passengers because that is their only means of transport, abide by the lawlessness. She travelled in the front of the bus and ensured that it was just her and the driver.
She shared that persons in her neighbourhood are aware that she works at GPH and they have been seeking her out for information and even asking for masks and asking what they have to do. She usually warns them about their attitude because for her the liming they do on the roadways puts them at risk. On Easter Monday some still attended a barbecue, and many were out and not wearing masks.
“Persons aren’t serious,” the nurse commented adding that the situation makes her feel “angry because it makes our work harder” because while they might not have to be hospitalized they may infect someone who has to and the numbers will keep climbing.
Many persons do not understand the magnitude of the isolation of their loved ones until they experience it. The nurse shared that it starts right at the ‘tent hospital’ even before the patient is diagnosed. While they are there a relative may be able to take an item for the patient, but it is explained that if the person happens to be positive then nothing would be returned to them as everything will have to be destroyed.
“Some people ask me if I am scared but I am not scared…because for me knowledge is power, that is how I look at it, and if you are there you have the kind of knowledge and understanding more than when you are not there and so you will be able to handle situation better,” Nurse Bristol said of her new position.
Instead of discussing it first with the family, Nurse Bristol said, she took up the challenge and then informed them. Her 20-year-old daughter was fearful, but she explained that when persons are out there, they do not know who is infected, but with her she knows and can protect herself.
The 13-year nursing veteran said that in terms of helping persons to heal she thinks this is her biggest assignment even though she believes that in the future there might be more.
The persons at the screening sites are always nervous and scared of the unknown and it is there Nurse Bristol would positively tell them that Guyana is tropical and they would have experienced the symptoms before and it does not mean that they have Covid-19.
“I would tell them Guyana has so much sunlight, we have the air, we have all this tamarind and the limes and the ginger…,” Nurse Bristol said. If indeed she says it as comically as she did to me, then it is no wonder, as she indicated, the patients start smiling.
For her, the job is about doing whatever it takes to alleviate their fears as she believes the mind controls the body so helping to keep the patients positive gives them a better chance of overcoming whatever symptoms they were experiencing.
“It doesn’t always work because if you have it then you have it but there is always that comfort that even though you have it is not the end of the world,” she said.
Nurse Bristol has never regretted becoming a nurse and she now wished that she had done it earlier and loves her job so much that she sometimes says if she could have taken her children to live at the hospital, she would be happy.
“That is how much I love it,” she added.
It was a church sister, Nurse Forde, a midwife, who inspired her to become a nurse “because she was so loving… I knew nothing about nursing, but looking at her, she was so nice and kind and sweet and I was, ‘I want to be like her,’” she said.
She has never looked back even though she has had issues, but seeing a sick patient walk out of the hospital well and knowing she played a role in helping them to heal is enough to keep her going.
Instant resistance
Nurse Hinds’s decision to work with Covid-19 patients received instant resistance from her only child, a 14-year-old daughter, especially when she indicated that should she have to work in the Covid-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) she would not be allowed to go home.
“She was like, ‘let them choose someone else, you are not going’. And I was like, ‘if it was you would you not want someone to care for you?’. And she was like, ‘yes but you are my mom let them go and get their own mom,’” she said.
Breaking the news to her partner was done in steps and Nurse Hinds first asked if it was not better to work with the patients well protected instead of being on the ward and coming in contact with patients who are asymptomatic. She eventually told him she was working at the ‘tent hospital’ and he is now fine.
Nurse Hinds has been a nurse for three years and according to her it was a “funny story” that saw her turning to that career. She was thinking about entering the teaching profession but one day she was in a minibus and a woman asked her if she was a nurse and when she responded in the negative the woman told her she looked like a nurse and that she should apply to join the profession.
While she did not know what a nurse looked like, she took the woman’s advice. She is now a registered nurse and has not regretted the decision, adding, “if you know me you know that I love my profession, from since classroom days. I just love what I do, I really, really do.”
Weirdest thing
Asked about how she feels about the public’s reaction to the virus apart from many not adhering to taking the necessary precautions, she said the weirdest thing she has heard is persons saying that if they have to die then they have to die.
Unfortunately, this also happens even with persons who are suspected to have virus.
“One patient… we had to isolate him, and I said to him that you were exposed apparently and we don’t want you to expose anybody else so that is why we have you by yourself, because he was moving from bed to bed. And his words to me were, ‘well me nah guh be the first person to give friends and family,’” Nurse Bristol said, adding that she was shocked at his response.
It turned out that the patient was indeed positive, and he eventually died. Looking back, she wants to believe that the disease may have done something to the man’s mind as she cannot comprehend that he actually uttered those words.