The Making of a Nurse: Pre-Training School(PTS)..#TheAccidentalNurse Pt 3
Hey, welcome back to The Wandering Nurse and to the 6th part in ‘The Accidental Nurse’ series, my nursing memoir.
This is the last part of Pre-Training School(PTS) and is also when i learn about the death of my Mother which in a way leaves me homeless. There are changes other interesting changes in my personal life and we finally find out if we make the cut, marks wise and can finally graduate from Pre-Training School to Nursing School proper.
A lot has happened from In the three or so months of Pre-Training School(PTS), from my reporting day on September 2nd 1996 to end of PTS in December 1996.
I was also getting to know more of the early year groups ( Sept. 1994 and 1995 intake) better, expanding my friendship/ tribe circle. They were all on various placement shifts and areas with some of the september 1994 intake on their health centre management in Isebania, which was located near the Kenya - Tanzania border. It was great to get study tips from them and also to borrow some of their notes which we used to help during our revision sessions.
We also found out that the septum, which was the nickname given to the partition between the female ad male sides of residence, functioned in two ways and only on the first floor. It had a hole at the top that was used to pass on information about whereabouts amongst other things. It also had another opening at the bottom which was concealed for obvious reasons because it was large enough for an average adult to pass through. It was used as a bridge of sorts when needed and involved a lot of planning and lookouts. It also seemed to be used by the less brazen of the male students. That was because, the staircase to the female quarters was in a more exposed place with direct view from the deputy principals house or the senior tutors house, while the staircase to the male quarters was a bit more hidden, obscured by the dinning hall and somehow not that well lit!
Exam day came upon us and it was mainly anatomy and physiology with one paper heavy on bones. I loved exams but i was nervous, understandably about how i would do. We had our last paper on Saturday morning, by which time I was excited at the prospect of my mother coming over like she had said. I alerted the guard at the gate and the kitchen staff to call me if there was anyone looking for me who identified as my mother. I waited, lunch time came and went and soon it was evening and she did not show up. I was disappointed but I also realised that she may be too weak and frail to travel, especially given that the journey could be a long and arduous one. I decided that I would go see how she was doing the next weekend, after getting our first exam results, hoping that I had made the grade to remain in the programme. We would then have something to celebrate.
On Sunday, I decided to take my cousin up on her offer to go visit her and meet her family. She lived in a place called makongeni and it was a long walk from the MTC to get there, but i did not mind as i was a great fan of long walks. The walk to Makongeni took me past the prison and pleasant scenery which made walking fun. The visit was pleasant and I got sent off with enough supplies from their shop and a promise to visit often.
Monday after class, I was summoned to our class tutors office. Being summoned to the office almost always meant one thing - you were in trouble and trouble came with consequences! I tried to run through my mind what it was that i could have done to warrant a summons ( sneaking to Kisumu was up there in the major league) and if I could handle let alone talk myself out of whatever consequence was coming my way! I walked into the office determined not to show how shit scared I was( apparently I have a great poker face, as he later said, but unrelated to this incident! He complained of never being able to read me! and here i thought, my eyes always betrayed me!).
I sat down on the chair opposite and waited for my fate. He asked how I was doing and settling in and then when was the last time I saw my mother? I thought about lying but then I decided that since he was asking he probably knew the answer, so I might as well just tell the truth. So I said Sunday past and I waited, hoping that it would just be a stern telling off and not a suspension or worse, expulsion. The strangest thing happened, it was like he had read my whole life file, either that, or my family drama was not at all unique to me but instead common and therefore he could accurately guess what our family dynamics were. He started talking about how my parents had subjected me to a traumatic upbringing and even went as far as listing them. He then went on to berate them for not caring about me, not even bothering to check up on me, being that I was in a new and unfamiliar environment, far from home. At this point I started feeling pretty angry myself, coupled with the disappointment I felt about my mother not coming over as she had said she would.
Once he was satisfied that he had riled me enough, he dropped the biggest bombshell of them all, forever changing my life in more ways than one. He said my sister had called on Thursday and had wanted to talk to me but as I was in class, they asked she could leave a message instead. She did, it was to say that my mother had died that Thursday morning and could I be released to go home. He went on to say that it was decided that I was not to be told until exams were done as they saw no need to disrupt my exams with the news. Then he went on to say that it was a good thing that I had at least seen on the sunday the sneaked out and given the circumstances he was not going to punish me but I should never repeat it again.
I sat there in total shock and numbness. I mean, what was I meant to say to all that? In an instance, my life had changed, taken a major detour. I tried to make it make sense, but I could not. I excused myself from the office, walked to the field adjacent to the dinning hall, where tall, dark and handsome( let us call him ‘M’ ) and the other boys were playing basketball and told him what had happened and then proceeded to walk to my cousin's house. I guess I needed to hear it from someone who was family or I just needed the comfort of family. I was not sure but I knew that at that moment, I needed to walk and maybe, just maybe, I would discover that it was all a dream and I would wake up. Sadly, it was real. M stepped up and became the rock that I needed to lean on and made the weeks and months after her funeral bearable.
Life moves on and nothing stops for you, not even for a minute. I came back to college, to find that not only had I aced my exams, my paper was used as the marking scheme - a hundred percent all round! The bar had been set and I now had a huge target painted on my back, not to mention buckling under the weight of expectations from the whole administration, who had somehow adopted me and decided that I was to be kept away from all sorts of corruption, moral or otherwise. Classes and college life resumed as normal. We learnt about medicines, how to make hospital corners, patient vital sign observations, midwifery, how to make an orthopaedic bed, how to change a bed with a patient in it from top to bottom and from side to side, history taking, amongst many other new and alien things. It was a lot but fascinating to say the least.
For reasons I could not explain, the female 94 class liked me and I got to hang around with them in their rooms and occasionally accompany them on their nights out. Apparently the security guard was convinced I could never be up to no good so I was their way past curfew. It also turned out that on the occasion the deputy principal was doing an impromptu walk around, checking rooms and floors for contraband and stray men, my presence, past curfew in any of their rooms was deemed as a good sign that nothing untoward was going on. This endorsement shielded me from any more shenanigans with the males and I even became firm friends with the emergency landing trio. You can say that my social standing within the MTC community and beyond was much improved and I was enjoying every minute of it.
There were loud bangs on almost all doors, people were shouting downstairs. It was dead in the night and I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or someone was about to be expelled! It turned out, there was a huge emergency at the hospital and it was all hands on deck even us PTS folks. The driver of a bus full of passengers was speeding, causing the bus to overturn and fall down a bridge into a river. It was carnage with horrific injuries and death and since Homabay district hospital was the nearest hospital, all casualties and bodies were being brought in and as in every hospital, Homabay not an exception, night time staffing was at bare minimum hence why the whole MTC students were needed.
I had never seen so many people with such horrific injuries in my life. There was blood everywhere, screaming and it was overwhelming, not knowing what to do or where to start. We got assigned jobs with the whole operation being coordinated by the then brilliant medical superintendent( or Med-Sup as he was known), who happened to be a dental surgeon. I got to see my first and last jaw wiring. It was a long night and by the time morning came, I was exhausted but we still had to prepare for and attend class. It turned out to be the first and last all hands on deck emergency I ever witnessed and participated in during my whole time at the MTC.
The whole PTS routine of classes, exams and lectures with evening and weekend exploring was all nailed to a T. Thankfully we all kept passing our exams and when the final exams and practical assessments rolled through, we all passed and could finally graduate from Pre-training school to Nursing school proper. That also meant that we had earned time off, a couple weeks of annual leave and we could leave the campus and go home which was all very exciting for everyone except me. I had no home to go to. Yes I had family all over but I was somehow estranged from them and had only lived with my Mother, who was now dead leaving me homeless. M and I boarded a bus to Kisumu, he was going home, looking forward to catching up on movies he had missed. I, on the other hand, was going to stay a couple of days with friends while I figured out what my next move would be. I kept this news to myself. I was not ready for what December 1996 had in store for me.
