A New Series

I am starting a new series. I am calling it "Shed A Tear" I will let the posts explain the features of these new series. You will soon see a pattern. It's a drawing and short description. Here's a little story I would like to share with you...

I hope that some literary hacks don't import my stories and fictionalize it or use it as material for their their trite novelettes. That's been known to happen. This series is an autobiographical foray into the inner sanctum of my F-POT. I am basing it on personal experiences. I am taking literary liberty by the mere fact that it is impossible to truly relate the stench , the pain and the agony of some of these experiences, but I will try.

I was seventeen years old when I performed my first post-mortem care. I was a student nurse at a provincial hospital with a bed capacity of 250 but with a usual patient census of up to 800. Most often patients slept on cots in the halls or mats they brought from home, laid down on the floors. The only time the halls were cleared of patients was when the dictator's wife or some national or foreign visitors came to the hospital for photo opportunities. I am not sure why we had to appear that we had room, perhaps because there may have been funds allotted for the hospital building extension that managed to actually not be stolen by the national government officials and so trickled down to the regions but instead were siphoned by the regional and provincial government officials.

My classmates and I wore white uniforms with white aprons and after the first six months we had our capping ceremony. We wore caps, except in the OR where we wore dark green scrubs; in the pediatric wards where we wore baby blue or baby pink aprons with cute appliques, over our white dress; in the psychiatric hospital where we wore civilian clothes and in public health nursing where we wore professional nurses' dress uniforms. We had two male classmates. They did not wear dresses.

The hospital had a permeating stench. It lingered in the halls, some sort of tropical smell, since there was no air-conditioning except in the few rooms in the private patient wing. The patients were poor, indigent, down-trodden, lived in wretched poverty. The hospital supplied some medicines and equipment but we re-sterilized catheters; re-used IV tubings; re-washed, re-powdered and re-autoclaved the gloves; re-sharpened the hypodermic needles. Yet, the best and the brightest nurses attended that school of nursing because it had an academic and clinical record of excellence. Every graduating class since the school's founding during the war in 1945 had a 100% successful passing of the board examination and always had several graduates in the top 10.

By the time I was 18, I had handled over fifty deliveries, performed procedures that most nurses in the US never have a chance to do during their first and second year of professional experience. This explains why I never worked as a nurse in my country after graduation but was hired in the US when I applied for my first nursing job with only a telephone interview. My clinical experience transcript was the equivalent of five years of nursing experience. I had exceeded my required scrubbed and circulated major surgery case requirements and my classmates and I handled hundreds of deliveries without a physician present, and we cared for more patients with communicable diseases than some practitioners in the CDC have seen.

The pediatric pavilion had a wing for malnourished children afflicted with marasmus kwashiorkor. I met a three year old boy who could not stand up because his wasted limbs could not carry his enlarged abdomen. For two months he had nothing to eat, so he ate dirt and mud. The pavilion reeked with the stench of infected flesh and at night the wailing of the mothers crying over their dying children reverberated and echoed in the halls.

I contracted tuberculosis in my junior year after being assigned as the student head nurse of the isolation ward. It was only a spot in my lung and so I had ambulatory treatment with penicillin and streptomycin (Dicrysticin) injections, isoniazid, ethambutol and Vitamin B complex for six months while I continued my studies. My classmate was not lucky, she actually had inflammation of her lungs, was coughing and had blood-streaked sputum, therefore had to take a year leave of absence. There was a patient there by the name of Ernie. He was blind and lived in the ward because his family refused to take him back. The hospital kept him. We had several of those patients. They were permanent patients of the hospital, one was a hemiplegic patient with massive decubitus ulcers. He manipulated every freshman student nurse but I was spared for my older sister was a graduate of the school and was the head nurse of the private patient ward. There were toddlers in the nursery, abandoned by their mothers and later were sent to the orphanage. Ernie, the blind patient distinguished the nurses by their voices but went further with me and my sister by recognizing the sound of our footsteps. He would say "Is that you Miss Adorio, the Younger?" before I even uttered a word. Sometimes I would pretend to be my sister my changing my voice but ended up giggling, so Ernie and I both ended up laughing.

After graduation, I was assigned to perform my required public nursing internship in a province where 90% of the population had exposure to or have contracted tuberculosis. There, for the first time I was mostly alone when I visited the patients in their home.

One day the military base medic and corpsman was out sick. The military base requested for a nurse from the city clinic where I was assigned. The head nurse dispatched me to the military camp. I was nineteen years old. I entered a room and there standing in attention were 250 men lined up for their physical examination. I worked with a captain who was a medical doctor. I tried to look away from the men for they were stark naked, however, that day, they were being examined for inguinal hernia. The captain instructed the recruits to blow on the back of their hands and bear down while I had to visually examine for herniation on their inguinal areas. I have never seen so many penises at one time. I tried to maintain my professional decorum. After the examination I immediately left. That afternoon as my post-graduate classmates and I were walking towards our boarding house, the bus full of recruits drove by and saw me. They peered out the windows, enthusiastically waved and gestured hand salutes towards me. I could not contain my amusement. I laughed so hard that tears rolled down my cheeks. That night, I dreamed of marching penises.