The old central block

Taureef Mohammed

IT WAS perhaps the ugliest building in Port of Spain. From the front – it might have well been the back – it looked like a massive, multi-storey cage that someone just dropped in the middle of the Port of Spain General Hospital grounds. Surrounded by buildings that spoke of Port of Spain’s colonial history – like the one that housed the Accident and Emergency department – the old central block with its basic design – a five-storey cuboid structure with a triangular roof – told no story and was an anomaly. It was an eyesore. If it told any story, it was the story of the neglect of the public healthcare system in TT.

The inside of the building was just as forgettable as the outside. I remember a broken window pane on Ward 54 that remained broken day after day, month after month, year after year. I doubt that anybody bothered to fix it. Every time it rained heavily, water leaked on the floor outside Wards 13 and 14, the orthopaedic wards. I suppose the puddle of water was a test for people who had fallen and broken their hips – we needed to be sure they were ready to return to their hazardous houses.

Again, as far as I know, which was up to 2018, nobody ever fixed it. Perhaps there was some kind of universal understanding that fixing small things in the central block was like fixing vital signs and lab results in a patient who was dying from multi-organ failure from an irreversible cause: it was futile.

I remember sitting outside the operating theatre one day. (I was always the least important in the theatre, so maybe that’s why I was outside.) I was an intern at the time. A senior colleague was sitting next to me, and we were looking at the central block, which was obliquely opposite to the operating theatres. She said: “If you watch it, the entire thing is tilted. If an earthquake catches you in there, get out.”

In August 2018, a month after I had completed my internship, a 6.9 earthquake cracked the structure, and everybody got out. In 2022, the old central block was demolished. Good riddance.

But there was more to the old central block.

If I have any passion today for what I do, it is probably because of the time I spent in that nondescript building. Perhaps its unassuming appearance allowed me to see the medical profession for what it was. It stripped the glamour and glitter, the Hollywood, from the doctor’s daily work. It was a grind.

Doctors who trained there talk about their memories on ward rounds – which started at 6 am if you were on Wards 53 and 54 – in the old central block, going floor to floor, up and down the stairs, trailing behind their consultants who were always one step ahead, only because they had gotten more sleep.

When ward rounds were over, the trainees did rounds again, this time to take blood for all the tests that were ordered by the team. “Allyuh young doctors is vampire,” patients would say.

The male orthopaedic ward was the liveliest. There was a mix of older people (who were likely admitted after suffering a fracture from a relatively minor traumatic incident like a fall) and younger people (who were likely admitted with a fracture from a major traumatic incident). It was a good mix, and it was kicks.

“Oh gosh, take off the TV nah, I trying to sleep here,” one of the younger patients said to a group of older patients watching the CPL.

One of the uncles replied, “All that trouble you was making out there and now you want to sleep in peace? Why you don’t hush yuh mouth.”

On public holidays and weekends there was a peacefulness about the place. On Christmas Day, a band from the Salvation Army went floor to floor, serenading the patients. A pastor came, I think on Sundays, and made his ward rounds with his bell and Bible. A young man, I can’t remember his schedule, passed around with a Styrofoam icebox hanging from his neck (just like the vendors in the Oval) selling home-made ice cream. My favourite flavour was rice and spice. I am yet to find the flavour anywhere else.

The old central block is a difficult memory to reconcile. The physical structure spoke of neglect; the human interactions, care. “Buildings don’t treat people. People treat people,” a consultant once told me. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

Taureef Mohammed is a geriatric medicine fellow. E-mail: taureef_im@hotmail.com