Comfort and care

AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Ayanna Eastman, and during the covid lockdown, I was quarantined for two months taking care of elderly people in a nursing home.

I come from the city of Laventille. It was a peaceful childhood. Which part of Laventille I’m in now, it’s pretty boring but, growing up, it was more alive.

I know people would say Laventille is a hotspot for crime now but it was not so for me. It’s pretty boring and lame around here now.

But we prefer it stay just so in the area.

My grandmother, Joyce Eastman, is the backbone of the family.

She had eight kids, one deceased, which is my mom, Michelle Eastman-Wilson, who passed away in 2011.

We have about 27 grands put together, 15 great-grands and it have the great-great-grands.

My mom had four kids, me, my two sisters and my deceased brother, Jahiem Wilson, who passed away on 18 February.

I’m still trying to come to terms with that because, before I had kids, I always look at him as my child. I take him from my mom and did pretty much everything for him.

I have three boy children, Joshua, which is 11, Rashad, ten, and Aiden is six.

My mom has ten grands from her three daughters.

The generations just keep getting bigger and bigger.

My granny is everything Catholic, so she want all she children and grandchildren and great-grans in the faith. She done take charge of that already! First communion, everything, the grandchildren had to do.

I believe in God, but to me, you don’t have to go and sit down in a church for God to answer your prayers. I does pray nonstop, every chance I get.

Listen to my gospel, I doing my work and I taking to God. Asking him for my child to pass for a good school when he sit SEA next year. I cover my whole family.

Anybody who I carry in my heart, I’s pray for them. Even my patients, I pray for God to let them live longer.

I does pray for everybody!

I believe God has a perfect plan. So if BC Pires asks how God could change his perfect plan because I pray to him…I never really studied it like that…

I don’t know if BC Pires’ plan and God plan is the same thing…

Probably God know what he want for you. But you want something else.

School was a joy. If I could put on a uniform and go back to school, I would do it all over again.

My first school was Nelson Street Girls’ RC. Most of the girls in the family went there.

I came out from Barataria Compre’ with three subjects.

I got into nursing through a friend, even though I had no experience.

But when I start to get into it, I start to like it. I fall in love with it. Because I developed a love for the patients and them.

Even one day, I thought I could open my own nursing home and take care of people.

I’m presently doing the advanced patient care course. I will get my geriatric nurse certificate in September.

My friend was downsizing, so I leave from her, and a next lady end up taking me, so I went to work there.

And I was quarantined in that nursing home for two months. I never went home, just there in the home.

Patients end up contracting covid. We had was to do CPR on patients who just vomiting. Stuff like that.

One morning, I woke up to do my routine check and I saw one of my patients, who was isolated in a room by herself. She was ageable, too, like 92 or 93, a recovering stroke patient. She had contract covid.

I found her passed away on the bed. Her oxygen keep dropping, it raising, it dropping. Me and the RN (registered nurse) was taking turns making sure she was okay. So much of things had happened to her, bedsores and stuff.

It was an experience I never really thought would come. You locked down there, you taking vitals, you cooking, you cleaning, you changing bedpan, you changing diapers, you brushing their teeth, you giving them medication, you making sure they’re okay. Everybody getting rub down!

It was a dreadful task: you calling ambulance, you doing CPR, you have patients with catheter, you tube-feeding. It was really a lot because it wasn’t just ageable people, we also had two mental patients.

For two months, we can’t go nowhere, we can’t leave to come back. And we have to get up next morning and do it all over again.

That two months seemed like a whole year for me. Seriously.

We had an extra room with a bed, so me and the RN used to take turns sleeping.

In the beginning, it was four of us: the supervisor, the RN, me and a next lady.

The supervisor stayed for one night, picked up her bag next morning and walked. She was the one who encouraged us to stay. but she say she cannot do this. The next nurse said she not risking her life and she left, too.

I put myself in the patients and them shoe and I knew how I would feel if it was me. I would really want somebody to take care of me, no matter what crisis come.

So I talked to my children, I talked to my aunt, I put (my worries) aside and said I would stay.

I love being around the patients, so it wasn’t no problem.

The worst experience was finding the lady who passed in the bed.

The good part of the lockdown in the nursing home was being around the patients. I make it entertaining. We had movie nights, we sing, we dance. I polish their toes, I comb their hair. The men and them, I trim. I file them. I give them little exercise in the yard. They tell me their life stories.

What I really and truly love: to sit down and listen to the older patients’ stories about what they went through. Hearing how Trinidad was years ago is fascinating to me, because I born in the 80s. Them born 1930-something!

I want to set up my own nursing home. I have beds, everything, on standby. I looking for a three-bedroom house to rent, with a yard space so they could come out and exercise, take in the breeze.

To me, a nursing home for ageing people must be a home away from home. It must not be a stressful environment. They must be relaxed. They must have nurses around them who love them.

My idea of owning a nursing home is not that it have money in it. The money don’t matter to me. Is what I enjoy doing, just being around them and taking care of them.

The crime situation right now is very ridiculous. They could just come up to you and spray you and nothing will come from it.

To me, the only person I can say had crime under control was Gary Griffith. I could be wrong, I could be right; that is my point of view. They need to get somebody, if not him, who have the same dream and driven as him.

The female commissioner they have now makes no sense.

To me, a Trinbagonian means being free. You’re free to anything.

To me, Trinidad and Tobago means diversity. Because we have a mixture of different cultures. And everybody just blend together perfectly. We don’t discriminate nobody, we welcome everybody. No matter where you come from, we welcome you with open arms.

That’s the love we show outsiders. That’s the same love I show my patients.

Read the full version of this feature on Friday evening at www.BCPires.com