A staff room in a dysfunctional theatre department in north-west London. On the TV, Barack Obama became president. And the black nurses threw a party.
Audio version in the player above.
The winter of early 2009 was unusually cold. Years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had worn us out. Disillusioned we shivered our way through the freeze and as that was not enough, the worst financial crisis since the 1930’s had just unravelled. Britain was depressed, lost and skint.
But there was hope; 70 million Americans had gone and voted for Barack Obama. As he became president I was working at an old specialist NHS hospital in North-West London.
My first day there was a bright and crisp morning and as I drove into the car park I came upon something very unusual.
Free parking. Free chaotic parking. The Brits got their punk heritage out and parked in whatever way they could, would or felt acceptable. Up over kerbs, on the grass, backwards, forwards and sideways. Funnily enough there was a parking warden there, looking like the Michelin man in hi-vis yellow thermals. I never really got what his job was about though.
Well inside the hospital, I reported to the reception and was directed to the changing rooms. The hospital went back some 150 years and the well-worn signs on the doors said “doctors” and “nurses” instead of “men” and “women”.
The recovery staff were a mixed bunch. There was the good English Christian girl from the village; the South European man who flew in with Ryan air for some shifts every month; the East European man with the scrub hat worn like a bandana, whispering that he “hates this place”; the young and proud agency nurse who worked like a dog, saving up for a trip that would take her to her dad in Africa and the two senior nurses that were nice, welcoming and professional, but who unfortunately couldn’t stand each other’s presence.
It seemed like most of the anaesthetic staff were Jordanian men. Cliques are not rare in hospitals. I’ve been to theatres where Chinese scrub sisters are ruling the roast, to recovery rooms full of tough Aussie cookies and in whole hospitals, so full of Filipinos that you’d think the embassy has moved in. Here, the bosses were Jordanian and under them they had an army of fellow countrymen, mostly employed through agencies.
Friday evenings there would be a long queue of agency staff, all clutching their time sheets, outside the office waiting to get it signed by the boss, a no-nonsense man of large size that ruled from behind his wide desk. His minibus used to stand just outside his office window, displaying a green flag with a sword and Arabic letters in the rear wind screen. Arabic was the unofficial second language in the theatres, which for itself was nothing unusual. The Filipinos like to talk their own language as well, but outside the staff room they typically whisper it as suits their quiet character. These guys were not as hushed.
In the staff room the cupboard doors were about to fall off, the walls had patches without paint and the vinyl carpet on the floor was erupting with broken bubbles, bursting through like infected boils and exposing the concrete base. It could have provided a perfect background setting for a kitchen sink drama, but no artists were at work to make use of the misery. Plenty of people around though. Surgeons came as professors, consultants, registrars, fellows and some unfortunate house officer at the bottom, doing the menial tasks such as correcting faulty prescriptions done by over-worked registrars on stained drug charts. Then there were the anaesthetists and a whole load of nurses, healthcare assistants, porters and administrative staff.
We were not all in it together. The surgeons favoured the staff room downstairs with a somewhat less in your face display of neglect, where they crowded around small tables and were drinking instant coffee from double cups of flimsy plastic, while talking and laughing loudly. They resembled young men from the House of Commons that seem just a little bit too excited as they jeer. Against the walls were stacked cardboard boxes, full of bent and folded big brown envelopes saying “do not fold”. This was at a time when x-rays still came on plastic thick sheets – not as images on monitors.
One of the worst places to get an infection is in the bones and bacteria like warmth, so orthopaedic theatres should be kept cold. Here, the hospital adhered strictly to the rules. I usually had double, sometimes triple, scrubs on and occasionally I sneaked a spare warm air hose intended for patients’ beds inside my scrubs.
This winter there was real snow that kept the ground covered inch-deep for days on end. Theatres and wards in other buildings were connected through make-shift corridors. The snow made its way in through the gap between the tarmac and the walls of corrugated steel and Plexiglass. Me and the porters, tough men used to hard labour and with gold chains around their necks, smiled to each other as we tried not to slip on the snow while pushing the trolleys with patients covered with quadruple layers of blankets over to the warmth and safety of the wards on the other side. It was a tough job.
Among the anaesthetists, there were many women and several seemed depressed. Handing over their patients in recovery with monotone voices and indifferent faces that reflected none of the sparks from the stones of the rings that graced their fingers. One day, one of them seemed even more low than usual. She’d come in with a severely disabled child into recovery. The child’s limbs were short and bent, the spine curved abnormally, the number and size of toes and fingers wrong, his head was tiny, the mouth giant – still he couldn’t breathe properly; secretions were bubbling about in his airway and chest. He was a mess. “This”, said the anaesthetist, “is what happens when you only have one set of grandparents”. I looked down at the little person who’s twisted body seemed to have a life of its own; arms twitching, eyes staring and flickering and the throat gurgling, and I tried to take in what the doctor had said and, when I had, tried just as hard to forget it again. The mum came over and asked me if she could feed him. I looked at the doctor who, waving her hand dismissively, turned her face away in disgust.
Of the staff, there was a group of black women that seemed big and heavy and moved about as in slow motion. Maybe partly cause that’s how their mothers and their mothers’ mothers had moved while walking the red African soil and maybe partly because of dodgy knees that made them grimace in discomfort when standing up. Often, they didn’t hide their dissatisfaction with things.
But one day was different. It was after Christmas and I’d been in the hospital for a few months already. It was cold outside but inside the staffroom it was crammed and warm. A noisy crowd with cheery voices and happy faces. Only two didn’t fit in; a bewildered surgeon who tried but failed to look cool and a woman in a corner who grumpily insisted continuing reading her paper. Everyone else joined the party. Too excited for cool and too happy for quiet, people sang, shouted and laughed. They prayed and thanked Jesus among the tables covered with plates full with Jollof rice and greasy grilled chicken wings and plastic containers with bean stews and okra. The stained sinks filled up with dirty NHS china and cutlery. Standing and sitting, we were all watching the telly on the wall and all the ladies who were normally complaining about their ailments, their husbands, their weight, the HMRC and the matron who never smiled, they were now raising their arms towards the beige ceiling with its neon light and they praised the Lord.
Barack Obama was sworn in and it was as freezing in Washington as in London. George W Bush sat stone-faced in a thick winter coat and looked on, as a black man with good looks, impressive intellect, inspiring speech and a habit of thinking before he talked, became the President of the United States of America. Half the world was bursting with excitement, left liberal Europe as much as Africa. As for myself; I had both the books and the t-shirt. All Scandinavians loved Obama! Just two weeks later we gave him the Nobel peace prize for being so… Nice.
The black ladies sang, gave thanks and proclaimed “Amen!” Because this was actually it: This was proof that God hears and answers prayers. All over the world, millions had prayed every day for a year or more that “please please God, give us this handsome black man, give him to us for president, please Lord Jesus.” And God did.
The answer to the prayers was broadcasted straight into the staff room in the hospital on the fringes of North-West London, and for a moment all the big black mamas forgot about their pain and they laughed and they were happy and they praised God like only African women know how to do. There were droplets of condensation on the windows and of tears in my eyes; This was a historical moment. Never before had there been a black American president and never had there been such spirited praise and worship in this run-down staff room. Morrissey, who just a couple of years earlier had sung that America had nothing to say to him as their “president never is black, female or gay”, could now finally listen. As could all the rest of us. And we did, at least Europe, Africa and half of America.
I came out of there, walking along the corridor towards recovery. It seemed brighter than usual. The young agency nurse stood leaning against the wall, her dark skin glowing and the white teeth sparkling in a broad smile as she concluded: “That was the coolest thing ever”.
David Ingemarsson 2018
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