Wayne Kublalsingh
I have always been a rough customer. At the age of ten, I vowed to kill a man. This man was my Uncle Sabee, my father’s boat-owning fishing buddy. My father had been in a Volkswagen car, following Uncle Sabee to see him off at the airport. On the Mc Bean Stretch, a truck lost its wheel, collided with the Volkswagen, killed Uncle Sabee’s mother, who was in the back seat, and seriously injured my father. When I saw my father’s red-stained shirt arrive at my grandmother’s home, so enraged, horrified, torn I was, I shouted, “I go kill Sabee Uncle!”
At my first day at Naparima College, I visited the San Fernando General Hospital to see my father. He had been unconscious and his forearm had been badly lacerated. He had lost much blood, but the hospital rose to the occasion and saved my father. And I guess, saved my blessed Uncle Sabee’s life.
My family of ten grew up in and out of the hospital. It proved to be our regular vacation spot.
Father, a bout of “nerves”. Mother, eight pregnancies. This one drink pitch oil, with which my father had been cleaning his bicycle. That other one get nail jook. The other get scorpion sting. The next one fall off the lay-lay tree, hit his jaw on the scrubbing board in the washtub, knock a tooth up in he upper mandible, disappeared it. The big boy get rheumatism, left foot can’t bend at the knee, straight like a walking stick itself. And the other get mumps, and the same rheumatism boy get tuberculosis.
The same rheumatic boy, yours truly, was in the hospital at the age of seven. I opened my eyes and saw my father. “You eat?” he asked. My father himself was a rough customer. Any hint of maltreatment, slight, abuse of his pickneys was met with cuss. “No,” I said. “They didn’t feed you?” “No,” I repeated. Well, sisters, was cuss, cuss, cuss!
I traced the back of my father through the hospital window, saw the last trace of him disappear up the darkening Promenade. The nurse, who had been the butt of my father’s wounded hostility, came to my bed and asked gently. “You didn’t eat?”
And then it dawned on me. It was not morning. It was evening. I had awoken when my father came, thinking it was another day, a morning. In my sudden arousal, I had confused evening with morning. I had eaten! I felt sick with my wrongness. “Yes,” I said to the nurse. Yet, she was not angry. She just eyed me wryly for a second, then disappeared. You can’t legislate for people’s chupid children.
The same rheumatism boy, yours truly, contracted tuberculosis at the age of fourteen. Private doctors could not tell me what was wrong. Dire weakness, I could hardly stand sometimes. I was referred to Dr Dan at the old Colonial Hospital on the hill next to San Fernando General.
One glance at me and he said, “Check for TB.”
At the SFGH, I was anaesthetised and a sample from my thyroid gland removed. The biopsy proved that I had indeed contracted TB. The surgeon was a Dr Kidney, an SFGH doctor. For over 18 months, I had to go before school and on holidays up to the old Colonial Hospital and receive sticks, long needles, left buttock, right buttock. I became deeply attached to my two nurses. Their kind and beauteous faces would be forever emblazoned in my mind.
For the next 50 years, I cancelled all my vacations at Trinidad public hospitals. But following a chronic bout of rheumatoid arthritis, aggravated by a 2012 police incident, my relegation to crutch, then wheelchair, and a double-knee replacement surgery in 2023, I once more booked. The knee surgery worked amazingly well, but the rest of my body suffered from chronic, debilitating, muscle-exhausting, stomach-ruction inflammation. The disease-modifying drug I needed was beyond my pocket.
But Mount Hope had it. The biologic treatment. Retuximab. I started clinic at that institution.
For two days in November 2025, after several visits to the RA clinic at Mt Hope, preparing me for the drug infusion, I twice took the Retuximab. The doctors and nursing staff of that institution have been most kind. And now, except for the times I run amok and rush the wrong foods, I am much improved.
Why should I disrespect the public service nurses who gave so much to my family and me for over 60 years? Why should I impugn them by bringing up alleged abuses of the overtime system in the face of legitimate advocacy regarding staff shortage? Are not overtime bills high because of these very shortages? Are we denying that the system is under stress? Why not impugn the cross-border Dragon killer? Aren’t these Florence Nightingales the same ones who risked their own lives and immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic? Whilst I remained at home in seclusion?
Many nurses do highly technical work, serving multiple patients simultaneously. Many are stressed and overloaded. The system must also be protected against errors and potential lawsuit costs. And, no minister would want a nurse to make a mistake with her or his medication - if such a minister ever deigns to wait in line for public service treatment.
