The Nursing Assistant

We see things that are shocking. No matter how old you are, in nursing there’s always something you haven’t seen before. Especially now, because accidents and traumas are becoming much more severe than they were ten years ago. Back then, you’d see less serious cases. You’d see someone come in with a single gunshot wound. Now people get shot 300 times.

Introduction: Claudia currently works two jobs from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. all seven nights a week.  She splits her evenings as a nursing assistant in the emergency room of Hospital Joao XXII and as a nursing aid in the private home of an elderly patient. She studies during the day for her nursing degree, meaning she literally has almost no time for sleep.  While she makes more than the minimum salary due to her hard work and two jobs, around half of her wages go to pay for school and the rest goes to help her mother and siblings pay bills at home.  She has seen a lot in her eleven years as nursing assistant and is determined to advance through college to earn a registered nursing degree.

Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2006

Family

I’ve lived in the São Gabriel neighborhood since I was little. My father is from Bambuí, a city in the countryside, a five-hour drive from here. His parents died very young. Another woman, who I call my grandmother, raised him here in Belo Horizonte. My mother was born here in Belo Horizonte. I have five siblings. I think I’m the odd one out in this life: I haven’t had children, I haven’t gotten married, nothing. The rest of them all have children, got married, and moved back home. My brothers, for example, had children early. My youngest nephew is five years old and the oldest is almost 17. I have twelve nephews and nieces.

My mother is a nursing assistant in a maternity ward. She’s almost at retirement age. My father is deceased. He passed away three years ago. He was a bricklayer. He worked in construction. He worked until he was 61 years old and had no intention of giving up.

Nobody would go to my father with problems because he had a short temper; he would curse and say whatever he wanted, whether it was appropriate or not. Generally, the support always came from my mother; for all the children, the support always came from my mother, all the problems were handled by her. My mother is a wonderful person, everyone can count on her!

Blue Eyes

My father would say, “If you get pregnant, you’re out.”

But my sisters got pregnant and they didn’t leave the house.

They didn’t leave because my mother wouldn’t allow them to. When my older sister got pregnant for the first time, oh what a mess! My father wanted her to have an abortion. My mother didn’t want her to have an abortion.

Every father’s dream is for his daughter to get married, right? She wasn’t married.

I think my father had that dream. The way he talked, he had this thing about wanting them to be married. If she gets married, then she’ll have more security. So he wanted her to have an abortion—that is, until the white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes was born. The baby’s father is black. My father is light-skinned with blue eyes, and his family all have blonde hair. Different from ours. So, that was it: it was all over once he saw the baby. He would go to the bar and take her with him, go to work and take her with him. Everywhere he went, the baby girl went with him. So, he became very attached to her.

The Red Cross and Claudia’s First Job

I’ve always been independent, more independent than my siblings. My brothers and sisters never finished high school. I took a nursing course at the Red Cross when I was in high school. The course was expensive, but my mother paid for it. She insisted that I continue and I graduated from the Red Cross in 1995.

I started working at Mater Dei, at Madre Tereza Hospital in Gutierrez. It’s run by nuns. I worked in the ward as a nursing assistant for two years taking care of patients.

The nursing assistant stays there with the patient, providing care. We puncture an abscess, administer IV fluids, help the doctor with intubation, give baths, change dressings, administer medications, take the patient for X-rays, prepare the patient for the operating room. The nursing assistant does all of this.

My shift was from seven-thirty to seven-thirty. It’s a first-world hospital, it is excellent because the nuns control it.

The nuns couldn’t stand me. You couldn’t even chew gum in the ward. I chewed gum all the time. They would say, “You’re chewing gum.” I would say, “Want a piece?”

So, I didn’t give them any respect. I did my job well. My work was always fine. But don’t bother me about other things.

You couldn’t talk much there and I chatted too much!

So, I would think to myself, “I’m going to leave this place, but I’m not going to quit. I’m going to wait for them to fire me because otherwise I’ll lose my unemployment benefits, everything I’m entitled to.”

One fine day, the guy from the department called me. I already knew he was going to fire me. “We’re letting you go.”

Then the nun came to talk to me, “Claudia, if you need anything…” I said, “Sister, the last place I want to work is here.” It just came out like that, without thinking.

When I left, I immediately went to Odilon, took the exam at Odilon, and got in.

Odilon Behrens Hospital and João XXIII Hospital

At Odilon, I worked the day shift for two years. My mother also worked there. So, the staff already knew me. I worked in the emergency room. Then I worked the night shift for two and a half years in Odilon’s surgical ward. Almost two years just inside the operating room. There were all kinds of accidents and assaults requiring surgeries and there were transplants– things I had never seen before. I thought it was beautiful seeing organs being worked on.

I also started working a second job at João. I’ve now been at João for eight years. At João, there’s a contract, but there’s no time limit. You stay there until you do something and they fire you or you ask to leave. At João you earn very little, like R$500 ($200 USD) per month, and I always bought supplies for my nephews and helped with costs at home.

I like my profession. It’s been eleven years, right? I like to help, or try to help. What I really like is helping and seeing people recover, seeing them leave. Every now and then, some people pass by and wave goodbye. When someone comes and says, “Guys, you work so hard, you deserve to earn a lot of money.” When we tell them how much we earn, people don’t believe it.  Some people say, “You should earn more than doctors because you’re the ones who are awake all night.” When someone says that to us, it makes us feel very proud.

People who are very arrogant should be thrown into João XXIII to see that it’s no use wanting to be great in life. Because when you’re dying, you’ll end up like that, lying in a bed, incapacitated and suffering. The most common traumatic cases at João are people getting shot. Odilon Behrens also gets a lot of those cases because there’s a huge favela behind it. You have to be cold-hearted to pick up a gun and shoot someone. I think those people probably don’t believe in God. Because if a person believes even a little bit in God, they wouldn’t do that.

We see things that are shocking. No matter how old you are, in nursing there’s always something you haven’t seen before. Especially now, because accidents and traumas are becoming much more severe than they were ten years ago. Back then, you’d see less serious cases. You’d see someone come in with a single gunshot wound. Now people get shot 300 times.

The Story of Cristiano

There was a boy at Odilon Hospital who was a big drug dealer in Pedreira. He was a very handsome boy. 16 years old. He came into the sector where I worked—me and a colleague of mine, Alessandra. And we became attached to him. Not exactly attached, but we talked with him a lot. His name was Cristiano. He had been shot multiple times. He was in very serious condition, but he recovered.

As he recovered, he had a device in his mouth to help him breathe. He would tap on the bed to let us know that he wanted something. So he would tap on the bed. Then we would go there and look at him, but we couldn’t understand anything he said. He couldn’t speak clearly with everything in his mouth.

Then, one beautiful day, I said, “Do you know how to write? Then you’re going to write because I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

So we started communicating that way. The doctor didn’t want to remove his breathing tube because he couldn’t breathe on his own. But he was conscious. So he started writing to communicate with us. One day, it was me and a colleague, we were talking and I was listening to a CD by Father Marcelo. I sang the song out loudly, a church song. Then he tapped on the bed. I looked and said, “What do you want, Cristiano?”

He wrote that he wanted me to pray for him. I even kept that piece of paper; it must be at home somewhere, I saved it. I said, “No, you’re the one who has to pray. You’re the one who has to accept God. I believe in Him, you’re the one who doesn’t believe.”

He had dyed his hair blonde, like many of the boys who dye their hair these days. I approached him, and he looked at me, and I said, “Do you want to listen?” So I put the music to his ear and left my Walkman with him, and he listened to Father Marcelo’s CD all the way through.

Later on, a little boy came in, about eleven years old. He also was a drug dealer. This boy also had a gunshot wound, but he could talk. He was my patient and was only under observation. One day he hit the bed like Cristiano would do.

When he hit the bed, I said to him, “Look here, you’re able to speak, never hit the bed because we don’t do that here. Maybe that’s how you call your mother or your sister, but you don’t hit the bed here! If Cristiano hits the bed, it’s because he has something in his mouth and can’t speak.”

Cristiano just stared at me with a straight face, didn’t say anything. After I cursed the boy I left. Eleven years old, how was I supposed to imagine he was a drug dealer?

Cristiano wrote to me that this boy was a drug dealer from Pedreira, a really dangerous guy. That he had already killed many people, and I had just cursed at him.

Cristiano said, “He’s already killed I don’t know how many people. This boy is really bad.”

This little guy had already done everything he shouldn’t have done in life. He was transferred to another floor.

It’s a very open area there, there are many ways to get into the hospital. People go there a lot to see how someone is doing, whether they’re going to die or not. It’s happened before, when someone was shot, in an instant this place was full of people at the door. Almost the entire favela would come down sometimes.

So one day some rivals went in there to kill Cristiano because he was one of the drug lords in the Pedreira area. Some people from Pedreira went in there to kill him… but it didn’t happen because he saw them first and the staff had time to call the police. While Cristiano doesn’t have a criminal record, he was a big drug dealer– he just was never arrested.

One day his tubes came out and we started talking. So I said to him, “Cristiano, why don’t you change your hair color back to normal, change your life, become a man? You’re handsome, I’m telling you, you’re a handsome young man, the women will be all over you. I’m not hitting on you because I don’t like kids. I like older men.”

He started to tell us all about what he did, how they got the weapons, and a lot of other stuff. But then he stopped.

He said, “Guys, I’m not going to keep telling you things, because it might get you in trouble.”

He could get caught too. By either the rival drug dealers or the police. Because we talked to him too much. Of course, people knew he was a drug dealer, but they never caught him, so, until proven otherwise, he’s a normal person.

So I continued to talk to him, “Change, turn your life around. This isn’t a life, Cristiano.”

Do you know what breaks my heart? It’s seeing someone handcuffed. It could be the worst person but seeing them in handcuffs breaks me. And they get hit in the face a lot by the police. It’s very humiliating and sad!

After a while Cristiano was transferred to another floor, but he always came downstairs and brought chocolates for me and Alessandra.

After he was discharged, one day I ran into him on the way to work. I said, “Get out of here, move away from this Pedreira neighborhood, because otherwise they’re going to kill you. Because whoever tries once, tries again. And the way you’re talking, being so outspoken, they’re going to kill you.”

He said, “I’m going to leave.”

“Really leave, change your life, go live your life. You’re too young to be doing all these stupid things.”

He said, “I’m going to change, I’m going to change.”

“Then change!”

He said, “Give me your number.”

I said, “We don’t have that at my house, we’re poor, my son, we don’t have a telephone at my house.”

Then he disappeared. Cristiano disappeared.

Then, one beautiful day, after a long time, I ran into Cristiano again. He was the one who stopped in front of me. I looked at his hair; it was back to his normal hair color. He had gotten rid of the blonde dyed color. He said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

And I ran into his father occasionally and his father would say, “Cristiano moved away from here. He’s living with his brother.”

So I said, “But is he all good now?”

“Yes, he’s a different person. He doesn’t come here to Pedreira anymore.”

I said, “That’s good, may God help him continue like that.”

I ran into him once again one day when I was going to get a snack. “What are you doing here, Cristiano?”

“Oh, my grandmother fell,” and he talked a lot about his grandmother. He adored her. “Oh, my grandmother fell and is hospitalized at Odilon, so I am going to visit her.”

“Cristiano, don’t come back here. Talk to your grandmother, send a message, but don’t come back here. They’ll be desperate to get rid of you. They were already desperate to get rid of you. Leave and stop messing around. They’ll kill you.”

He said, “I’m going to Odilon’s.”

He went to the hospital to visit his grandmother before she was discharged.

Then not much longer after that, one day when I arrived at work they said, “Guess who came here with a gunshot wound to the head?”

I said, “Who? I have no idea.” I thought it was an employee.

“I can’t believe that happened to him. He came to see his grandmother and…”

I said, “Guys, he took so many bullets the first time and didn’t die, and with just one he died!”

That affected me a lot. I don’t usually talk to people who get shot or arrested. I try to avoid them. But with him, I think we bonded because he was too young to be involved in that life and he didn’t have the mindset of a drug dealer.

His grandmother was everything to him. I think what happened was, it was a direct shot, they intended to kill him. It happened in the favela. He had gone to his father’s house to see how his grandmother was recovering.

I spoke to him before he went there, “You’re taking a risk. You’re taking a risk and looking for trouble.”

Even today, when I talk to Alessandra, we both remember him a lot. She also witnessed everything. We were both on the same shift. Someone only “gets out” if he’s a user. If someone’s a dealer, it’s very difficult to get out.

But that’s what’s happening: people are getting into this life at a very young age. Very young indeed. These boys are starting young. Most of the dealers are young boys.

Working Two Jobs and Going to College

I’m trying to get a college degree because of my mother. I’m afraid she might need something and I won’t be able to help her. I’ve always thought about this, even when my father was alive. I was afraid they might need money, or something else, and I wouldn’t be able to help. I want my mother to retire.

After my father passed away, I applied to Universo, where the first graduating Nursing class will be mine. The college is from Rio and has branches in Bahia, Juiz de Fora and now Belo Horizonte.

So these days I work every night, seven days a week. Two jobs at night: from 7 PM to 7 AM at the hospital and from 7 PM to 7 AM at a private home. During the day, I go home, I get home around eight, eight-thirty, I take a shower and go to college at eleven, eleven-thirty. I have classes from Monday to Saturday.

The hospital pays around R$800 ($340 USD) per month and the other job pays around R$500 ($200 USD) per month, so I earn around thirteen hundred per month. I don’t pay rent, but there’s water, electricity, food bills… I help out at home. I pay for school, seven hundred and something per month.

I don’t have any time. I don’t even have time to date, but this business of starting a family only causes trouble. I need to go to mass; it’s been about three Sundays since I’ve gone. I used to go more often, when I had more time. I was very involved in the church, I did a lot of theater, I argued a lot with the priests, so I did a lot of that. Now, not anymore because I work and study a lot.

When I was on vacation from college, I slept. I would get home in the morning and sleep all day. Because I was so tired. But even with that, I couldn’t catch up on my sleep. I didn’t get proper rest. Because sleeping during the day is not the same as sleeping at night. Not at all. After I graduate, the first thing I’m going to do is move out of my house. I’m going to live alone because my house is so messy right now. Sometimes I can’t even study or sleep properly.

When I graduate from college, I never want to work nights again in my life.  When I graduate, I think I’ll sleep, sleep, and sleep.  Nighttime is for sleeping and partying. That’s it!

But I also want to do a specialization. That’s another two years. I’m thinking of doing emergency and administration. The administrative part. Emergency is what I do here. Only the administrative part will be different. The administration will be different because it’s the bureaucratic part.

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