Veteran nurse Nadine Anderson Lawrence is celebrating her role as newly-elected second vice president of the Nurses Association of Jamaica, returning to an executive that she served in various roles before and preparing to face more of the toughness that go with the job.

The Victoria Jubilee Hospital (VJH) senior nurse, in a career in which she has gained widescale respect, has, among other things spoken of the attacks she faced from patients over the more than 22 years that she has spent there.

Anderson-Lawrence, a Departmental Nurse Manager, who was Nurse of the Year for 2007, will serve the association led by University Hospital of the West Indies nurse Janet Farr for the 2014-2015 administrative year, but the stigma of patients attacking members of staff still lingers — something that she would like to see eradicated.

Pointing to some of her own experiences, but refusing to be drawn into matters related to a probe being conducted by the ministry of health at her workplace, one incident in particular threw her off course, though not enough to force her into leaving the profession.

“The verbal abuses by patients and [their] relatives are too numerous to mention, but there have been physical abuses that I have encountered in my years at Jubilee,” Anderson-Lawrence told the Jamaica Observer in an interview.

“The worst of them all was in 2005, when I had just returned from leave, after undergoing major general surgery.

“A patient was behaving badly on the ward and I got a call to go upstairs and see if I could talk to her and calm her down. I went up, started speaking to the lady in a friendly tone and telling her to calm down, when suddenly she let off one kick straight into the centre of my abdomen where my operation was performed. It was frightening and shocking,” Anderson-Lawrence said.

Despite the physical assault, Anderson-Lawrence, a trained midwife decided to play a more forceful role in the defence of nurses by being elected to the executive again. In that physical incident, she still delivered the woman and held no ill-feeling toward her, even though the pain from the kick lingered.

“What gave me gratification was that the same lady came back to the hospital, walked up to me and introduced herself. I did not remember the person and she said that ‘a me did kick yuh inna yuh belly, and yuh say yuh did just do surgery’.

“That incident and several of the others that I have been exposed to have not deterred me from fulfilling my objectives and meeting my goals in life,” stated Anderson-Lawrence who was among the first batch of registered nurses to have been assigned to the Victoria Jubilee.

Describing herself as a stern, no-nonsense individual who looks out for her colleague nurses and cares diligently for the sick, Anderson-Lawrence said that she had also been forced many times to separate fighting patients on and off the wards.

“I am always the cushion when some of these things happen at the hospital. I play the role of the middle person,” she said.

The Holmwood Technical High School graduate vividly recalled two “satisfying” experiences that will remain with her long after she leaves the institution.

“I was assigned to work in the nursery and I had to care for this baby who weighed 0.5 kg (roughly one pound) at birth. That baby had many periods of apnoea (temporary lack of breathing), and while there may have been doubts over whether or not he would live, I didn’t give up on him, and I continued to care for him. He is now 17 years old and doing well. His mother still keeps in touch with me,” she said.

“Another baby girl was also born premature and it was feared that she would not make it, but I was confident that she would. She went to Holy Childhood High School and is now on her way to university.

“Up to last month her mother said hello to me… she told nurses that she knew me and she could not forget what I did to her child.”

Delivering another patient resulted in the woman returning to the VJH and insisting that no other should perform midwifery duties than the senior nurse, when it was time to give birth to her second child.

She will always remember too, while heading downtown Kingston to get transportation home when a woman, a charcoal vendor, rushed up to her and hugged her, literally dyeing her white uniform black.

“She was very sick when she came in to have her baby and even ended up in the HDU (High Dependency Unit), but I would always go to visit her, speak to her, give her support and always reminded her to visit knee city (kneel down and pray). Although my uniform was no longer white, I welcomed the hug, and she even came back to the hospital to have another baby,” Anderson-Lawrence said.

The Seventh-Day Adventist’s special attention to the young may have been inspired by the fact that she had virtually been given up for dead by relatives in Trelawny, who had built a coffin for her before she was age two.

She had been sick for six months, battling an allergy to milk powder, among other things, and treatment at hospitals in Trelawny and Manchester realised no positive result. So when she was taken to the Bustamante Hospital for Children, her family felt that she would not have survived and chiselled out a wooden coffin in anticipation of her imminent burial.

Apart from the kick, her list of bad experiences include being verbally abused by relatives of patients, but even those have not dissuaded her from providing the best care to patients.

Anderson-Lawrence, who served before as first vice-president and second vice-president of the NAJ, summed up her time at the VJH as one with “mixed feelings”.

In the midst of personal abuses, violent confrontations in the general West Kingston community have also contributed to making the lives of nurses like her, sheer torture.

The operation led by members of Jamaica’s security forces in May 2010 was, to her, like “hell”.

“I was planted at the hospital for over 36 hours during the incursion. We heard so many gunshots and at times everyone had to be going down on the floor. After that experience and nurses got a chance to leave the hospital, another nurse who spent 36 hours on duty and I were travelling up Cross Roads, when a man begged us money which we did not have to give him. He just spat at the vehicle that we were in.

“The incursion was bad, and there was another shooting incident when over 20 people died (2001) in West Kingston that had us uneasy. The gas riots, too, were bad, as one time I was kept at work for 36 hours and could not move,” she said.

For the community-oriented woman, who often gives safe sex talks to young people, issues condoms to them, and, long with her husband Sanchez provides meals to homeless people in her West Central St Andrew community, the work will continue.

Having served as a member of the fund-rasing committee of the Kingston College Parent Teachers’ Association while her only child, Sanchayn Lawrence, attended the school, she still has the drive and hunger to assist.

After all, she rose from humble beginnings at her birthplace, Troy in Trelawny, then moved to live in Golden Run, near Craig Head in Manchester, and jogged up the ladder of success to achieve a master’s degree in nursing administration from the University of the West Indies, following earlier studies at Kingston School of Nursing.

Anderson-Lawrence has pledged to continue to do her work and care for her patients — including the ones who give birth at the front of the hospital.

“I have delivered several babies in front of the hospital, in cars, because when the mothers arrive at the hospital the babies’ heads are almost out. In one week alone I delivered three, and if it happens that I have to do more, then I will,” she said.