By Prior Beharry
REGISTERED mental health nurse Vanessa Chadee who migrated from Trinidad to England 22 years ago says that the Covid-19 pandemic has taught her resilience.
It is something though that she would have learnt since childhood which she described as both “disheartening and happy.”
Growing up in the rural village of Barrackpore in south Trinidad was made difficult at times for Chadee and her two younger brothers Darren and Junior. Their father was an alcoholic. When Chadee was five, he left his job as a police officer due to his drinking and her mother Rawti had to work as a housekeeper to put food on the table.
Chadee said, “I remember many times not being able to go to school because I did not have shoes or a school uniform. My parents separated whilst I was in primary school and we started living with my grandparents not too far away.”
She wrote the Common Entrance examination and passed for ASJA Girls’s College in San Fernando. It was only with the support of her extended family that she made it. Her maternal uncles, who also had very little but worked growing sugar cane with their father, paid for Chadee’s books, uniforms and for her to travel from Barrackpore to go to school.
Chadee said, “I must say growing up with the support of my grandparents, aunties and uncles were also some of the happiest times of my life. I had great friends in college and although I didn’t have as much as they did, they supported and encouraged me throughout the seven years I spent at ASJA Girls’ College (1985-1992).”
She attained eight O’Levels and four A’Levels and worked some jobs like a receptionist and accounts administrator thereafter.
Chadee wanted to study medicine, but financial circumstances made it difficult. Her uncle Harry Sookhai stood as guarantor for a loan for her to study nursing.
After her first year, she won a scholarship that paid the nursing fees for the following year and in 1999 Chadee graduated with an associate degree in Psychiatric Nursing.
Due to limited by opportunities for upward mobility in Trinidad, Chadee, moved to the United Kingdom in 2000 after qualifying as a registered mental health nurse.
She was sponsored by the healthcare company Cygnet Healthcare and worked diligently for the next ten years working her way up from a staff nurse to ward sister, team leader and then unit manager.
Chadee was then recruited as hospital director at Glenhurst Lodge under the Bramley Health Group of Companies.
In 2014 she was again promoted to hospital director for a much larger hospital within the Bramley Health Group called The Langford Centre.
And in February 2020 she became the Director of Clinical Services and Compliance for the company.
Working in Covid
One month after taking up her new post, Covid-19 came to the UK. It was a “baptism of fire,” she declared.
Chadee said, “I had to learn, adapt and implement very quickly. Instead of settling into my new role gradually, I was working 70-hour weeks, writing contingency plans, sourcing PPE, implementing and training staff on new-infection control procedures, dealing with staffing shortages, both patients and staff testing positive for Covid-19 and dealing with families regarding deaths amongst our patient population.
“I think the most testing part of my role was informing relatives and friends that their loved ones had passed away. With a lot of support from the other company director and a lot of hard work loyalty and dedication from our staff, we continue to fight this dreadful virus.”
She said, “I could not have done it without my son and husband. Working 15-hours days made us a bit more resilient.”
Chadee said this made her appreciate life more as she witnessed people dying all around her. She lamented that coping with medical situations during the pandemic showed how her colleagues were genuinely trying to help not only patients but their fellow medical professionals.
She was happy that on occasions her husband who had owned a restaurant in Canada would have provided nice meals at the end of the day like curried chicken, goat, fish or a steak.
She drew strength from her family.
Personal life
Chadee said, “Personally I have had to concentrate on the positive aspects of my life at that time, my husband and kids who have supported me immensely and have understood and stood by me during all the long hours of work. During the pandemic, I came home every day wondering if I contracted the virus and whether my family was put at risk.
“I have found strength and resilience that I never thought I had and never imagined that I would have to deal with anything like this in my career or lifetime, but I managed to get through it thanks to God.”
She met her husband Anthony in 1991 and they dated for two years. Anthony was the first serious relationship she had and the first boy to be introduced to her family. Naively, she said, she thought he was the boy she would marry.
They broke up two years later and both went their separate ways; each getting married.
When Chadee moved to the UK, she got married and had her only son Thomas in 2007. (Thomas did a school project where most of the information about his mum is taken for this article.)
Anthony got married in 1995 had two children Shanaya, now 23, and Nicholi, 21, but was divorced in 2003. He went to live in Canada.
As fate would have it, she and Anthony, now an accountant who runs a car parts export business, met up by chance in Trinidad in 2015, after not seeing each other for about 20 years. They went on a date at the Gulf City Mall in La Romaine and continued seeing each other.
Anthony moved to the UK in 2015 and three years later they tied the knot. They now live in Bexhill-On-Sea, East Sussex.
Giving back
Chadee started an overseas nursing programme with Bramley Health in 2015. Nurses from around the world were sponsored to come to the UK, where they are offered training and experience to be able to sit their exams and register as nurses for employment.
She said, “We have since recruited many mental health nurses from Trinidad and a year later, started to recruit from Jamaica, St Vincent and Barbados. We currently also recruit from Africa and the Philippines.”
Chadee misses her family, the weather and the Trinidadian meals of doubles (a curried chickpeas sandwich of fried dough with condiments including a variety of chutneys) and curried duck.
But she usually returns twice a year which the pandemic has spoiled but will continue her visits as things resume to normality.
