Days before her retirement, when nursing superintendent Joan Mary Prescilla received requests from her hospital dean to continue working as it prepared for the coronavirus pandemic, everyone knew she would not refuse.
Prescilla had helped manage dozens of children with serious burns, a result of their being trapped in a school fire in Kumbakonam in July 2004. Six months later, she volunteered to go to tsunami-scarred Nagapattinam, where she stayed over a month caring for survivors.
On April 1 this year, a day after she was to retire, Prescilla was at her usual post at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, attached to Madras Medical College, where she continued to assign nurses their daily tasks, supervised their work with patients and allocated resources.
“She was looking forward to retirement. But when the request came, we knew she would continue working. Everyone knew her work was important to her, sometimes more important than her home,” said Prescilla’s cousin Victoria Solomon, who too is a nursing superintendent at the Church of South India’s Kalyani Hospital in Chennai.
But Prescilla wasn’t well: she had diabetes. And as Tamil Nadu’s coronavirus counts grew week after week, the workload at the hospital increased for doctors, nurses and paramedical staff. Prescilla would continue to work from home, guiding other nurses over the phone till 10.30 or 11 at night.
Even Solomon doesn’t know yet when Prescilla’s health deteriorated. “She was hospitalised in the coronavirus ward, her blood sugar was very high and she died on Wednesday,” Solomon said.
“We don’t know whether she was positive. Initially we were told she was positive, then we were told she was negative. We don’t know yet.”
Prescilla leaves behind her husband, a 26-year-old daughter and a 28-year-old son.
“When the coronavirus disease emerged, we knew she would immerse herself in her work. She was a fire warrior in Kumbakonam, a tsunami warrior in Nagapattinam, and a Covid warrior at the end,” said Ebanezer Arul Selvam, her brother, a social science schoolteacher in Vellore.
Ebanezer and Prescilla grew up in a three-sibling family in Chennai, their mother a schoolteacher and their father a composer at a printing press. Prescilla studied science but was unable to secure a seat in a medical college after her pre-university course.
“But medicine remained on her mind — she opted for nursing,” Ebanezer said.
After graduating from the Stanley Medical College nursing school, Prescilla spent three decades steadily rising up the ranks of nurses — treating patients, rotating across medical departments and, as Ebazener puts it, earning respect and accolades from fellow nurses, doctors and hospital administrators.
She received the state government’s “best nurse” award in 2018. “It was one of her proudest moments,” Ebanezer said.
Through April and May, Ebanezer said, Prescilla’s workload appeared to increase dramatically. “She spent several nights at the hospital — her daughter scolded her several times,” he said.
“Even when she was sick, she continued working. She had her worries — she worried for her children. They worried for her. Now she is gone. The world needs to know that there are such people.”