We Threw Sister Mokoena's Farewell at Two in the Morning

The roster nobody wanted to read

I saw it on the board in the duty room on a Thursday, written in her own neat capitals the way she wrote everything. Sister T. Mokoena, Ward 14, night duty, 19:00 to 07:00. Under it, in smaller letters, someone from the matron's office had added the word FINAL and underlined it twice.

I read it three times. I had known for months that she was retiring. But I think every one of us had quietly pictured a proper send-off, a Friday afternoon in the boardroom with the CEO making a speech and a cake from the bakery on the corner. Instead, the woman who taught me how to find a vein on a dehydrated eighty-year-old with my eyes half closed was going to walk out of this hospital the same way she had walked in, at seven in the morning, tired, with her handbag over her arm.

"She chose it," said Lerato, the other staff nurse on my rotation, when I asked. "She told Matron she started on nights and she wants to finish on nights. She said days are for people who like being looked at."

That was Sister Mokoena exactly.

What she was to us

I need to explain who she is, otherwise none of the rest makes sense. I came to Ward 14 at twenty-three, fresh out of college, convinced I knew things. On my second night a man in bed nine started sweating and going grey, and I froze at the foot of his bed holding a clipboard like it was a shield. She did not shout. She walked past me, put her hand flat on his chest, said his name twice, and then said mine, quietly, and told me exactly what to fetch and in what order. Later, at the nurses' station, she made me rooibos and said, "Now you know what your body does when it is frightened. Next time you will know it sooner."

She did that for half the nurses in this building. Some of them are unit managers now. One is a lecturer at Wits.

Planning a party with no rules

The problem was obvious. A medical ward at two in the morning is not a venue. We had twenty-eight beds, twenty-six of them full. We had a sluice room, a duty room the size of a large cupboard, and a nurses' station that is really just a counter with a kettle and a broken swivel chair. We had no budget, because the staff fund had been emptied in March for Precious's maternity gift. And we had Dr Naidoo, the medical officer on call, whose pager had a way of going off every time anyone took a breath.

Lerato and I made rules on the back of a fluid balance chart. Nothing loud, because patients come first and she would never forgive us otherwise. Nothing that needed a plug, because the extension cords on our ward were already a fire officer's nightmare. Nothing hot, because the microwave in the duty room has been dying since 2019. And it had to happen between the midnight obs and the four o'clock obs, which gave us a window of about forty minutes if nobody crashed.

Food was the only thing we could actually control. Everything else, the timing, the patients, the pager, belonged to the night.

The collection

I started a WhatsApp group called "Ward 14 Secret" and within a day it had forty-three people in it. A porter called Bongani, who had pushed beds for her for twenty years, sent two hundred and then apologised that it was not more.

By the Monday we had enough for proper food, not just the chips and Coke we usually lived on at three in the morning. Lerato's husband offered to collect whatever we ordered on his way home from his own late shift, so it would be fresh when it got to us.

We argued for two days about what to get. In the end we settled on sandwiches, because sandwiches are what nurses eat anyway, standing up, and because I had once seen a platter at my cousin's engagement and remembered thinking how nobody had to be in charge of serving it. You just took the cling wrap off and the job was done.

Two in the morning

At ten past one, Lerato's husband phoned from the parking lot. We met him at the side entrance where the smokers stand.

We set everything out in the duty room. Two platters, a box of samoosas that Bongani's wife had fried that afternoon and sent cold, a cake from the corner bakery with "Thank You Sister" written in blue icing, and forty-three printed messages that Lerato had rolled up and tied with surgical tape because we had no ribbon.

Sister Mokoena was doing her own round. I waited until she came back to the station and then told her there was a problem with the drug count in the duty room.

She sighed, put down her pen, and followed me. I opened the door.

Nine of us were squeezed in there. Dr Naidoo was in the doorway with his pager in his hand, already apologising in advance.

She did not cry. She stood very still with her hand flat on the doorframe, the same way she had once put her hand on that man's chest, and she looked at each of our faces one at a time, slowly, like she was doing a headcount. Then she said, "Who is watching my patients?"

We told her. Only then did she sit down.

Eating standing up

It was not a quiet party, exactly, but it was a whispered one. We ate with paper serviettes and passed the cake round on a kidney dish that had been sterilised for the occasion. Dr Naidoo managed two sandwiches and half a samoosa before the pager won and he ran off to casualty with his mouth full, waving.

Bed four's buzzer went at 02:22. Lerato answered it. Sister Mokoena sat in the broken swivel chair through all of it, reading the rolled up messages one by one.

At some point she read one out loud. It was from the lecturer at Wits. It said, "You taught me that frightened is just information." She folded it in half very carefully and put it in the pocket of her uniform, and that was the closest she came.

Seven o'clock

At four we did the obs as normal. At seven the day staff arrived, and she handed over the keys to the drug cupboard, and then she just went. No speech. Bongani walked her to the taxi rank.

We cleaned the duty room before Matron arrived. There were a few sandwiches left, which the day staff finished by eight, and I put the empty boxes in the recycling and thought about how many nights I have eaten cold takeaways at that same counter, alone, at four in the morning, wondering whether I was any good at this job.

I still eat at that counter. But I eat differently now. I make the new girls sit down for ten minutes, even if they say they are fine, and I make them rooibos, and when they have frozen at the foot of a bed for the first time, I tell them what their body was doing, so that next time they will know it sooner.