Weekend On Call is an entirely fictional account of a
weekend in the life of a mental health nurse manager. The combination of an
alcohol problem, work-related stress and difficulties in his marriage lead to a
crisis, as he struggles with his own mental health while being expected to oversee
the management of mental health services over the weekend period. In the story,
the on-call manager recalls something he was told back when he first trained as
a mental health nurse:
Back
inside the house, you put the bleep and the on-call mobile on the coffee table
and sit in an armchair, in the
dark. You notice you can’t stop crying. When you did your nurse training all those years ago, you remember someone
saying that to work in mental health you had to be ‘okay in yourself’. What did that mean? That you had
to have good mental health in your own
right? That you had to have a stable home life, a secure relationship, a happy
marriage?
‘The Waves of Change’ is a remarkably apt title from my
point of view. By a strange quirk its publication coincides with my decision
not to renew my registration as a mental health nurse. I retired from the NHS
in 2016 but maintained my professional registration as I then began a second
career as a senior lecturer in mental health nursing. When my late wife became
terminally ill I decided to retire from nurse education, ultimately becoming her
full-time carer. Waves of Change indeed – retirement followed by widowerhood. But
it is only now, as my professional registration comes up for renewal, that I am
finally, officially un-becoming a registered nurse. I began my nurse
training in 1983 so there hasn’t been a time in the past 38 years when I haven’t
considered myself involved in mental health nursing. Relinquishing my nurse registration
could be seen as another major life event and another loss. In one way, I do feel
like I’m surrendering a major part of who I am but I’m considering it an opportunity
to become something else. Now, having retired twice, I feel it’s time to let go
of nursing and to focus more on my other lifelong interests – writing and
music. That’s why it’s so good to have some of my fiction published instead. And
so I begin my third career – this time as a writer and musician. It sounds, somehow, so
much more interesting than ‘retired mental health nurse’.
