Nursing

Dorothy Monteith

Hartley Neita, Contributor

HER NAME is Dorothy Monteith. She was born, Dorothy Stovel, in East Harbour of the Turks and Caicos Islands on July 27, 1929, and spent her early years in what was then a dependency of Jamaica. Like the children everywhere, she played ring games, jacks, and hop scotch. She also remembers building castles on the very beautiful and clean beaches of the islands. And she read a lot.

Seventy years later, her face is still young except for the laugh lines which trace the many years of joy, mixed - of course - with the sad moments which have given strength to her character.

She went to the Government Elementary School, and later the Secondary School in the Turks and Caicos. She then decided to take up nursing as her career; and except for times when she mothered her four children, and moved from place to place with her husband, late Resident Magistrate Basil Monteith, nursing has given her many of her most happy moments.

She came to Jamaica and studied nursing at the Kingston Public Hospital, then did midwifery at the Victoria Jubilee. She returned to Turks and Caicos to work and it was there she met her husband. He was in the Islands in the judiciary and one year after the spark of love flew from either eye they said "I do" to each other. When his assignment was finished, they returned to Jamaica. He served and they lived in Port Antonio, Lucea, Morant Bay and Kingston. For a while she was a housewife and mother, except for a brief time as nurse at the exclusive Frenchman's Cove Hotel in Portland. She resumed her career at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Morant Bay, and finally at the Bustamante Children's Hospital in Kingston.

"Children are wonderful patients," she recalls. "They are amusing, loving, mischievous and observant."

She retired from the Children's Hospital in 1989, and then spent ten years at the Oxford Medical Clinic in Cross Roads, St. Andrew. Her husband died some years ago but her children and extended family give her total love and affection in these after years. There is Kathleen, a Lecturer in History at the UWI, for whom any day is "Mothers' Day", her twin Dorothy-Jean, a part-time artist who is with the Jamaican Embassy in Washington D.C., Carol, now living in Germany, and Peter, her eldest who is a travel consultant executive.

Her afternoons are full of activity with her grand daughter, Tiana, who goes to Sts. Peter and Paul Preparatory School. She also finds time to bake and entertain her many friends. Patients she cared for still remember her after many years. They stop her in the plazas and send her letters. One girl she cared for at the Children's Hospital was, the last time she saw her, a student at the Mona campus. And these are the jewels in her life, which have made nursing such a rewarding profession for her.

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