Margot

Margot is 70 years old and was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She retired from her long career in nursing in April 2022. I waited until she was visiting her daughter, a friend of mine in Nice, before the interview so it could be in person. It was decided that a zoom call would be a bit tricky for her to set up, and the translation process would also be harder online. It was the best decision to meet in person as Margot was able to better understand and trust my intentions before agreeing to participate.

Margot studied for her nursing diploma in Lubumbashi but moved to Kolwezi for work. She wanted to work as an ICU nurse, but the service wasn’t yet open in the hospital, so instead she began her career as a surgical nurse, working mostly in the operating theatre but also in the anaesthetic department. When the ICU finally opened, she went to work there but after some time the surgical department needed skilled nurses to train fully in anaesthetic care so recognising her skills, they requested that she go back and work for them.

Eventually, she met her husband who was from northern France and working in DRC with the French military. They were friends for a while before eventually getting married and she returned to France with him to raise their two children. In France, her diploma was not recognised, and she had to begin her nursing education all over again. The director of her course did not take her seriously when she said that she would complete the three-year qualification in 1 year. He was rude to her and told her that she would fail. At that time added her daughter, who was supporting with any necessary translations, a small black woman, not that young, proposing such a thing was incredibly rare. This made Margot even more determined to prove that she could do it. She wrote the thesis for her diploma in 2 months, a task that took some other classmates 2 years. One day she saw the director of the nursing school when she was out shopping and she told him that she had indeed done her qualification in one year, he congratulated her, and it was clear to me that the acknowledgement had been important for her. After finishing her studies, she worked in a clinic in the same area of northern France before moving south to Nice, where she worked for the rest of her career. She worked first in a clinic and then in a hospital. She asked if she could work back in the surgical department like she had in DRC, but they told her that for that she would have to do a further training that lasted 10 months. Naturally, she completed that training as well and then worked with her state diploma as a surgical and anaesthetic nurse in Nice until the end of her career.

When I asked her about moral events and moral distress, she indicated that there were many to choose from. The first one she remembered was an incident that happened very early on in her career in DRC. The area that she worked in was close to many large mines and a truck carrying 30+ miners to work had overturned. This was right at the beginning of her career, but it was clear that the images had stayed with her. She described having to check each of the injured men much more quickly than she would have liked to and needed to triage them and decide who to help and who wouldn’t make it. There was no A&E in DRC so the injured went straight to ICU or to the operating theatre. She remembered the cries of the men who were very injured and in pain but who were not yet the priority and said that the hardest part was choosing who to care for first. She likened this situation to the recent Covid-19 pandemic and had empathy for those working at the time, as those nurses also had to decide who to prioritise in challenging situations.