KOCHI: On the face of it, she is just another security guard on duty outside the emergency ward at Lisie Hospital. But Geetha S, a petite 34-year-old woman is not just anybody who ended up on the job because she couldn’t find anything else. She, who was once a nurse in a prestigious hospital in the Middle-East, was forced to take up the job of a security guard because her husband burned her nursing degree certificate out of spite.“My husband was miffed because I left home to take up the job in Muscat. In the two years I was away, he married another woman. It was only after I came home on vacation that I realised that my husband had been misusing all the money I was sending him. He had purchased a new home and had settled in it with his new family. I left him and took my children to my home. Meanwhile, my husband came home, took my nursing certificate degree and burned it without my knowledge,” Geetha says.In the two years that Geetha was away working, she had not saved enough. Procuring a duplicate certificate would prove too costly for her and the unexpected turn in her life had burned away her desire to strive for another. But, even as she expresses her wish to go back to the nursing profession she once cherished, she says she is happy that her work as a security guard (the one she got through an ad) has at least landed her on a hospital’s premises.“Maybe not as a nurse, just a security guard, but at least I feel close to my true vocation here. Sometimes, the junior nurses ask me to help them. I know it is not part of my duty, but I feel happy to do it anyway,” she says.Born to a poor family in Mundakkayam, Idukki, Geetha has learnt to take the pain in her stride. “I have learnt to smile at the bitter lessons of life. Some ask me how I manage to remain happy with all my troubles. I have learnt to appreciate everything now,” she says. Even as she adjusts her cap on her head she says, “Everybody at home thinks I am still a nurse.”
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