Of Nurses and Pathologists

By Brian Mbanacho

I am yet to date a doctor but I have a few nurses, and each time I have asked if a patient has ever died in their care and whether it affected them. There is no wrong or right answer, I wanted to add, all the while knowing there’s definitely a wrong answer. 

“It’s just part of life,” is definitely a wrong answer. So is, “We all die anyway!”

I don’t know about you but I don’t feel safe being with someone that’s been hardened by other people’s suffering. Someone who will watch someone die and then cross the road to go eat smokie pasua while asking her friend Njoki where they will be sababishaing later that night. That kind of indifference to death has to be detrimental to any romantic relationship. 

But you know what’s worse? Dating or marrying a pathologist. Like that government pathologist, Oduor, who will be the first person to be called after yet another body is fished out of River Yala. I genuinely don’t think anything fazes that man. He has seen the worst. From balding scrotums and sagging breasts to crashed skulls and broken ribs and gouged eyes. I am sure he watches horror movies as comedy every night.

And yet, this man comes home every night, kisses his wife on the lips, throws his babies in the air, chases them around the house and later that night, cuddling with his mamaa in bed, casually says, “Did you know scrotums age too?” and his mamaa will laugh and start playing with his scrotum. 

Actually, thinking about it, the person you must fear the most is someone who will knowingly date and marry a pathologist. If it’s not a fetish, at best, they are serial killers in disguise.

I am sure, when marrying a nurse or a pathologist, the pastor is mandated to ask, "Are you sure you will take this man/woman to be your legally wedded partner? Yes? Well, it's your funeral."

The less we say about morticians the better