A versatile professional with a heart for helping others… Eve Adams is a ‘Special Person’

Jan 12, 2020 News, Special Person

“I made a resolution that year that no matter what happens to me I would give God thanks; I was going to give thanks in the good times and I was going to give thanks in the bad times. Even though there was nothing to be thankful for at the time with such a diagnosis, I said ‘Lord you will have to give me a reason to give thanks.’ I remembered saying that and going right to sleep.”

By Sharmain Grainger

Give thanks in the good times and the bad times. This is the mantra that Eve Adams decided to embrace several years ago. It wasn’t in a time of goodness that she made this bold decision, rather it was when she was faced with the most unnerving struggle of her life.

Eve Adams is a ‘Special Person’

But it was then that she was able to muster up courage to hold on to her faith and accept that nothing happens by chance but rather to transform us into better versions of ourselves; the kind that not only wants to do good, but exudes a kind of goodness that other people want to emulate.
And for it, today Adams has ingrained in her DNA, the desire to help save lives, and she does it by any means necessary. This isn’t just in keeping with the Florence Nightingale Pledge she recited years earlier, it instead comes from a place of empathy; a place of knowing what it is to cling to life…that place where it becomes so easy to lose faith but you don’t, and instead become stronger.
There is a reason for wanting to extend your time in this realm, and Adams understands that all too well. She has come to the realisation it is not just about her; there are actually people who are depending on your very existence and, sometimes, just sometimes, to die is to let them down.
Unwilling to let them down, she battled through one of the most feared diseases – cancer – and came out on the other side a much better person, one who is deserving of our ‘Special Person’ title today.
But Adams didn’t know this was her destined path, at least not when she was but a girl growing up on the East Coast of Demerara.

Celebrating with her husband, Willie Rennick, on his 80th birthday last year

EARLY DAYS
Born to parents Thomas [deceased] and Joan Adams on March 22, 1952, as the youngest of three children, Victoria Village, East Coast Demerara was the first home to our ‘Special Person’. Later her parents bundled her and siblings [the eldest a girl and a boy (deceased)] and moved to Nabaclis, another East Coast Demerara community. She attended St Andrews Anglican School and then Golden Grove Government School.
She has fond memories of her childhood days, especially the way she was brought up by her homemaker for a mother.
“I remember my mom always telling us she was not raising us for Golden Grove and Nabaclis, and as children we could not understand that, because these were the communities we knew; where else could we be raised for? We couldn’t think of the world bigger than those two areas,” Adams recounted.
Among her years of stockpiled memories are those sumptuous lunchtime meals her mother prepared and, according to Adams, “I remember coming home from school at lunch time and the table would be set with knife and fork; we were never allowed to eat with a spoon.”
Adams from a young age, too, was an avid reader, and sometimes got lost in the pages of the several books she got from her godmother who resided in England.
“She would send me books and articles about food science,” Adams recalled, as she responded to a question about the career path she’d envisioned for herself as a young girl. “When I was in high school I told my parents I wanted to

Her son and his family complete her blended family

become a nutritionist; from reading I figured that is what I wanted to do,” she intimated.
But it would take quite a bit of work to convince her contractor father that being a nutritionist was actually a real profession.
“My dad didn’t know what a nutritionist was, and so I told him it had to do with the science of food and preparing food in a healthy way; my dad’s response to me was ‘you don’t have to go to school to learn how to be a cook’…of course my dad wanted me to become an engineer,” Adams quipped.
She also had the option of becoming a nurse, but was eventually able to make her case for following the nutritionist path.
“After I decided I wanted to be a nutritionist I sort of geared my mind towards that career path,” said Adams, as she recalled becoming a student of the Carnegie School of Home Economics and later becoming a teacher in the Home Economics Department of the Paradise Government School.
STUDIES ABROAD
But she wanted to learn so much more. Moreover, she applied and was accepted to attend Oakwood College in the United States to achieve her nutritionist ambition. Reflecting on her journey to a land that she would later adopt as her second home, Adams, amidst a girly giggle, said “I flew from Guyana to JFK in the US. It was so comical, because I landed there and the flight from JFK to Atlanta was waiting for me, and I had no idea I had to change

In the company of her husband and his children

planes, so they had to put me in this long thing [like a train] and they drove me across the airfield to catch the southern airline plane to Atlanta.”
That journey started on January 7, 1972, and evolved into another, when she met and married Winston Overton – the father of her only child – a son she named Kwame Adams-Overton.
She was able to land a job as a dietician. But according to Adams, “After I had my son, working as a dietician wasn’t working out for my family. So I went back to school and became a nurse and then I started my career in nursing.” She recalled becoming a very proficient nurse in the Intensive Care Unit and the Cardiac Care Unit too, but never really had much exposure to bedside nursing.
But even as her career in nursing took off, the marriage to her son’s father ended and Adams learned to become the best possible single-parent provider to her son.
At the pinnacle of her nursing career, Adams was happy with the life she had built for herself and son. But what she didn’t know was that she was about to face a situation that would either make or break her very existence.
The year was January 1997. During a routine medical examination, she was diagnosed with cancer, the Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma kind.

Vacation time

“It is like you can’t believe it…Whenever you get the diagnosis of cancer, it is like a death sentence,” Adams confessed. Instead of curling up and preparing to die, Adams decided to make a resolution that would change her life forever.
“I made a resolution that year that no matter what happens to me I would give God thanks; I was going to give thanks in the good times and I was going to give thanks in the bad times. Even though there was nothing to be thankful for at the time with such a diagnosis, I said ‘Lord you will have to give me a reason to give thanks.’ I remembered saying that and going right to sleep,” said Adams. At the time her son was just a teenager.
A few weeks into her diagnosis, she was required to return to be examined by an Oncologist who made it pellucid that ‘the diagnosis of cancer is not good, no matter what the type of cancer’. What she didn’t anticipate hearing were the very words that constituted, for her, a reason to give thanks.
“This cancer specialist said ‘…this type of cancer, we have a higher success rate of cure.’ I said thank you Jesus right away…I think the doctor probably thought I was crazy, but I was saying thank you Jesus for ‘my reason’.”

Growing gracefully together

It wasn’t nearly an easy fight; in fact she recalled going in and out of remission at least three times. Her last remission was in the early 2000s and ever since then “I have been pretty healthy,” she thankfully asserted.
LENDING A HAND
But even before her diagnosis, she always had a nudging to help the less fortunate in need of medical care. The importance of taking this path became even more clear after her own experience.
“I remembered coming back home to Guyana and there were many children who needed surgeries that were not offered in Guyana…this was in the early 1990s,” Adams shared as she recalled “as a nurse I used to travel with different organisations going into different countries and doing medical missionary work.”
But then she eventually joined forces with a volunteer organisation called Healing Children Northeast, which has as its mission to provide donated medical care to children in need. It was through this organisation she was able to really lend some crucial support to children in her homeland.
“I started working through the organisation to sponsor children to come up to the US for heart surgery. One child came up with a tumour on the brain and another girl who was badly burnt we were able to assist,” Adams recounted.
She doesn’t boast about being able to help others, but she did admit, “I think I have found my true calling.” As such Adams has every intention of continuing to help as many persons as possible to have a fighting chance of holding on a bit longer to a good quality of life.
Reflecting on the path life’s journey has thus far taken her, she has no regret. In fact, she has a better appreciation that it wasn’t by following a single direction that caused her to become the influential human being she is today, but rather, it took some intertwining, complete with a dash of good times and bad.
“I was able to successfully combine teaching, nutrition and nursing,” Adams said, as she considered how much more impacting her life has been as a result.
With her extensive credentials, she was able to offer her expertise at the Visiting Nurses of New York, from which she retired as the Vice President of Nursing at the age of 55.
But this certainly wasn’t the end of the employment road for this Delaware, USA resident as she recalled, “I promptly went back to work because I realised I was too young to sit at home.”
Her expertise was welcomed at the Premier Home Health Care Services, from which she retired two years ago from full-time employment.
“I am still working with them part-time, now I work two to three days a week…I do a lot of mentoring with young nurses because the organisation now hires nurses directly out of nursing school, and so I work with them to help them to build their nursing documentation,” Adams said.
Although very committed to her work and still volunteering to help the less fortunate access medical support, Adams ensures she finds time for the blended family she shares with her now husband, Willie Rennick.
Currently, here in Guyana on a semi-vacation, Adams was yesterday lecturing to Buxtonians about the disease process, since she believes that with knowledge comes power. Adams is also always eager to let people, especially those of the young generation, know that it is always wise to focus on multiple career paths, much as she did.
“My grandson is 17 years old and he wants to be a doctor, but my advice to him, and others, is don’t look at only one field, look at other career paths too…I said to him after you become a doctor, if there is another career path that you think you can better master, go for it.”
For being a versatile professional with a heart for others, today we at Kaieteur News say hats off to Nurse Eve Adams.