Stepping into the spotlight

Sue Cavanaugh: Stepping into the spotlight

They say life is all a stage and for Sue Cavanaugh, that line couldn’t be truer.

With a warm, outgoing and bubbly personality, Cavanaugh naturally gravitated towards theatre in her youth. From Toronto to the Yukon, she performed in countless venues across the country for years but when she couldn’t find work living in Kelowna, she decided to take on a different role and became a Health Care Assistant (HCA).

For nearly a decade, Cavanaugh worked as an HCA throughout Interior Health and Vancouver Island Health before moving to Kitimat almost five years ago. Here, she continued at the Kitimat General Hospital and other health centres but after so many years in the job, she was eager for a scene change. She decided to pursue the nursing program at Coast Mountain College in Terrace at 38 years old.

“I would get so many comments at work telling me I would make an excellent nurse because I love people so much... and Heath Care Assistants are the first eyes for a nurse so we do a lot of similar groundwork,” she explains.

“I was always wanting to do further patient assessments, to learn about their medical histories and where they’re from, which made me want to excel further to better provide for them.”

Cavanaugh says going back to school was daunting as she first needed to upgrade her high school courses to qualify for nursing, making the journey ahead appear long. She continued onwards while still working and raising a family but says everyone in the CMTN community has given her the determination to keep going.

From study groups to carpooling with peers from Kitimat to Terrace, Cavanaugh says her nursing program quickly became a closely knit group of friends who uplift each other to this day.

“After class, we would all regularly go down to the library for our study groups that we formed and make flashcards to test each other on our lessons,” she says.

“I credit most of my success to those times, everyone would come up with different flashcards that I’d never even thought of and because it was so much fun, learning became so easy.”

She says another surprising draw of the program has been how interactive her classes are. Whenever there were complex concepts to learn, the instructors would think of creative ways to explain them.

“They would turn their lectures into games, I remember once in biology we were studying cell regeneration so they made a huge board game in class that we walked through to learn all about it.”

With graduation in sight and a summer position as a student nurse under her belt, Cavanaugh can’t wait for her first official day on the job.

“You’re never stop learning when you’re working with patients, you get to know them and hear all about their lives — it’s very rewarding,” Cavanaugh says.

“I just hope that I can brighten their days even when they’re down, to remind everyone how amazing life can be and that we all have to help one another.”