Kristyn Brown was among the first cohort to graduate from Champlain Saint-Lambert’s Nursing program. Not only did she complete the rigorous three-year program, but she did so with two toddlers at home.
Brown (Nursing, 2014) said balancing full-time study with young kids at home wasn’t easy, but she took it one day at a time.
“I missed out on a lot of time with my children, but all my hard work was for them and our future,” she said.
Brown said she relied on her children’s father and her family during that time. She also felt a great deal of support from her classmates.
“I had a really supportive cohort, we were like a family,” she said.
It helped that she wasn’t the only one balancing school and family life: “There was a lot of moms in our program actually,” she said.
After she graduated, Brown started working at the Kateri Memorial Hospital in Kahnawake in longterm care.
She also started working part-time at an drug and alcohol rehab centre specialized for Indigenous patients. Brown said after four years, she was burnt out from the stresses of that job.
“It’s a rough field of nursing – drugs and alcohol detox,” she said. “Especially when it’s from an Indigenous perspective. There’s a lot of trauma. There’s some really sad stories.”
When she felt she couldn’t stay in that field, a new opportunity came Brown’s way. Her mother handed her a flyer advertising for a research assistant position at the Douglas Hospital who would help create mental health assessments for Indigenous people.
Brown jumped at the chance to get involved. She said that COVID-19 disrupted her work doing data collection for the research project but that she was happy to be part of the project to develop health services specialized for her community.
Brown is now back at Kateri Memorial, working in acute care and focusing on maintaining her work-life balance.
“You have to slow down and learn to take care of yourself,” she said.
Brown’s advice to current students and recent grads: “Leave home. Get out there and expand your horizons. Go different places. Learn as much as you can. Never stop learning. Don’t feel defeated, everything you do in life has a purpose. Don’t be hard on yourself.”
