“I felt like this was where I was supposed to be”

Jeff Green | May 05, 2021

Cathy Fox retires after 40 year nursing career, 30 of them serving her own community

Cathy Fox was very young when she graduated from a one year nursing program at St. Lawrence College in 1981 and began working at Hotel Dieu hospital.

She went back to school a couple of years later to become a Registered Nurse and worked in the Emergency Department at the Perth Hospital in the mid and late ‘80s, much of it part-time because her two children, Lindsay and Bradley, were born in 1987 and 1989.

In 1990, an opening came up with the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) in Kingston, which provided all of the homecare nursing services in Frontenac County at the time.

After a year or so working out of the VON office in Kingston, Cathy came 'home' to Sharbot Lake. The VON office, in the basement of the medical centre in Sharbot Lake, was the base for home nursing services in the 'northern' region, and Cathy was born and raised in Sharbot Lake and lives near the village as well.

“I really felt like this was where I was supposed to be,” she said of her years with the VON. “I was providing care for people who I knew and who had looked after me when I was growing up. I was able to talk about my patients with Dr. Bell, Dr. Fraser and Dr. Black, at the medical centre, on a daily basis, and we had weekly meetings to talk about how people were doing. The service was coordinated by the Community Care Access Centre office in Northbrook, where they understood the distances involved and the needs of the people in 'the North'. We were able to schedule visits efficiently and when people became very ill and even palliative we could check in on them daily. It was very efficient, very fulfilling.”

Cathy Fox may indeed have worked for the VON for the rest of her career.

All of that changed in 2004, when the Ontario Ministry of Health decided to set out a new bidding process for providing home nursing services. The VON left home care entirely and the service is now being provided by more than one agency.

Cathy was vocal about her concerns with the changes at that time, and her opinion has not changed after watching what has happened in the intervening 17 years.

“Nurses are travelling from one end of Eastern Ontario to the other, literally passing each other on the roads, and there is nowhere near the continuity of care, and much less of the consultation with family physicians, that we had back then,” she said.

After working at jobs in Kingston for a couple of years, after leaving the VON, Cathy eventually came back to work in Sharbot Lake, this time at the Sharbot Lake Medical Centre (now the Sharbot Lake Family Health Team).

She was the office nurse for the first few years, and went back to school to obtain her Bachelor's Degree in Nursing in 2010. Later, when the diabetes educator left the Family Health Team in 2013, she was persuaded to take on that role. She went back to school, while working, to get her credentials, which she completed in 2014 and renewed in 2019. This role, similar to the home care nursing with the VON, has been particularly satisfying.

“It has allowed me to establish relationships with patients over time, develop a care program with other Family Health Team staff, again it has felt like I have been where I belong, caring for people in my own community” she said.

Always a planner, Cathy provided 18 months notice before her retirement, “but I don't think anybody took that too seriously at the time,” she said.

What followed was a huge change in the way the Family Health Team operated, when COVID hit.

For Cathy's patients, it has been a challenge, because they do need to come in quite regularly for blood work, but over the years she has been doing a lot of counselling and checking in with her patients over the phone anyway, and that made the transition into COVID protocols much smoother.

“I could talk to somebody on the phone for 15 minutes, you can work out a lot of problems that way. I'm comfortable on the phone, as are most of the patients.”

Her nursing career has also had an influence closer to home. Her daughter Lindsay became a nurse as well.

“Lindsay is braver than I ever was, however. She works in the ICU at Kingston Health Sciences Centre, which is always a challenge. And now it is more than that. Anyone who complains about having to wear a mask for 15 minutes in a grocery store should talk to Lindsay about the PPE she wears in the ICU every day, and about what is going on there with the numbers of people they are caring for from other regions. It is pretty extreme.”

Cathy's husband, Steve, worked for CN, and he retired young, 13 years ago, so he has been waiting for Cathy to retire to help with projects at home. Also, helping out with the care of her grandson is something Cathy is looking forward to.

“I'll find things to do,” she said.