TD Aboriginal Nursing Fund Award

I am profoundly grateful and honoured by being chosen as a recipient of the TD Aboriginal Fund award through the Canadian Nurses Foundation.  This award could not have come at a more appropriate time or have been more welcomed.  It had been a long and financially constrained year of graduate studies and I was quite at the end of my rope.  You can imagine the joy and relief I had felt at receiving this award which definitely allows me to continue on in my studies and move forward toward my second year of school. I am originally from Grand Rapids, Manitoba and a proud Cree woman.  This award allows to me to continue my studies in the Master of Nursing program – Clinical Nurse Specialist Stream.  My specialty is dialysis and with a growing number of aboriginal people becoming dependent upon this therapy, I have felt the need to return to school and provide the services that I could see were not being provided in the northern population.  It is my wish to provide holistic care to patients and their families who are living with dialysis and to study the impact this has made within their lives and their culture.  I want to make their lives better and easier.  Ultimately, it is my wish to reduce the incidence of dialysis within this population. I wish to thank TD and the CNF for allowing me to continue on in my studies and work towards making life better for those living on dialysis.