‘I love my job’: street nurse
As a street nurse, Sage Thomas is committed to bringing health care to some of the city’s most desperate residents — homeless people, substance abusers and depressed patients, beaten up by life, who don’t feel safe or welcome in conventional medical settings.
Thomas, who works with the 713 Outreach Team and has a clientele of 55 patients, is determined to alleviate their exterior wounds with salves and sterile dressings, but also to reduce the health risks they face from highrisk behaviours and addictions.
The 25-year-old is pierced, tattooed — the words “love” and “courage” among them — and unfazed by street life. In her Okanagan youth, she wasn’t homeless, but was exposed to a lot of “different experiences.”
Today, like most days, she’s outside in her characteristic androgynous attire, her short brown hair topped by a tweed cap, explaining some of the tools of her trade on a bench in Millie’s Lane — formerly Odeon Alley. It’s just around the corner from Cool Aid Community Health Centre at 713 Johnson St., hence the team name.
The team includes nine staff members with expertise in various health disciplines, including newly added nurse practitioner Nancy Wright, employed by AIDS Vancouver Island and Island Health, along with two MDs, one of them a psychiatrist. They do their work mostly wherever the clientele who rely on them can be found.
Thomas carries a kitbag with nursing supplies ranging from over-the-counter painkillers and antacids to clean syringes and crack-cocaine pipes, along with the opioid-antidote naloxone — the injectable lifesaver for overdoses of painkillers such as fentanyl.
“My week was full and intriguing and wonderful,” Thomas said on a recent Friday evening in August, sounding anything but worn out. “Always an adventure. I love my job.”
Some people might wonder how it can be rewarding to seek out unpredictable people affected by severe poverty, mental illness and addictions.
“I really get to know people on a very human level and they are all incredible people,” she said. “One hundred per cent have had a lot of trauma, but it totally blows me away to see the strength and resiliency they embody.”
The majority of her clients are homeless, while others are at risk of being evicted.
It’s a matter of keeping an eye on them, learning the places they hang out, their favourite parks, and getting to know the people who know them — in case they don’t show up.
“I’m in touch with people who historically have a very damaged relationship with health care and society, and I put the onus on health care and society [for that],” Thomas said.
“And our team is about bundling relationships and trust. We work with folks with no expectation that they will quit [using drugs]. Wherever they’re at, we support them.”