‘It was really scary at first’
Eskasoni nurse gets creative to help protect vulnerable communities
When the first case of COVID-19 was announced, Tanas Sylliboy worked quickly to try to protect his vulnerable Indigenous community.
The 26-year-old nurse had just completed the Nurse Practitioner Master of Nursing degree at Dalhousie University and had planned to take a month off before he needed to start studying for his national exams, but the pandemic put the brakes on both.
“It was really scary at first. My anxiety level was like 200 for those first two weeks,” says Sylliboy. “I knew that if the virus were to hit our community, it would spread really, really quickly.”
He says First Nation communities are very tight-knit and many have a housing crisis, which means a single home may contain a lot of people. Sylliboy created posters reading “Naqa’si” (“stop”) so people could identify households with high-risk members or people who were self-isolating due to recent travel. He says the signs — and thankfully not the virus itself — “spread like wildfire” throughout Eskasoni Mi’kmaw Nation and then to other First Nation communities across Canada.
Working alongside the
Eskasoni Chief and Council, Sylliboy helped make a plan to protect their community.
Eskasoni introduced a curfew and restricted people leaving the community unless it’s for urgent appointments or emergencies. Sylliboy and the rest of the health centre team are conducting most of their own appointments over the phone whenever possible, and they’ve set up a COVID-19 hotline that community members can call with questions or concerns.
He says the next steps may include giving community members experiencing possible COVID-19 symptoms the option to relocate temporarily to refurbished housing so they can self-isolate.
“Everyone’s working at 100 per cent capacity and things are going really well,” says Sylliboy. “We’re trying very hard to protect our most at-risk — our homeless and our elders — and we don’t have any cases in our community at present. We’re just trying to take every step possible to minimize the impact of this virus.”
Sylliboy says he’s not sure if the extreme measures they’re taking are working or if they’re just “extremely lucky,” but he’ll take it.
“I’ve heard many times ‘Oh, get over it’ or ‘It’s in the past,’ but it has had a ripple effect across generations. We need to have these conversations so we’re equipped with the knowledge to have a traumainformed care.”
Tanas Sylliboy
Eskasoni nurse
‘IT WAS’
“Everyone’s scared, so we’re just trying to provide that reassurance that it’s OK to be scared but they’re not alone,” says Sylliboy.
He’s been a nurse for the last five years, primarily in emergency departments across the province — including three years at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital in Sydney.
He was inspired to become a nurse practitioner back when he spent a month working alongside one, back when he was doing his undergraduate nursing degree at Cape Breton University. He loved the role she played in the communities she worked in, and knew it would “greatly benefit” his home of Eskasoni.
In many Mi’kmaq communities, Sylliboy says having a Mi’kmaq healthcare provider is “really unheard of. Many Indigenous Canadians experience barriers when it comes to accessing emergency healthcare — often due to intergenerational trauma, systematical racism or fear of discrimination — so it’s especially important to him to be “a familiar face” for them.
So when Sylliboy began working at a youth health centre three years ago, he remembers feeling discouraged that it didn’t feel like it represented Mi’kmaq youth. He took it upon himself to make it feel more home-y by adding pieces of Mi’kmaq art donated by students and staff at the Eskasoni High School.
He says it was also “unsettling” to realize how few healthcare professionals were familiar with the history of Residential Schools in Canada, including its intergenerational effects so he provided education and arranged for cultural sensitivity training for staff that were interested.
“I’ve heard many times ‘Oh, get over it’ or ‘It’s in the past,’ but it has had a ripple effect across generations,” says Sylliboy. “We need to have these conversations so we’re equipped with the knowledge to have a trauma-informed care.”
Along with the work he’s doing in Eskasoni, Sylliboy also works with the IWK Health Centre on the Aboriginal Children’s Hurt & Healing Initiative — an important cause because he says many Indigenous populations especially children have trouble expressing pain with the use of traditional standardized pain scales.
“The Mi’kmaq language doesn’t have a word for ‘pain’ that directly translates, so pain can be undertreated or overtreated because things may get lost in translation,” explains Sylliboy. “Because of residential schools, there’s stoicism reflected throughout the generations. You didn’t want to express pain to provide that satisfaction to the people who were hurting you.”
Sylliboy never thought about becoming a nurse until his high school research project on nutrition made it to the national level and a judge asked him if he’d ever considered going into medicine. No, he’d thought immediately. But later on, he’d researched the requirements and realized that he met the qualifications to get into nursing school and decided to give it a try.
During his first year studying nursing, Sylliboy got to spend time in longterm care facilities as well as various hospital departments. No matter where he went, he says he always had the same reaction: “This is something I can absolutely see myself doing for the rest of my life.”