B.C. mourns first-known COVID-19 death of nurse
VANCOUVER— From a young age, Diana Law shared her father’s interest in helping people.
One day, when there was an accident outside Law’s house, she and her father, a doctor, ran out to attend to the victims until help arrived, recalled Glen Culshaw, her husband and best friend since high school. That’s just who Law was, he said.
Culshaw recalled that formative memory this week shortly after Law died at 57 from a months-long fight against complications from COVID-19. She is the firstknown nurse in B.C., and the second in Canada, to have died from the disease.
The way COVID-19 seemed to appear in the family gave Culshaw the belief that his wife likely contracted the virus at Peace Arch Hospital, where she worked.
When Law started to show symptoms, she went to Vancouver’s Kidney Care Clinic. She thought they had been brought on by medication she was taking in support of an organ transplant she had received several years ago. But she was sent across the street to Vancouver General Hospital, where she tested positive for COVID-19.
“It just went from bad to worse,” Culshaw recalled. His wife was admitted to the intensive care unit Dec. 31.
Culshaw also tested positive, as did Culshaw and Law’s son Alexander, 16. Both were asymptomatic then and remained that way through their 14-day quarantine period.
Their daughter Sydney, 19, never did contract COVID19, Culshaw said.
Law remained contagious and isolated for more than a month after being admitted to the ICU. After that, she could receive visitors during the times she was awake. But most often she was asleep, on a ventilator and an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, and on dialysis.
“It was terrible. Absolutely terrible,” Culshaw recalled.
Law never left the ICU. She died April 14.