EXTENDING HER LEGACY

A fourth-year student at Ryerson receives award honouring late Star reporter Barbara Turnbull,

As soon as she finished being interviewed by the Toronto Star about receiving Ryerson University’s Barbara Turnbull Award, Kayla Douglas dashed off to cover a fashion event on campus for her journalism school’s paper, the Ryersonian.

This spring, she’ll start an internship at the Ottawa Citizen.

Douglas has come a long way; she was hospitalized two years ago with a mystery illness.

She’s now a fourth-year Ryerson Journalism student, and is the latest recipient of the award, which is given to a student with a physical disability who best embodies former Star journalist Turnbull’s characteristics: tenacity, perseverance and a positive attitude in the face of significant challenges.

Turnbull was shot during a convenience store robbery in 1983, leaving her quadriplegic at age 18.

She died in May 2015, after a decades-long career reporting for the Star, earning a reputation as a champion for disability rights.

Douglas said she was initially hesitant to do this interview; journalism is an intensely competitive industry to break into and she didn’t want to give potential future employers any reason not to hire her.

“It’s kind of a complicated feeling to feel like I have to be better than everybody else to not be considered replaceable as soon as I get sick,” she said.

She eventually agreed, she said, because she doesn’t want anyone in her position to feel as though they can’t be themselves.

“I wouldn’t want anybody else in my same position to hide this part of them,” she said. “I realized that, as a journalist, I have a voice to go and help all these different communities, and now I have kind of a hand in the community of people with disabilities.

“So I thought, why would I hide this part of myself when I can connect with more people and then help tell their stories as well as my own?”

Recalling her hospitalization, Douglas said she caught an illness that she couldn’t seem to shake.

“I was throwing up constantly,” she said. “I had to be within a couple feet of a bathroom at all times.”

The diagnosis from multiple doctors in Toronto and her hometown of Pickering was a viral infection that should clear up. After waiting two weeks with no improvement, she said she went to see her family doctor, who gave her some meds — which only made her feel worse.

It was finally during a visit to the emergency room that Douglas said she was diagnosed with a type of inflammatory bowel disease so uncommon in young people that the nurse thought the year on her hospital bracelet was wrong. “I was born in ’97, and they thought it had to be at least ’79,” she said.

Now on the proper medication, Douglas is doing much better, and keeping a positive attitude, even after a flare-up meant she couldn’t attend her internship at the Citizen this September.

“Stuff like this can come up at any time, so I just have to make the most of what I’m doing and try to get everything done as soon as I can. I try not to worry about it,” she said. But the Citizen was understanding, Douglas said, and pushed back the date of her internship.

She starts in the spring.

“I wouldn’t want anybody else in my same position to hide this part of them.” KAYLA DOUGLAS FOURTH-YEAR RYERSON JOURNALISM STUDENT