Nurse Randi Walker treasures this beaded stethoscope, targeted by thieves in one of two breakins to her Debden area acreage. (submitted/Randi Walker)

By Susan McNeil

Nurse

Rural refuge losing appeal after two break-ins

Jan 12, 2023 | 1:21 PM

When nurse Randi Walker bought an acreage in the Debden area at the start of the pandemic, she was looking for a place to recharge from the mentally exhausting workdays during a global health scare.

Two break-ins later, Walker is thinking of selling. She no longer feels safe in her home after some of her most personal belongings taken away.

“It’s a beautiful property and I love it here. It was everything that I ever dreamed of, and it’s sort of been destroyed,’ she said.

Walker was one of 30 healthcare staff sent north to La Loche when the COVID-19 outbreak happened there in 2020.

Randi Walker was one of 30 staff sent north during the initial COVID outbreak in La Loche. (submitted/Randi Walker)

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She was working six weeks on with three days off and said at the time many people did not want to socialize with any healthcare staff, worried about possible infection from the virus.

“I was struggling mentally and emotionally. I wasn’t able to see my family. I wasn’t able to visit anyone. I was almost a representative of the virus itself because they know I’m a nurse and they were scared of me,” she said.

Buying her dream acreage was supposed to give her the time and place to heal but that was also taken by thieves.

“This is the second time we’ve been broken into in the past year. The first time they took all my grandmother’s jewelry that I inherited,” Walker said.

The loss in the initial break-in was bad enough, with the thieves going so far as to take her mop and broom and her grandmother’s clothing and jewelry, along with virtually everything else in the house.

In the second break-in, the thieves took mostly larger items like a television and a laptop. They also took her stethoscope which had been beaded by elders in Saskatchewan’s north as an acknowledgement of the work and sacrifice of healthcare staff at the start of COVID. She used it for much of her nursing career.

She found the stethoscope outside in the snow, one of only two recent positives coming from the break-ins. The other is the volume of support from her neighbours.

A family member was in the Saskatoon ICU over the Christmas holidays and a difficult decision was made to donate his organs.

When Walker, her partner, and his two children returned home, they had some possessions of his including a hospital bag with the last clothing he wore.

Those were taken in the second break-in and so were the family Christmas presents.

“They stole some really personal, important, special unique things that really mean nothing to anybody else in the world but to us and to me,” Walker said.

Neither of her neighbours in the area – which is about five kilometres off the highway – have had issues that she knows of, a fact that increases her sense of being violated along with not knowing who has her things.

“You’re violated in the worst possible way where someone goes through your most secret things,” she said. “They’re looking at the most personal parts of you and doing so without permission and without you knowing.”

With the loss of the peaceful life she had been hoping for, Walker is looking to make a change in her living situation.

She was very glad to find the stethoscope that went missing the second time.

A woman from Patuanak took the time to bead the stethoscope and in Walker’s mind represented the ordeal of the pandemic on nurses.

“It was sort of the total representation of everything I had gone through up north. It was a very special gift that I was given,” she said. The fact I found it outside on the ground like it was just an afterthought, it hurt, but it didn’t hurt as much as thinking it was gone altogether.”

In the decade or so of use, the stethoscope touched thousands of lives.

“That’s the good thing that came out of this is that it came back to me,” Walker said.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com