Anne Hazon spent a lifetime caring for others. For 56 years she’s helped the sick, the injured, the women in labour and the newborns — including the now 15-month-old vying for her attention this morning.
Seated at a coffee shop table in Richmond Hospital’s lobby last week, Hazon, 73, was days away from getting time to care for herself; she’s now retired from a long nursing career, much of it spent here at Richmond Hospital in maternal and child care.
“The shifts are 12 hours, so I do find them a bit long now. I’ve just come to that stage in my career where it feels like the right thing to do,” she says, her granddaughter Aliyah Cohen — the last baby she’s delivered at Richmond Hospital — squirming in her lap. “I’m looking forward to some time to myself and time with my granddaughters.”
Hazon’s current nursing assignment is in the six-bed neonatal intensive care unit at Richmond Hospital, a unit that provides care for premature and seriously ill newborns. It’s far from where her career began in the early-1960s.
Born in England, Hazon wanted to be a nurse from the time she could speak. At age 17 she entered nursing even though mom, also a nurse, tried to steer her away from the profession. Hazon trained at Leicester Royal Infirmary, a large hospital that gave her fast experience in gruelling work. She loved it.
“Patients were in big long wards. There were no private rooms. You’d have a 36-bed ward. I remember as a student nurse we’d have to go around and make sure all the wheels of the beds pointed the right way. Sometimes we had to scrape the dirt out of the wheels.”
She earned her nursing diploma in 1964 and longed for adventure. Hazon and a friend packed what they could onto scooters and rode through England and Scotland, working in nursing along the way. A few years later, she noticed an advertisement that said Canada was looking for nurses. She packed her things and headed to Toronto.
There she met her husband. They moved to B.C. in 1971 and Hazon got a job at Vancouver General Hospital. The couple bought a house in Richmond, and in 1973 Hazon found work at Richmond Hospital.
Throughout her career, which includes 10 years as a B.C. Nurses Union steward, Hazon has worked with patients in numerous fields, including midwifery, surgery and public health, but labour and delivery is a specialty. The reward of the job is delivering babies.
“It is a great thing to bring a baby into the world and see the joy on parents’ faces.”
Nursing also takes an emotional toll, but Hazon decided early on to leave those emotions at the hospital.
“What good would I be to my children and my husband if I let all that wear me down? But there are of course certain situations that you never forget, where a child has died or a mother has died.”
Notably, Hazon never shied away from going to bat for patients and colleagues. Having trained and mentored many nurses, in 2012 her peers recognized her with the prestigious Award of Excellence in Nursing Practice.
Nursing has changed dramatically over the years. Hazon remembers her early days when the emergency department wasn’t staffed with doctors. A nurse would instead have to be paged to assess a patient and call a doctor in from home, if necessary.
And then there are those odd twists.
One night Hazon found a man in the ER holding what appeared to be a baby wrapped in a blanket. She ushered him in, put the bundle on a stretcher and unwrapped it.
It was a monkey.
The man explained that his pet had cut itself on a coffee table. Hazon dutifully tried to close the wound, but the bandages wouldn’t stick. Naturally, she called a veterinarian.
