Just a couple weeks before walking the stage to receive her bachelor of arts in health sciences at SFU this month, X-ray technologist Lauren Shandley was in a very different world.
Preparing for work with the Canadian Red Cross in disaster zones around the world, the 31-year-old Burnaby resident was just outside of Toronto learning how to help set up a field hospital and take X-rays in a mass-casualty situation.
She and her colleagues also practised how to evacuate if things went wrong.
“Afterwards we were all kind of hyped on adrenaline,” Shandley told the NOW.
For part of her 10 days of training, her team was thrown into a disaster simulation, complete with 100 casualties played by actors in gory makeup.
“It was intense,” Shandley said. “I was like, wow, this is about as real as it could get for training purposes.”
As a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie who works at Royal Columbian Hospital (the Fraser Health region’s main trauma centre) Shandley knows how to work on the fly, but simulating how to work with limited resources in a disaster zone has given her a taste of what her work with the Canadian Red Emergency Response Team will be like.
“You can prepare only so much, but until you’ve had a bit of a taste of it, you don’t actually know how you’re going to react,” she said. “It kind of helps you build confidence and have a starting point.”
Shandley’s trip to Toronto was the culmination of her Red Cross training, which began in March, and she is now on call for that organization’s Emergency Response Team, meaning she could be deployed to a disaster zone at any time with 48 hours’ notice.
She has also been on the roster of Doctors Without Borders since October but has yet to be deployed.
A 2008 grad of BCIT’s medical radiography program, Shandley initially assumed she’d leave medical imaging behind once she’d earned her BA in health sciences with a focus on global health at SFU.
“I always have a need to learn and grow and I found, as an X-ray tech, there’s a lot of opportunity to learn and grow, and I did quite a bit of that, but then there was a point where I was like, I need more.”
When a Doctors Without Borders job posting landed in her email inbox about a year ago, however, she realized there were ways she could combine her X-ray experience and her growing interest in global humanitarian work, and she began to seek out other opportunities, like the Red Cross.
“My passion lies in health of the human race and breaking down barriers to access, especially to some of the most marginalized people, such as women and children, especially in these settings,” Shandley said. “We have technology and the capability, so why not, right?”
