“I came to Lynn Valley in 1962 and I’ve never lived anywhere else ever since. We didn’t look any further once we found Lynn Valley. It just had the lifestyle I wanted to live.”
In 1962, Peg McIsaac was a trained nurse and a young mother with a baby on the way when she and her husband decided to make their home in Lynn Valley. Fifty-five years on, Peg has seen her community and her profession transform.
Peg, named Margaret, known always as Peg, grew up back east in Montreal and in Toronto, where she was born in 1933.
Every summer, Peg and her brother Bill took the train to their grandmother’s cottage at Lake Simcoe. Peg liked the lake and the village down the road. “We would walk about a mile along a gravel road to the little town, buy candy, and walk back home, getting into trouble on the way.”
What kind of trouble would that be? “Oh, we’d steal an apple or pull a carrot,” Peg admits. “That was about all.”
Peg’s father, Clifford Booth, was an engineer who worked with a new material called fibreglass. The work involved testing various products at home.
“We had fibreglass curtains in our living room, and, do you remember marbles? Bonkers and those big ones we called ‘twosies’? They were made from fibreglass.”
Her mother, Helen Kerr, trained as a nurse at Toronto General Hospital, graduating as a registered nurse in 1923. She worked on the wards at the hospital until her marriage in 1929.
Daughter Peg always wanted to be a nurse like her mother.
She entered the nursing program at Toronto General in 1953.
“I lived in residence for the three years of training. Our usual curfew was 10 p.m. but one night every month we could stay out until midnight. We would sneak in after hours, of course. It was a great time in my life. I learned about nursing and I learned how to be a nurse.”
Half way through her training, Peg’s father died suddenly. Helen returned to her career in nursing, “and I got the assignment to teach my mother about changes in nursing,” Peg recalls.
“Nursing in 1954 was a different world from nursing as it was for mother in the 1920s. Medical instruments are one example. They didn’t have to be boiled as they were in mother’s day. They came pre-sterilized, in packages.”
Peg’s re-training helped her mother master the changes that had occurred in her profession over the past 25 years. “Mother went on to be a very good nursing supervisor. She was known as Peg’s mother when she re-entered the nursing program. By the time I graduated in 1955, I was known as Mrs. Booth’s daughter.”
Mrs. Booth’s daughter worked for a time as a nurse in Toronto, but her dreams drew her west. Marriage to Stephen McIsaac was a step in that direction. He was from Trail, B.C., an accomplished skier keen to return to the west side of the Rockies.
Soon after their marriage in 1959, the newlyweds made the move west. By 1962, with the second of their three sons on the way, they purchased their first home in Lynn Valley.
Fifty-fifve years on, Peg remembers Lynn Valley as it was.
“At Lynn Valley Road and Mount Seymour Parkway there was a strip of shops facing onto a gravel lot. I remember it as gravel, but it may have been paved. The boys got their candy from the Jack and Jill store, where Waves coffee shop is now.The Cedar movie theatre was near the intersection, and there was a good hardware store - not Paine’s Hardware quality (the iconic hardware store on Lonsdale) but very good. The boys learned to ski and skate here.”
Once the boys were in school, Peg worked at Lions Gate Hospital from 1969 until an opportunity took her to Burnaby General in 1977. “I loved working at Lions Gate. I still get together with friends I made there. But, I like the elderly. That’s why I went to Burnaby.”
As head nurse in a long term care ward, Peg was in a position to observe the potential for improvements in care for elderly patients. At that time, standard hospital policy required patients to be woken up three times during the night for medication and assessment. During the day, these patients were agitated and did not eat well, causing them to deteriorate rather than improve.
Would patients improve during the day if they could sleep through the night?
Peg and her colleagues decided to try something different. Nurses checked patients at half hour intervals throughout the night, administering aid and medication as necessary. “We did a proper sleep study,” says Peg, “documenting and charting the procedures.” They also introduced the use of incontinent briefs, as they were known then.
The results were positive. Patients’ appetites improved and they exhibited less agitation and confusion during the day. “The ward evolved into a ‘rehab’ unit. People came in unable to walk and they left able to walk on their own.”
Peg retired in 1995, a couple of years after that study was conducted. Changes in nursing practices and approaches over the past 22 years are of interest to Peg, but not her focus. “I move through one day at a time. Everything I do is to help the keep the right brain going so the left brain works.”
A forward thinking and acting person, Peg’s skills, experience and interests were not confined to her own benefit. She helps her community too.
Take bridge, for example. Bridge lessons at Silver Harbour Seniors Centre led to the addition of more classes at the centre, and a stint on the Silver Harbour board of directors. She’s an active member of the North Vancouver Lawn Bowling Club, playing a mean game of darts in the winter months. Mostly, though, Peg is out and about in her beloved Lynn Valley, hiking the trails with her trusty walking poles. It may be that Lynn Valley itself is an element in Peg’s approach to life, that all is well with the world as long as she is in Lynn Valley.
“To me, Lynn Valley has always been, and still is, a small town. From the time I came until now, it’s still the friendly community I moved into, still home although there are more buildings and more lights. The heart of Lynn Valley is still very much the same.”
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or email her at [email protected].
