A life full of adventures

But “boring” is just fine now for former nurse for Mother Teresa who now teaches at Seniors College of P.E.I.

Paula Gauthier’s parents stressed three things when she and her nine siblings were growing up in Hope River, P.E.I.: Go to church, get an education and be a good neighbour.

She accomplished all three, although in the case of her neighbourhood, it expanded far beyond central P.E.I. As a young nurse in India, one of her neighbours was Mother Teresa, then a revered Roman Catholic nun, and now a saint in the Catholic church.

Gauthier grew up as a middle child in the busy home of Gregory and Bernice Murphy. After graduating from the P.E.I. School of Nursing in 1976, she faced a quandary.

“I was really a homebody, but I had this desire to see the world. But I didn’t want to leave home,” she said in an interview for The Guardian.

Her solution was to accept a nursing position in a location that she couldn’t easily leave. She moved to St. Anthony on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. At the time she arrived, the only way in was by air. She was homesick before she arrived.

“I cried every day for about three weeks.”

From there, Gauthier moved to Guyana in South America. Some of the poverty and extreme conditions she witnessed were an eye-opener, and personal safety was sometimes an issue.

“I was younger and sillier and didn’t have any fear,” the now 71-year-old said. “It makes you appreciative of what we have here. The peace you see.”

MOTHER TERESA

Guyana was followed by a year of nursing at the Calgary General Hospital, following which she and a friend took a year off to travel in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, including picking apples in New Zealand. That carefree year was followed by a life-changing experience in 1982 when she worked for Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Kolkata, India, which was located in an old Hindu temple.

“It was quite a privilege. People think you had to be somebody special to do it, but you didn’t. If you just showed up, you could work there.”

She had an early introduction to a common health problem.

“I had 100 mosquito bites one day when I woke up, and about 10 days later I came down with malaria.”

Gauthier says the Home for the Destitute and Dying dealt with more than the poor and those near death. In many ways it evolved into a small hospital as the staff had to deal with people in need of acute nursing and medical care. Given the circumstances, normal North American medical practices sometimes went out the window.

“Sometimes we needed to do things we really didn’t want to do.

“I remember one evening I was looking after a little boy who was having a blood transfusion. He was dying, his blood pressure was dropping out, and Sister Luke (head nursing sister) said, ‘We have to go now.’”

Volunteer nurses were only allowed to work so many hours and only when senior sisters were onsite.

“I said, ‘Sister Luke, I can’t leave him, he is dying.’

“She said, ‘No, God will save him. The best thing you can do is go home and pray.’

“And I thought, I don’t think God is going to approve of that, he wants me to do something. But Sister Luke said we all have to go.

“So we went home and we prayed, and I was coming back in the next morning fully expecting to see him in the room at the back where we kept the bodies that passed away the night before. He was sitting up eating breakfast.

“I couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, there is something to this, what she is saying about praying.”

Gauthier says Mother Teresa commanded great respect and the ability to know what was in people’s hearts. She experienced that first hand.

After about six months working in Kolkata, and seeing the inequalities in the streets, she grew disillusioned, although she never mentioned anything to Mother Teresa.

On the day Gauthier was leaving, Mother Teresa asked her to take mail back to some sisters in San Francisco.

“I think she knew I was having difficulty with what I was seeing and how to deal with it. She said, ‘Paula, always remember you take what God gives, and give what God takes, always with a smile.’

“And I thought, you’re not talking about the mail, she just seemed to know. She was soft-spoken, but when she did speak everybody listened.”

Gauthier is a woman of strong faith, and says it was strengthened during her time in India and meeting Mother Teresa.

“She reminds me of Christ, in a way. She didn’t go out seeking people, they flocked to her.”

Gauthier still keeps in touch with the young women she worked with in Kolkata.

“We had experiences that change your life, some things on the streets. It really bonds people.”

LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCES

One of those was putting a dead man in a taxi without the driver realizing the man was deceased.

The man had been taken to Sister Teresa’s centre in critical condition after being struck by a vehicle. Before the taxi arrived to transport him to a hospital, the man died.

Fearing a street mob might blame the centre for the death, it was decided to trick the taxi driver into believing the man was still alive.

Nurses arranged it so he was sitting up in the seat, and when they arrived at the hospital, they made it look like he was being assisted to walk in.

“Everybody remembered that, even 30 years afterwards when we met in Ireland. There were six or eight of us, and everybody remembered that day.”

Gauthier’s globetrotting didn’t end with India. She later worked in California, at the King Fahad Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the Vancouver General Hospital, where she earned her baccalaureate degree, and in Oregon, where she received her master’s degree from the University of Portland.

While in Portland, she did locums to remote small nursing stations in the Arctic. Gauthier says she learned valuable lessons in creativity while in the north, similar to her time in India.

“It taught that you have to manage resources really well, to be creative and have the courage of your convictions. You tried things that were difficult and you didn’t know if they were going to work or not.

“But when somebody’s life was in danger, you had to do some of those things. And generally with really good success.”

Gauthier returned to Prince Edward Island in 1991, and after five years in which she did acute care nursing and worked with the Association of Nurses of P.E.I., she became the learning manager for Holland College’s practical nursing program (1995-2017).

TEACHING SENIORS

Nowadays, Gauthier keeps her hand in the health-care field by volunteering as an instructor for two Seniors College of P.E.I. courses entitled How the Human Body Works in Health and Disease, especially as it concerns seniors.

“I love it; it has taught me a lot. I learn from the participants as much as they learn from me. They always have something to offer and have that lifelong learning ethic.”

Gauthier herself is excited about attending a new Seniors College program this season on heritage retrofitting.

Registration for the college courses opens at 9 a.m. on Sept. 3 at the website seniorscollege.ca.

A possible new topic for her to discuss will be her television career. She and fellow sisters Anita, Bernie, Brenda and Heather are participating in CBC’S Family Feud Canada.

A brother, Mike, is going along to Toronto for moral support. The Murphy sisters’ appearance will be taped in late August. It’s uncertain when it will be on national television.

Gauthier’s hobbies these days include gardening, travel and golf, but once included two polar opposite activities: skydiving and scuba diving. Her skydiving adventures when she was living in Alberta included a harrowing experience.

While still a novice and on her third jump, her parachute failed to open properly and she fell more than 1,500 feet in an unplanned free fall.

After doing an emergency manoeuvre she had been taught, the chute opened. Because she was jumping from approximately 3,000 feet, her landing came faster, and harder, than normal. She didn’t complain.

“I was lucky.”

But like the plucky, young woman she was, she got back on the horse a couple of weeks later and things went well.

“I had to go back. I started skydiving because I had a fear of heights, and I thought this is a good way to get over it. After the incident, I thought, ‘OK, if you don’t go now, you’ll never go back.’”

Her time scuba diving was also to tackle a fear, this one of the water.

“We were farmers growing up, so we didn’t go near the water to much.”

After her many travels and adventures, Gauthier’s homebody genes clicked in. In 1992, she married a childhood friend, Terry Gauthier, and they have a daughter, Kaely, who is finishing up her RN degree.

Their house is on property Paula’s family owned and had been sold in the 1960s. It returned to family hands in 1985.

“I have a boring life right now and I enjoy it.”