Search Result

"Two Vancouver nurses forego retirement to become front-line caregivers in the city’s deadly opioid crisis. Street nurses Evanna Brennan, 75, and Susan Giles, 68, provide full-time care to the desperately ill, homeless, alcoholic and drug-addicted residents of Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside (DTES.) It is a labour of love that they committed to 40 years ago, ever since the HIV-AIDS crisis first struck the community in the 1980s. Angels on Call, shot in 2021 in Vancouver by director/producers Roberta Staley and Tallulah of aRTy Media, follows Brennan and Giles as they deliver a unique form of nursing called outreach care. Rather than waiting for patients to come to a clinic, the nurses go to the patients by car or on foot no matter where they are: a tent on the street, under a bridge, or in a rundown DTES Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel. Many patients say they are alive today only because of the daily care they receive from Giles and Brennan. Evanna Brennan has a formidable strength of purpose that was nurtured by a devout religious upbringing in Ireland under the tutelage of Dominican nuns. She met Giles after immigrating to Canada. Despite battling two kinds of cancer, Brennan today gathers strength from her remarkable friendship with Giles, as well as the hundreds of patients they care for in the Downtown Eastside. Susan Giles is driven by the belief that heath care is everybody’s right. She started her street nursing career in 1979, retired about 25 years later, then reinvented herself as a street nurse working alongside Evanna. Her early nursing career was spent caring for dying AIDS victims in Vancouver. Today’s situation in the Downtown Eastside reminds Giles of those desperate days. “I feel very hopeless right now. The overdose rate – it’s crazy.”"