At toronto’s mount sinai Hospital, RN and lactation consultant Louise Lemieux White reviews the chart for a new mom who has just had her first baby and is struggling with breastfeeding. It says she uses cannabis.
“Five years ago, I would have ignored that. I was naive and feared what I did not know,” White admits. But today, knowing what she knows about addiction, she decides to address her patient’s drug use and listen to her story. In 2014, White’s then 14-year-old daughter was struggling with an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and needed 15 months of treatment to get to a place where she would not need to self-medicate to relieve her emotional pain.
“Having that knowledge and empathy allowed me to have that conversation (with my patient),” says White, who approached the woman with a sense of understanding, not judgment.
White credits the experiences in her own personal life that have allowed her to become the nurse and person she is today. And she’s not afraid to talk about those experiences.
White’s nursing career started in 1986 after graduating from the French Nursing Diploma Program at Algonquin College in Ottawa. She began working in the surgical infant unit at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
She treated everything from wounds and burns to tumours, learning a lot about infant care along the way. After six months, White left Ottawa for a position at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto to expand her knowledge in neonatal surgery.
“It was a higher level of illness and intensity of care,” she says, noting one aspect of the role was to develop relationships with the parents of the infants she cared for. Despite learning a lot in her position, she knew additional education would help her to provide better support to parents.
In 1989, White left SickKids to pursue her BScN at McMaster University, working part-time at Toronto General Hospital on an adult intensive care unit. Two years later, she graduated and accepted a position as case manager for a Toronto home-care organization. In that role, she oversaw nurses and services for clients who required in-home care. But the position was short-lived. She put her career on hold in 1992 to begin her family. Shortly after this, White followed her husband, who took a job in London, England.
During her break from nursing, White focused on her growing family and reassessed what she wanted to do professionally. She knew she wanted to continue working with babies and parents, but also believed she had a gift for teaching. In 2003, now back in Canada, she became a certified childbirth educator and began teaching at Mount Sinai Hospital before earning her certification as a lactation consultant in 2006.
It would be less than 10 years later when White would discover her young daughter’s drug and alcohol addiction. “In a few months, we were facing a daughter who did nothing but look for her next fix,” White explains. “When we were seeking some help in our province and in our city, we found that there wasn’t any. There were long wait lists...over a year for a residential bed,” she says, adding she felt isolated, judged and stigmatized because addiction is seen by many as a moral failing. Desperate, White found a residential treatment centre in the U.S, and sent her daughter away to begin her recovery. She has been drug and alcohol free ever since.
Something needed to be done about the lack of support for parents in the same situation, she says. That’s why, in 2016, White and Angie Hamilton, a parent whose son had a similar experience, teamed up to form the grassroots Canadian registered charity, Families for Addiction Recovery (FAR). Their goal is to support families and protect individuals, particularly youth and young adults. They want to change the face of addiction by ending stigma and advocating for evidence-based treatment. “(We would like) to bring awareness and be a movement for social change,” says White.
At 53, White now balances her work as a lactation consultant with her busy schedule advocating for an open-minded approach to individuals with addiction. Supporting parents and families is a big part of what she does as the co-founder of FAR.
“I’ll keep on that slow road to progress and see what happens…because I know I can make a difference,” White says.