“This year really just highlighted … that we can never really let our guard down because we don’t know what’s coming,” she said.Īnother Hamilton-area nurse said receiving her first dose in March 2021 was a “bittersweet” experience.Īmie Archibald-Varley, who co-hosts the Gritty Nurse podcast with Fung, had helped screen patients for COVID-19 early in the pandemic and was relieved to get the vaccine’s protection. Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 vaccines administered in Canada, a milestone that offered hope for a new year after a dismal 2020.įung wasn’t among the high-risk groups prioritized in the early days of the rollout, but she and other Canadian health-care workers have been reflecting on the past year as their own vaccine anniversary approaches.įung, who serves as the co-lead of infection prevention and control at her workplace, said 2021 was a year of learning more about the virus, which continues to throw curveballs as new variants emerge. “I was thinking: ‘if this had been available to her, I have no doubt she’d still be alive today.’” Really, it was a tribute to my grandmother,” Fung said, pausing to hold back tears during a virtual interview. “I remember feeling so fortunate (when getting the vaccine).

Although the matriarch was 106 years old, Fung says she was healthy and lively, and likely to survive another couple of years. Pandemic restrictions kept Fung from properly grieving her grandmother’s death when the “glue of the family” died in a Toronto long-term care home in April 2020.

Sara Fung was overcome with emotion when the first COVID-19 vaccines started pouring into Canada last December, and again in March when she received her first dose.Īs she felt the prick of the needle on her arm, the Hamilton-area nurse thought of the grandmother she lost to COVID-19 nearly a year earlier.

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