Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 67 continued ... Cpl (Ret’d) Kate MacEachern continued ... In 2007, while serving in Alberta, she was set to return to CFB Gagetown on the East coast for her Primary leadership qualification, a course required to achieve a higher rank. Once qualified, she was to be promoted to Master Corporal. Regrettably, dark clouds laid ahead. Just shy of two years after joining, Kate suffered significant injuries during a training exercise in Edmonton. It was thought she’d never come back to active duty. Instead of attending the course and being promoted, she followed a couple of programs with the CAF stress injury clinic in Alberta. With a lot of determination and against all odds, she returned to active service in 2010. “When I got hurt, I had fractured my neck, my back, my skull… I had a bleed in my brain, and it was going to take years to recover from that. But by 2010, I had recovered enough that I could start deploying again.” With those significant injuries, she was deemed too high risk for an overseas deployment. Kate’s skills were used domestically instead. She became part of the unit that was tasked with security during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. She also assisted with disaster relief efforts during flooding episodes in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 2011, Kate thought of a unique idea: raising money to help fellow members or Veterans suffering from physical and psychological injuries by walking very long distances. At the time “though post-traumatic stress (PTSD) wasn’t a foreign subject, it wasn’t talked about much. A lot has changed in nine years.” “It was the most brutal physical thing I’ve ever done. You look at a map, you think 580 kilometers, it’s not that bad. But within 125 kilometers, you could see bones in my feet, because I had blistered that bad. These walks brought so much attention to PTSD, and the outpouring of support prompted everyone involved to do it again.”
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