Almost six years ago, an accident in the kitchen left Kate Walker’s preschool aged son with a severe injury. Now, Walker wants to help other families going through the same experience.
“ It was after a really lovely day on the ski hill that we came home and I was preparing, just kind of doing the final preparations of a soup that I’d been making in the slow cooker,” she said. “ My youngest son came into the kitchen and said he wanted to help me.”
Walker’s son pulled a toddler chair up to the stove. Before Walker could react, the chair slipped from under her son, and he grabbed the pot of soup, which spilled on him and caused full thickness burns on 21 per cent of his body.
He had to spend 6 weeks in hospital after the incident, and has had about 13 reconstructive surgeries. Walker says that today, her son has “an amazing attitude towards life.”
“ He shows us how to be strong, how to be brave, how to find the joy in life, no matter what, like he’s just brimming with. Joyful, generous, empathetic, beautiful energy, and he’s an amazing kid.”
Walker says that early on after the incident, she realized her son needed to be surrounded by positive energy so that he could heal.
“I was traumatized and so I think I was bringing a lot of my pain into the room and so early on I realized that I needed to shift that and I needed to do my own work so that I could be as healthy as possible, to continue being the best mom that I could be to my son.”
Walker did several different kinds of therapy, both on her own and with her husband. She says it helped her step outside of the grip of overwhelming emotions she was feeling.
“ It helped me to gain some objectivity,” she said.
Prior to the incident, Walker had been working as a television writer. In recent years, she pursued a degree in counselling and has recently opened a practice in Nanaimo.
She says the first step to becoming a counsellor was taking time to focus on her own healing work.
“I don’t believe that we get past these things, so to speak, I think that what we learn is to be in relationship with the things that have happened in our past, in a way that doesn’t trigger us all the time and a way that we’re able to manage in the way that we’re able to accept,” she said. “I worked on that relationship with all those parts of myself that were overly activated at the time.”
Walker says she’d like to help others in the burn trauma community.
“ This community of burn survivors needs a counsellor who knows burn trauma, who’s been through this, who really gets it and who can support people from that place of real deep understanding,” she said. “I saw that gap and I just felt called to fill it.”
“ I’ve done the work. I can share it with others in a way that I feel helps, and hopefully inspires other people to feel like they can do the work, and come out with a strong connection to self and a healthy relationship to their past, and a brighter picture of their own future as well.”
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