3 weeks ago
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FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – A Fresno pistillate is celebrating her well-earned status this weekend.
83-year-old Diane Kanzaki-Reeves was a registered caregiver for 62 years. She says she developed the spot her occupation would necessitate astatine an aboriginal age.
“I deliberation the resilience, it’s really survival,” Kanzaki-Reeves said.
She was lone a mates of months aged erstwhile her household was sent to a Japanese internment campy successful 1941. She inactive hangs onto household artifacts from that time.
In a show lawsuit successful her location sits household artifacts from that time, similar the angiosperm her dada made her retired of seashells.
“There were nary flowers,” she explained.
Released from the campy astatine six years old, she made it her beingness ngo to assistance those who are hurting.
“I ever say, if beingness gives you lemons, marque lemonade,” she said.
Kanzaki-Reeves went to nursing schoolhouse arsenic soon arsenic she graduated from precocious schoolhouse successful 1959.
“To beryllium accepted, I had to beryllium a definite value due to the fact that they felt that nurses projected health… So I had to spell connected a fare to suffer – I can't retrieve – 20 pounds oregon something,” she laughed.
She says a batch has changed since then, but her emotion for radical hasn’t. She worked astatine respective section hospitals implicit the years and helped to unfastened the St. Agnes Medical Center successful 1975.
Then, a sedate diagnosis enactment her successful her patients’ shoes.
“I really developed bosom cancer,” Kanzaki-Reeves said. “I noticed that determination were a batch of needs successful the community. There was a crab nine that had enactment groups, but not for mastectomy patients.”
So, she created the enactment radical she needed herself. She past developed a bosom prosthetic institution to assistance women retrieve their confidence.
After that, she took her passionateness for crab acquisition to a secluded people successful Hawaii, processing the archetypal programme of its benignant successful their autochthonal language.
“I gave it to them for them to usage for those women,” she said.
Kanzaki-Reeves moved backmost to the Central Valley successful the aboriginal 90s, helping to tackle the AIDS epidemic successful Fresno. She says she saw the disease’s stigma first-hand.
“Oh, terrible. And of course, this is the Bible Belt,” Kanzaki-Reeves reflected.
She says she advised her patients to support their HIV diagnoses a concealed unless they profoundly trusted the listener.
“I’ve held hands until they passed distant due to the fact that they didn’t person anybody else,” she said.
She helped galore astatine their astir susceptible and afraid.
Over the people of her career, she earned galore awards, including Business/Professional Woman of the Year successful 1988 and being St. Agnes’ archetypal worker of the year.
She past finished her vocation moving astatine the Fresno VA Hospital.
She says, nary substance wherever she worked oregon what she did, her crushed for walking into enactment ne'er changed.
“Everybody has hardships, and if you tin assistance them, it mightiness assistance them to determination on,” she said.
She volition person a status enactment this weekend, and says radical from astir each azygous 1 of her jobs volition beryllium determination to celebrate.
This is not the extremity of her ngo to assistance others, though. She says she plans to usage her clip volunteering astatine places similar the library.
