'You're going to be scared': La Loche shooting survivor reflects on recovery in wake of Toronto attack
'You will survive, you are a survivor,' says Charlene Klyne
A woman who lost her sight in the La Loche school shooting says she understands the struggles faced by survivors of the recent shooting in Toronto's Danforth neighbourhood, which claimed two lives.
"I'd like to tell people that you will survive — you are a survivor," Charlene Klyne told The Current's guest host Megan Williams.
Klyne was shot in the face by a 17-year-old who killed four people at La Loche Community School in northern Saskatchewan in January 2016.
During her own recovery, Klyne has been "unnerved" by similar attacks like the one in Toronto, and the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
"I know when they do get out of the hospital, they're going to be scared to go anywhere."
She wants to tell fellow survivors that "certain noises are going to trigger off certain feelings, and you're going to be scared. You have to learn to be aware that not all the noises are from a gunshot."
"A lot of people think that: 'Oh, you'll get over it,'" she said. "And I'd like to say that yes, you'll get over it. But I can't see, so I'll never really get over that fact."
Trauma can last decades
Funerals for the victims of the Danforth shooting — Reese Fallon and Julianna Kozis — take place Monday, while several survivors remain in hospital.
Nathalie Provost, who survived what became known as the Montreal Massacre, said that violent events often leave more survivors than we realize.
"In Toronto, we will never be able to count the number of people that survived what happened," she told Williams, referring to people who have been peripherally affected by the shooting.
"We don't know all those stories, but that will be an incredible number of people."
Provost is one of the survivors of the mass shooting at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, where Marc Lepine killed 14 women in 1989. In the moment he turned his gun on her, she remembers being "sure that in the next fraction of a second I would be dead." He shot her four times, but she survived.
She understands first-hand that the trauma can be long-lasting. More than a decade after the shooting, she found herself scared at the noise of her children playing.
"I just became stressed, you know, my heartbeat changed, I sweat a bit, it's instinct," she told Williams.
"A slamming door can make me crazy … even today," she said.
While Provost has struggled in the nearly 30 years since the attack, she said there have also been positives.
She said she has met extraordinary people in the wake of what happened to her like Canadian chef Martin Picard who visited her in the hospital and crafted a special recipe to remember the women who died.
"In French I would say, I will try to translate: 'There's some flowers that can grow in mud,'" she said.
Listen to the full discussion near the top of this page.
This segment was produced by The Current's Kristin Nelson and Samira Mohyeddin.