Kari Sutherland woke up one morning as an undergraduate at Fort Lewis College and couldn’t breathe.
"I was in the ICU for seven or eight days. I almost died,” she says. I really believe the reason I’m here today is because of the nurses and the way they took care of me.”
She changed her major on the way out of the hospital.
That split-second pivot from patient to future nurse set Sutherland on a path that has tested her in ways she never expected.
While she was finishing prerequisites, her grandfather, the man who raised her, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She drove between Durango and Denver every week to care for him until he passed. She was raising her younger sister. She had a job, a husband, and a household. And she was studying for nursing exams.
“My grandfather’s diagnosis really solidified my decision to become a nurse,” she says.
Transitioning to Nursing School
Sutherland just wrapped up her first year of nursing classes as a member of the inaugural cohort of the CU Anschutz Nursing Fort Lewis College Collaborative. The program lets students in rural southwest Colorado earn a BS in Nursing (BSN) from CU Anschutz without leaving home.
“The more I learned about CU Anschutz Nursing, the more I was fascinated by it,” Sutherland says. “The high testing rates, their research, and the things the college has contributed to the nursing profession were awesome. I thought it was so cool I could stay in Durango and still go to nursing school.”
The transition hasn't been easy. Sutherland came in as a 4.0 student and promptly failed one of her first exams.
“It made me question everything: if I was smart enough and if I belonged, but it made me grow into a better person,” she says.
She retooled her study habits, committed to sleep over late-night cramming, and leaned into the tight-knit community of her 22-person cohort.
“We’re like a big family. We all really want to be nurses, and we work so well together,” she says.
The program's clinical rotations have taken students beyond the expected: local hospitals in Durango and nearby Farmington, New Mexico; a mental health facility; the county detention center; and a community health fair in Cortez.
The breadth isn't lost on her.
“The fact that we’re the first set of nursing students to do clinicals here and stay in the community is really cool,” she says.
Sutherland, a Durango native, had plans to leave the town after graduating high school. Life kept her here, and somewhere along the way, she stopped wanting to leave.
“I have so much more appreciation for Durango now than when I was a kid,” she says. "We’re a small town, and we have to take care of each other. I’m happy I’m contributing to that.”
