By rssfeeds-admin 
83-year-old Diane Kanzaki-Reeves was a registered nurse for 62 years. She says she developed the strength her job would require at an early age.
“I think the resilience, it’s actually survival,” Kanzaki-Reeves said.
She was only a couple of months old when her family was sent to a Japanese internment camp in 1941. She still hangs onto family artifacts from that time.
In a display case in her home sits family artifacts from that time, like the flower her dad made her out of seashells.
“There were no flowers,” she explained.
Released from the camp at six years old, she made it her life mission to help those who are hurting.
“I always say, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” she said.
Kanzaki-Reeves went to nursing school as soon as she graduated from high school in 1959.
“To be accepted, I had to be a certain weight because they felt that nurses projected health… So I had to go on a diet to lose – I can’t remember – 20 pounds or something,” she laughed.
She says a lot has changed since then, but her love for people hasn’t. She worked at several local hospitals over the years and helped to open the St. Agnes Medical Center in 1975.
Then, a grave diagnosis put her in her patients’ shoes.
“I actually developed breast cancer,” Kanzaki-Reeves said. “I noticed that there were a lot of needs in the community. There was a cancer society that had support groups, but not for mastectomy patients.”
So, she created the support group she needed herself. She then developed a breast prosthetic company to help women recover their confidence.
After that, she took her passion for cancer education to a secluded tribe in Hawaii, developing the first program of its kind in their native language.
“I gave it to them for them to use for those women,” she said.
Kanzaki-Reeves moved back to the Central Valley in the early 90s, helping to tackle the AIDS epidemic in 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 keep their HIV diagnoses a secret unless they deeply trusted the listener.
“I’ve held hands until they passed away because they didn’t have anybody else,” she said.
She helped many at their most vulnerable and afraid.
Over the course of her career, she earned many awards, including Business/Professional Woman of the Year in 1988 and being St. Agnes’ first employee of the year.
She then finished her career working at the Fresno VA Hospital.
She says, no matter where she worked or what she did, her reason for walking into work never changed.
“Everybody has hardships, and if you can help them, it might help them to move on,” she said.
She will have a retirement party this weekend, and says people from almost every single one of her jobs will be there to celebrate.
This is not the end of her mission to help others, though. She says she plans to use her time volunteering at places like the library.
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