SIMRAN KAUR DHILLON

BC Children's Hospital nurse who filled the ward with paper chains and bhangra

There are three things you need to know about Simran Dhillon. She laughed with her whole body, she could find a vein on the first try on a frightened five-year-old, and she believed any hospital room could be improved by paper chains.

Born in 1993 in Surrey, British Columbia, the daughter of Harjinder, a long-haul truck driver, and Manjit, who worked nights packing blueberries and days raising two children, Simran grew up between the gurdwara, the hockey rink and the bhangra studio. She earned her nursing degree at the University of British Columbia in 2015, danced on the UBC bhangra team, and in 2016 started at BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver, the place she had wanted to work since she was twelve.

On the paediatric surgical ward she was the nurse who knew every child's favorite song. She hung Canucks banners, cut paper chains in the team's blue and green, and taught half the floor the first steps of bhangra in the playroom. Parents wrote her letters. Colleagues kept them in a binder at the nurses' station that now runs past two hundred pages.

She loved masala chai, long drives to Whistler and terrible karaoke, and she held her faith lightly and gratefully. In her last year, through illness and treatment she called “the long shift,” she held on to the Sikh idea of chardi kala, the spirit that stays in high spirits, and kept making paper chains for the new kids on the ward for as long as her hands allowed.

Simran passed away on 3 March 2025, aged thirty-one, surrounded by her family and the sound of kirtan. She leaves her parents, Harjinder and Manjit; her younger brother Jaskaran; her partner, Arjun; and a ward full of children who will never know how many of their good days she arranged.

“Chardi kala, always. Even on the long shift.”