The Vancouver woman who was hospitalized March 31 after a 20-day-hunger strike against the Site C dam has ended her fast, but says her fight against the $8.8-billion project isn’t over.
Kristin Henry, 24, had been living on a liquid diet of water, tea and vegetable broth at a protest camp outside B.C. Hydro’s Vancouver office when, last Thursday night, her heart rate dropped to dangerous levels.
“I had my pulse checked ... it was getting quite low, so we called the ambulance, and I was taken to hospital,” she told the Alaska Highway News.
Once there, she was told her heart “wasn’t doing so well,” and that she was having kidney problems. After four days at St. Paul’s Hospital, Henry decided to end her fast.
“I have stopped the strike, I have started eating again because the blood results came back to essentially saying that from that point on, I was going to be doing long-term, irreversible damage to my organs,” she said.
“At the urgency of the doctors and my family there, I decided to break my fast.”
While her heart rate stayed low over the weekend, she says it’s slowly coming back up. Her kidneys will take more time to “hopefully go back to normal,” said Henry.
While her immediate plan is to spend time with family and “get some rest and recovery and get healthy again,” she vows the fight isn’t over.
“I’ll get back to make sure to finish this fight, to make sure this dam doesn’t happen,” she said.
Although Henry has never laid eyes on the Peace River, she says she’ll be at the annual Paddle for the Peace this July.
