Crystal Lake nursing student looking for medical supplies to take on Haiti trip

CRYSTAL LAKE – A local nursing student is headed to Haiti in about a week and a half to help treat the sick.

And you can help this holiday season by hooking her up with medical supplies or the money to buy them.

Kailee Kruse, a senior at Chamberlain College of Nursing in Addison, is part of a 12-student team chosen to attend the school’s annual humanitarian aid trip. She and her fellow students will go to the impoverished nation on Jan. 8 and help run rural and urban clinics until Jan. 22.

Kruse, 22, has gotten an early start when it comes to helping people. She is an EMT who worked for A-TEC Ambulance in Crystal Lake, and earned her CNA so she could care for her grandmother while attending college to get her bachelor’s degree in nursing, which she will achieve this August. Chamberlain, which runs 20 for-profit nursing colleges nationwide, chose Kruse to be its Midwest representative on the trip after a screening and interview process.

She said she decided that her calling was international aid during a trip to Texas near the Mexico border to screen and give medical aid to people entering the U.S.

“I’m into doing international relief as the end goal … I like how medicine is approached differently. There are specialties at a hospital in our country, but when you do international stuff, you have to do all the specialties. You have to be everybody – you’re kind of like the ‘medical person,’ you’re not just one specialty,” Kruse said.

When it comes to international relief, Haiti needs all it can get. The island nation is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and is regularly wracked by natural disasters, from a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010 that killed at least 100,000 people, to powerful storms such as Hurricane Matthew, which struck in October as a Category 4 storm and killed 1,000 and affected many more, especially people still living in tents six years after the earthquake.

Kruse has set up a Go Fund Me page to raise money for medical supplies – the trip is already financed and money will be spent directly on aid – and she also is collecting supplies at her Crystal Lake home. Among the items she wants to bring are basics such as anti-fungal cream, hydrocortisone, multivitamins, folic acid, toothbrushes, floss, dressing tape and blood-pressure cuffs.

A drop box can be found in front of her home at 696 Regent Drive in Crystal Lake.

“If we can get word out, people in the community can really help out,” Kruse said.

She is a 2013 graduate of Crystal Lake South High School.