Hay River (May 08/06) - Linda Beaton is happy as a medical laboratory technologist with the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority.

"I really love my job," she says.

That's understandable considering the difficult road she has travelled to get there. A single mother of three since 1983, Beaton went back to high school when she was about 30.

Linda Beaton is a medical laboratory technologist in Hay River. The mother of three made a decision when she was about 30 years old to go back to high school because she didn't want to grow old and find herself waiting tables all her life. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

At the time, she was working several part-time jobs in Ontario to support her family. She was a waitress at a truck stop, a janitor, a bookkeeper, manager of a car rental agency and a school bus driver.

"I only had Grade 10," she recalls.

At the truck stop, a co-worker was an elderly woman. Beaton, now 49, decided she did not want to be working as a waitress when she got older.

So in the late 1980s, she went back to high school. In fact, she was driving the bus that took students to the school she attended.

"I parked the bus in the parking lot and went to school with them," she says.

Beaton admits to being a little nervous when she started high school for the second time. "But when you're determined to do it, you do it."

When she was in high school, she still didn't know what she would like to be, but wanted a well-paying career in which she could work with people.

Upon graduating high school in 1988, she studied medical lab technology at a Sarnia college.

After graduating college in 1991, Beaton sent 500 job applications across Canada, but only managed to get a part-time job on Prince Edward Island, where she worked until 1994 when she was laid off.

She was unable to get another job in the field because of cutbacks across Canada and returned to Ontario where she drove a school bus, taught first aid and was a security guard.

Beaton, who is originally from Newfoundland, says she never looks back at her road to Hay River and considers it a struggle.

"You just put one foot in front of the other," she explains. "When you have three kids, you have to keep going."

In 1998, she got a part-time job as a medical lab technologist on Cape Breton Island, and later a full-time position in Churchill, Man.

In late 2000, Beaton got her current job in Hay River, which offered her a $9-an-hour increase in pay.

As a medical laboratory technologist, one of five in Hay River, Beaton is trained to collect various bodily fluids and analyze them.

"Anything that comes out of your body, we can analyze," she says.

Many tests, such as analysis of blood, are done in Hay River.

Other tests, such as of tissue samples, are sent to Edmonton or Yellowknife.

Beaton says medical laboratory technologists are an important part of the health care system and they work closely with doctors and nurses to anticipate patient's medical needs.

Right now, there is a demand for medical lab technologists across Canada, she says. "It's a cyclical thing."