Camp Nurse (25 page)

First to show up in the morning were two nine-year-old girls, Xiu-Ling Rosenberg and Frankie Colwin. Xiu-Ling was petite with long black hair, and Frankie was also small and wiry, pale with short brown hair, and glasses that magnified her eyes and always made her look startled.

Xiu-Ling noticed me reading her name. “It’s
Zweeling
,” she said helpfully. “I’m from China. My parents rescued me from
being drowned by some village peasant, a.k.a. my biological father,” she added cheerfully. “I have add and Tourette’s but I’ll let you know if I start ticcing ’cause I’ll need the chewing gum my parents sent. It helps me.” She took her friend’s hand. “Frankie has add, too. Hey, what meds are you on this summer?” she asked Frankie, who told her. “I’m on the slow-release stuff now,” Xiu-Ling boasted. “It has fewer side effects and stuff. Ask your parents to switch you over.” They got their meds and walked out arm in arm.

Thirteen-year-old Sharon was in a bad mood. She had a headache and was annoyed to have to come to us for the medications she took at home independently. I explained that we had to keep meds locked up, but she was impatient and left as soon as she swallowed her pills.

We were just about to lock up when Bradley arrived at the last minute. He was on daily allergy pills but preferred to take matters into his own hands. “You may not see me from time to time,” he cautioned as he slapped a baseball into his catcher’s mitt over and over.
Thwack!
“I decide when to take my meds. Don’t worry, I’m gifted, so I know what I’m doing.”
Thwack! Thwack!

“How will we know whether to expect you or not? Will you
RSVP
?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t worry.”
Thwack! Thwack!
He launched into the history of his allergies and all the signs and symptoms but we hurried him along so we could all get to breakfast. As we were leaving, we noticed that with all of his chattering, Bradley had forgotten to take his allergy pill, the one he had come for. “I’ll take it to him,” I said.

“No need. I have a feeling he’ll be back.” Alice pointed at the baseball he’d left behind on the counter.

When I entered the dining hall for breakfast,
camp
came back to me in a wave: the noise of hungry kids, their excited voices,
the breakneck speed of eating, and the hilarious post-meal announcements. But at Camp Solomon, there was one difference. I learned not to dig in to my food as soon as I sat down but to wait until everyone arrived and recited a grace together before the meal.

After breakfast, the day’s routine was also familiar. A morning clinic was held for anyone who had complaints of any sort. Most mornings, by the time Alice, Louise, and I strolled back to the Health Centre, coffee mugs still in hand, a small but vocal crowd had gathered. We handed out slips of paper for the kids to write down the reason they’d come and then decided in what order to treat them.

I went out to the waiting room. “Who’s got the ‘fly buzzing inside his skull?’”

A sleepy-looking boy closed his comic book and waved. “Yo. That’d be, uh, me.”

I checked his ears and throat, took his temperature – Louise examined him, too – but since we couldn’t find anything wrong, we offered him a fly swatter, which he declined, then sent him on his way.

Meanwhile, Alice had been busy with an anxious teenage girl who had a bump on her neck and who’d written “may have cancer.” Alice put her arm around her and led her in for a thorough examination, then explained that the bump was a swollen lymph node. “They help your body fight infection,” Alice reassured her. Next, she took the tall counsellor with “Big wart on foot. Been there for months” and taught him a slow-acting homemade treatment that involved duct tape. However, he chose to see Louise to get a prescription medication for a speedier remedy.

I took the boy who was “all stuffed up,” and gave him a decongestant, nasal spray, and box of tissues, told him to wash his hands, and that he was good to go.

A boy who had “puked all night in cabin (throw-up tasted like dill-pickle potato chips)” was looking better, but I let him lie down for a rest.

Xiu-Ling and Frankie arrived. Xiu-Ling was crying and pointing at Frankie. “We were sitting in services and she hit me over the head with a prayerbook!”

Frankie looked pleased with herself. I examined Xiu-Ling’s head and felt all over for swelling but found nothing. I placed an ice-pack on the sore spot. After a few minutes, I checked. “It’s fine, now, Xiu-Ling.”

“But there’s a bump,” she wailed, “and it hurts so much.”

Alice and I looked at each other and tried not to smile. I placed the ice-pack back on for a few more minutes and returned to ask how she was doing.

“Bad. Very bad,” she cried. She rubbed her head and glared at Frankie.

The morning crowd thinned out, but it picked up again as the kids starting coming for their lunch meds on their way to the dining hall. During a quiet moment Alice took the opportunity to search through the drawers for medication – anti-psychotics and behavioural drugs – that a fourteen-year-old boy named Eddie was supposed to be on. He hadn’t shown up for his breakfast meds and now not for his lunchtime meds either. It wouldn’t have mattered because she couldn’t find the meds anywhere. Alice looked worried because already – it was only the first day of camp – we’d been hearing lots of buzz about Eddie and it wasn’t good.

Seth, Eddie’s counsellor, had been reporting to us that Eddie had been acting up, trash talking, and making racial slurs toward Sam, one of the other counsellors in that cabin, who was from Serbia. “Serbia is the skuzziest country in the world,” Eddie had said to him. He’d been bullying a boy named Mitchell, calling him names, “pantsing” him (pulling down his pants) and threatening to give him a wedgie. He’d mocked a counsellor
who had special needs, for his slow, careful way of talking. Alice called Eddie’s parents to ask about the meds. His mother told her that Eddie’s behaviour had improved so much lately that she and Eddie’s father had agreed to let him go off his meds for camp. Alice looked worried when she got off the phone.

I continued handing out the lunchtime meds.

“Hi, I’m Chelsea.” A tall girl with unruly blonde hair stepped forward, her hand outstretched for her pills. She talked at top speed and her loud voice was growing louder by the moment. “You’ll be seeing a lot of me ’cause I’m on three-times-a-day meds – breakfast, lunch, and late afternoon, but not too late, otherwise, I won’t sleep at night.” She barely paused to take a breath. “You must be the new nurse. I heard there was a new one this summer. Hey, did you forget my name?” she practically shouted. “It’s Chelsea and
FYI
I’m bi!”

“Biracial?” I asked. “Bilingual?”
Bisexual?

“No, bipolar and I love it! I get mood swings.” She leaned over the counter to read the menu posted on the bulletin board over our desk. “Oh, it’s tacos for lunch!” She waved her hands up high over her head in jubilation. “Tacos are my most favourite food in the whole wide world!” She wrapped her arms around herself in a big hug. I couldn’t help but wonder if and when Chelsea would dip down to the other end of the “pole.” (And it didn’t take long to find out. Only two days later, I saw her at the lake, sitting at the end of the dock, sobbing into her beach towel over a perceived slight – an unintended diss – from another camper. Luckily, her counsellor arrived on the scene and managed to coax her back to the group.)

Xiu-Ling and Frankie were soon back, for their lunchtime meds. They were giggling madly as they lined up with the other campers. Xiu-Ling had completely forgotten about her sore head but now complained about itchy bug bites. She scratched at her legs, showing me just how severe the situation was.

“I’m soooo itchy! I’ve got way more bites than Frankie.”

“I hardly have any!” Frankie crowed.

“Why do I get covered and they don’t come near you?”

“I guess the mosquitoes like me so they don’t bite me.”

“They like me better ’cause my blood is sweeter. Hey, I’m sweet, you’re sour!”

On that first day of camp, right after lunch, I had gone to check on Daniel, the twelve-year-old with diabetes who was on an insulin pump. His care was complicated, so I asked to speak with his counsellor, and Tim stepped forward. He was a shy, serious-looking guy who listened carefully while I explained that every night at midnight Daniel was to be woken up for blood-sugar testing. If it was too high, the insulin rate would need to be increased; too low, and Daniel was to be given crackers and sugar cubes. If it was
very
low, he needed to bring Daniel immediately to the Health Centre. I described the early warning signs of hypoglycemia and how, in Daniel’s case, it was very serious. Tim nodded but his quizzical expression worried me. We’d been counting on a counsellor to help with Daniel’s condition and I wasn’t sure about Tim.

“How will I know when it’s midnight?” he asked slowly, thinking it through.

“You have a watch, don’t you?”

“Yes, but …” He looked at it on his wrist. “I don’t know how it works.”

When I told Alice about this encounter, she explained that Tim was mentally challenged. He worked as an assistant counsellor, helping out in the cabin. Seth was Daniel’s main counsellor and he would be responsible for helping Daniel manage his diabetes.

Oops!
I was going to have to be a lot more sensitive. Someone with special needs didn’t exactly walk around with a label, now, did they?

It was Alice’s third year at Camp Solomon and I was envious of the friendly greetings she received from all the kids and how she knew not just their names and medical problems but their personalities and quirks, too. I’d never spent long enough at the other camps to have built up these relationships.

Alice and I spent the rest of that first afternoon going over charts. There was a handful of kids with chronic health issues: some were hidden, others were obvious and visible. Some problems were dormant with potential for flare-ups. There were kids who managed on their own and others who needed help from us. Sophie was a thirteen-year-old, born with spina bifida, a developmental birth defect that affected her ability to urinate. She had to catheterize herself and was prone to urinary tract infections. “We probably won’t even see her,” Alice told me. “Sophie is extremely private. She doesn’t want the other girls in her cabin to know, only her counsellors. Don’t even let on that
you
know.” There was Beth, a
CIT
, who had been recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
^*
Alice and I planned to check on her daily, assess her pain and symptoms, and give her medications. Drew was a teenager with a rare metabolic disorder that he’d had most of his life. He was on morning meds and needed once-a-day monitoring but otherwise was healthy and participated in all activities. Steven was a thirteen-year-old who used a wheelchair to get around. I had seen him motoring all over camp, accompanied by his attendant, Dave. Steven had an assortment of developmental delays and physical problems. Everyone seemed to know Steven as this was his third summer at camp. His mother insisted he be treated like all the others. “Please don’t make him an object lesson,” she’d written in a letter to us. “And when the kids act up and are disciplined, make sure he is, too.”

We were still reviewing charts when Warren, a counsellor, suddenly rushed in with a frightened little boy in his arms. “Nathan can’t breathe!” Nathan was gasping for air, chugging away at forty breaths a minute.
^*
I jumped up and took out my stethoscope, but even before placing it on his chest I could hear how tight it was, full of high-pitched whistles and wheezes. There was very little air moving through his lungs and I knew his airways were likely constricted and inflamed. Alice grabbed an oxygen mask while I put a drug to open up his airways into a nebulizer, a device that aerosolized medication, and attached it to Nathan’s face. We called for Dr. Louise to come immediately.

Nathan sat hunched over, working hard at breathing. Warren held his hand and Alice, Louise, and I stood by watching closely. When his treatment was finished, Nathan was breathing more easily but looked up at us with sad eyes. He seemed so alone in the world, even with all of us comforting him.

Alice showed Nathan how to use a small, hand-held inhaler for his medication. But he had difficulty managing that, so she switched him over to a different instrument called a spacer that was easier to use. Still, it was hard for him. It took all of his concentration and he squirmed, jiggled his stick legs, and twisted his feet around on the floor as he tried to master it. I sat down to read through his chart and quickly got a better understanding why all of this was so difficult. Nathan had serious developmental problems. In his chart, there was a sample of his handwriting. It was the barely legible scrawl of a child learning how to write but Nathan was twelve years old. He looked about eight.

He’d had an asthmatic attack like this at camp the previous summer but there were few details of his health the rest of the year. Alice filled me in on the horrific story of his early childhood. Nathan had been rescued from parents who had abused him, kept
him on a leash, and tied him to a chair. Two years ago he’d been placed with a loving foster family. He enjoyed coming to camp even though it wasn’t easy for him to interact with other children and he was emotionally dependent on Warren – his counsellor last summer, too – who was completely devoted to him.

As they were about to leave, Nathan reached up to be carried. Tough, eighteen-year-old Warren wearing a black do-rag and multiple earrings slung him across his chest like a guitar and Nathan clung on. I said we wanted to check him again later but Nathan shook his head, no. He didn’t want to come back.

“We want to prevent this from happening again,” I explained, but as soon as I said that I could tell he didn’t know what “prevent” meant.

As the days went on I got to know many campers well and a few parents, too, over the phone. Daniel’s mother called every other day for an update on Daniel and for a report on his blood-sugar levels. There was anxiety in her voice and I tried to reassure her that her son was doing well and under Seth’s close supervision. She frequently made minor adjustments to his diet or insulin regimen. Later, when I would convey these messages to Daniel, he would roll his eyes or look exasperated. “I like to stay on the down-low about my diabetes,” he told me, only coming to the Health Centre if he had to change the site of his insulin needle or pick up his supplies. Usually, he came by himself, slipping in quietly so he wouldn’t be noticed, but once, he brought a cabin mate with him. “I don’t like needles,” the friend said, giving an involuntary shudder as he watched Daniel give himself an injection of insulin into his abdomen. Daniel looked at me and I had a feeling we were thinking the same thing: He couldn’t afford not to like needles. His life depended on them.