Camp Nurse (7 page)

“Hey, does that include swimming in the lagoon?”

“It’s a cesspool!” I glared at him. “This camp should be shut down,” I muttered.

“If there are problems, we will form a task force to address them,” said Mike.

“No committees! No meetings!” I thundered at him. “This is a deadly situation!”

“Watch out, guys,” he warned his pals who’d gathered around us. “The nurse is going ape.”

I grabbed his walkie-talkie and screamed into it. “Listen up! To everyone at Camp Na-Gee-La, there is no drinking water until further notice.” I held it close to my mouth and repeated the warning. I turned back to Mike, who now looked ready to comply.

“We’ll put up signs all around camp,” he said.

“That’s not good enough! Call Anderson! The water supply has to be shut off.”

“Can it wait? He’s busy fixing the roof. It’s been leaking.”

“No!” I stormed at him.

“Don’t stress out, we’re dealing with it.”

“People can get seriously ill and die from contaminated water,” I told him. Mike looked shocked. Was I finally getting through to him? “I want you to order a truckload of bottled water and tell Sarge to boil all water before using it for cooking or washing. This is an emergency.”

At that, Mike stood there, thinking. “Does this mean the carnival is cancelled?”

I lunged forward to strangle him, but he must have thought I was zeroing in for a hug. Once again we ended up in another tangle of misunderstanding. I pulled away. No one was taking me seriously, but at least I could try to save my own kids. I raced to find them and warn them not to drink the water. I barged right into Max’s cabin, and plowed through a sludge of wet towels and bathing suits, piles of grubby clothes and scattered candy wrappers. The kids were all there, a couple of them up high in the rafters, climbing the beams and swinging like monkeys. A few kids were gathered on the floor in the corner of the cabin, feeding potato chips to a family of mice. I happened to notice a nine-year-old boy wearing a dress, with his hair in pigtails and ribbons, but there was no time to inquire about that. Quade and a few other counsellors were playing poker with Spleen, while Max sat on the jailbird’s shoulders, doing flips backward onto the bed, giggling helplessly each time. (Fleetingly, I had to wonder if the gambling winnings would be divvied up equitably in true socialist form.) I interrupted the game to give them the warning.

“Hey, first you tell us to drink more water and now you’re telling us not to drink the water at all? I don’t get it,” Quade said. “Make up your mind. What’s your bottom line?”

“Yeah, what gives?” Spleen said without looking up from his hand.

No time to explain! I ran out and continued to spread the word. Rain started coming down, a heavy but pleasant downpour that broke the heat wave. By late afternoon, it was still coming down. The roof was leaking in the mess hall and Anderson and Wheels were up there, trying to patch the holes. The water had been shut off and bottled water had arrived. Meanwhile, all around camp, the valleys were filling up. Two enterprising counsellors hauled up canoes from the shed near
the lake and were paddling on the newly forming ponds of knee-deep water. The kids piled into the boats and others started jumping into the water with their clothes on. Kids dragged the vinyl mattresses from their beds and used them as rafts or to slide off the mess hall porch into the middle of a huge pile of mud. Pretty soon, just about everyone was deep in the mud, wearing their bathing suits or else stripped down to their underwear. I caught sight of my own kids. Max was running through the mud barefoot, looking like a feral child, while Harry was drifting around contentedly in one of the canoes, his white, mosquito-bitten arms splattered with mud. Everyone was delirious with joy! It was Woodstock, but without the drugs or music. But then someone realized that music was exactly what was missing from this scene and ran to bring the boom box from the mess hall. Soon the valley resounded with garage band grunge from what sounded like a homemade tape.

Mike joined me and gazed at the scene appreciatively. “The fun never stops around here, does it, Nurse Tilda?”

Please, make it stop!
Just then I noticed that the live electrical cord running from the mess hall was lying in a foot of water and I ran off to put the kibosh on the music.

Later on, after the water emergency ended and the mud bacchanal died down, and after I’d finished treating the cuts and twisted ankles from kids slipping and sliding in the mud, there was still Zack’s knee and Sarge’s lungs to worry about. I had nabbed Zack at lunch, but he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t examine his knee right then and there (he’d placed it right beside my tuna-fish sandwich).

“Bring this knee of yours to the infirmary after lunch,” I’d barked at him, nudging it off the table. He didn’t show up until much later. Immediately I saw that his knee was even worse. The wound was now wide open, smelly, and mushy – all signs of infection. “Okay, that’s it. You’re going to a doctor. This could
have been prevented but now you need a deep debridement to clean all that out and antibiotics, too.”

“You mean pills?”

I nodded.

He backed off. “I have issues with pills.”

“How so?”

“I don’t take medicine.”

“You can’t swallow pills? I’ll crush them into applesauce for you.” I was losing patience.

“My mother’s a Scientologist,” he said. “She doesn’t want me taking pills. She believes in the body’s natural healing powers.”

Just then Sarge arrived, right at dinner time. “I came for my breath-a-lyzer,” he said, his usual cryptic self. His lungs sounded better now that he was using his medication properly. I handed him the new inhaler I’d bought and had charged to the camp. I had him in my corner so I tried again. “What’s for dinner, Sarge? Hope you saved me something tasty!”

“Spaghetti,” he said, and, like the true gonzo chef he was, added, grinning sadistically, “with
meat
sauce.”

Sarge wasn’t joking. He had cooked up the rotten meat and served it for dinner.

All I could do was retreat to my room and wait for the victims to start staggering in. I hunkered down in bed under the covers, hiding from them all, and braced myself for the impending food-poisoning disaster. I left the light on in my room all night, and I stayed in my clothes so I’d be able to jump up and react even faster. I studied my textbooks, reviewing the signs of salmonella and staphylococcal food-borne infections. “Botulism,” I read, “starts with diarrhea and vomiting, eventually leading to paralysis of the eyes, mouth and throat, and respiratory system.” Ultimately, they would all go into cardiac arrest! Let the outbreak begin: I was ready.
^*

The funny thing was, that night everyone slept more soundly than ever before. It was the first night I wasn’t disturbed. No one even came for an antacid tablet. The only thing I ended up nursing was my own resentment and fatigue. In spite of the ominous events, things actually improved over the next few days. Mike had gotten Anderson to board up the entrance to the lagoon in the woods. Plumbers were called in to repair the leak

in the septic system. The camp’s water supply was shut down and the public health authorities disinfected the system. We drank bottled water for three days and then the water was re-tested, deemed safe to drink, and the advisory lifted. The weather had turned sunny and hot, so I returned to my previous harangue about drinking lots of water to avoid dehydration and heat stroke.

I knew for sure that the camp’s spirit was back to normal the morning when the wake-up music was “Walkin’ on Sunshine.”

There were only a few days left until the end of my tour of duty. I still fantasized about fleeing, but I was determined to see it to the bitter end. Mike and I had even become buddies.

“The buzz around camp is we’re thinking of inviting you back next year,” he told me. “You should take it as a compliment.”

“The only buzz I’m aware of is from the mosquitoes,” I shot back grumpily (though I was secretly pleased).

I had to admit, there were some delightful moments at Camp Na-Gee-La. One day I watched a group of twelve-year-old girls and boys on kitchen duty. The music was blaring, and the kids, all in their bathing suits, were laughing and dancing, spraying each other with the hand-held ceiling nozzles. They were having such fun – their wet, shining faces so joyful as they threw gobs of bubbly suds at one another. I tried to not notice the slippery floor, the piles of food residue in the sink, and the partially rinsed dishes.

I also enjoyed observing the
CIT
“activities of leadership development.” One activity was a game called “Which Would You Rather?” that posed thought-provoking questions such as: Would you rather see into the future or communicate with animals? Would you rather be famous or smart? Their Truth or Dare game must have been abandoned hastily because I kept coming upon the cards strewn all over the campgrounds, blown around by the wind.

Another leadership session started off well but soon erupted in a messy food fight. They were making a map of the Middle East, with gumdrops for Egypt, raisins for Jordan, popcorn for Israel, and licorice sticks for the West Bank, when suddenly, they started hurtling gobs of chocolate pudding (the Mediterranean Sea) and blobs of green Jell-O (Sea of Galilee) at one another. Well, one look at that scene and anyone could see why there’d never be peace in that region!

On one of my last nights at camp there was an emergency. It was the most terrifying situation I’d ever faced as a nurse – not because I didn’t know what to do, but because I had to face it totally alone and completely ill-equipped to treat it properly.

Mike banged at my window in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, shouting, “Hey, Nurse Tilda! Wake up! Come quickly! Someone’s having a seizure!” I jumped out of bed, fortunately still in my clothes, and charged out the door. My heart was pounding as we raced to one of the Comrades cabins. I had no idea what to expect. I ran in and found thirteen-year-old Amanda lying on the floor in the midst of violent convulsions. This was a true full-blown or grand mal seizure. The other girls and the counsellors were gathered around her, terrified, and I pushed them aside to get to her. I knelt down and turned Amanda on her side and cleared the space around her of people, furniture, and obstacles. Had we been in the hospital, I would have
given her a shot of Valium and called a “code,” to summon the resuscitation team, but here, all I could do was try to keep her safe while we waited it out. After a few long minutes, the seizure eased up and she lay there, unmoving and unconscious but breathing, slowly and deeply. I took her pulse; it was steady but rapid. Wheels was already waiting outside the cabin in the van. I thought about calling for an ambulance, in case Amanda deteriorated on the way to the hospital, but I let myself be persuaded by Wheels that he could get us there faster. He came in and helped carry her to the car. We laid her on the back seat and I crouched on the floor, next to her.

As we drove to the hospital the rainstorm turned into a raging electrical thunderstorm of biblical proportions. Visibility was poor, even with the high-beam headlights on. There were no streetlights on those winding country roads and it was only during the intermittent split seconds when the sky cracked open in a burst of light that we could see where we were going.

I thought through all the possible scenarios. What if Amanda went into cardiac arrest? Mentally, I prepared myself to perform
CPR
. What if her airway became obstructed? If that happened, she would need an emergency tracheostomy; I’d have to cut into her windpipe and breathe air into her lungs. I didn’t even have a scalpel or an airway with which to perform such surgery, much less the qualifications or the guts to actually do it. But if I didn’t make an airway, she’d have no oxygen flow to her vital organs. I noticed a plastic straw on the floor of the back seat, probably from someone’s trip to the Dairy Queen. I picked it up. Mentally, I landmarked her neck for the cricothyroid membrane, the place I’d have to slice open with a scalpel (if I had one) and then insert the dirty straw to make an airway for her. In the hospital, I had assisted in hundreds of these procedures on my patients, both emergency ones and planned ones, but under completely
different conditions! I held on tightly to the crumpled straw in one hand and to Amanda’s hand with my other.
Oh, why did I listen to Wheels? I should have called for an ambulance!

Amanda continued to breathe. I shone a flashlight into her eyes to check the response of her pupils. They were equal and reactive, which was a good sign, but when I pressed down on her breastbone, there was only a minimal response to that painful stimulus, indicating that she was still deeply unconscious.

Oh, hurry, hurry, get us to the hospital
. Wheels had to drive slower than usual because it was so dark and treacherous.

“Wow, it’s like Jurassic Park,” he said as another bolt of lightning turned night into day and then back to night again.

“It’s like a horror movie, except we’re in it,” I said gloomily from the back seat. What was I doing here?
I wish I was back at home, in my bed, safe with Ivan
.

“Hey, Nurse Tilda, don’t be stressed. Amanda seems better, now.”

“She is seriously ill.”

“Oh, I’ve seen worse, much worse.”

“This has the potential to be worse.”

“Oh, well, the
potential
.”

Although she didn’t appear to be seizing, I was afraid Amanda might be in a state of an underlying seizure, called
status epilepticus
, which could cause permanent brain damage. “Amanda! Wake up,” I shouted at her, fruitlessly.