by Tilda Shalof
“What goes on in that one?” I asked Gidget, who organized the interest groups.
“Hackey-sack, cornrow braiding, and macramé-flower pot holders.”
“What about the Fear Factor Cookout?” I asked.
“Well, today they cooked up a batch of fake snot.”
“What’s the recipe?” I asked, half kidding.
“Gelatin, green and yellow food colouring, corn starch.”
There was even a handstand class. “Not enough propulsion and you can’t get your legs up. Too forceful and you’ll flip right over,” the instructor cautioned the kids.
I asked Mike about the daily routine. “It’s a creative schedule,” he explained. “We try not to impose a lot of rules. We believe kids have a right to make their own decisions about how to spend their time. We don’t want to stress them out. If they want to do nothing, that’s okay, too. They need downtime.”
“We need more safety practices,” I said. “There have been too many accidents and preventable injuries.”
He seemed worried. “You’re not going to bail on us, are you, Nurse Tilda?” At that moment he looked like he did on that first day, a scared boy at the gate, waiting for a mother to save the day. He must have sensed how frustrated I was feeling in this chaotic, lawless place because he tried to win me over. “You’re the best nurse we’ve ever had.” It wasn’t his flattery that made me stay; there was simply no way out. I didn’t know how I was going to last two more weeks, but I was a nurse and would never abandon my patients.
I returned to the infirmary and sat down at the desk. For amusement, I took another whirl on the first-aid dial, my own little wheel of misfortune.
Electric Shock: Call doctor. Start artificial respiration at once. If victim is burned, apply wet baking soda or strongly brewed tea leaves to affected area.
Yeah, right, someone gets hit by lightning and I’m going to put on the kettle for tea! I tossed the wheel into the garbage … then fished it out again. Its comic relief might come in handy. I took a look at my growing shopping list. I needed a thermometer, bottles of sun block, a jar of aloe vera gel for sunburns, electrolyte replacement powder for dehydration. The days were hot and no one was drinking enough water or wearing a hat. Already a kitchen worker had fainted from heat exhaustion. I’d had to hose him down and pack him in ice.
The next time I saw Wheels, I handed him my list. He took a glance and gave it back to me. “It’s all up here.” He pointed to his noggin. “My memory is perfect. I hear something once and remember it for life – no explanation necessary. But I won’t drive to town for just a small errand. I don’t sweat the small stuff.”
“So, let me get this straight,” I said, exasperated. “You’ll make a run to the hospital if it’s an emergency and only a trip to town if it …”
“I need a real reason. Like, if a kid is in a coma or having a dying spell, then, obviously, I’ll go. That’s a no-brainer. No explanation necessary.”
“I see,” I said, gritting my teeth.
We didn’t have to wait long for a “real” reason. Later that afternoon, Owen, a tall, tanned counsellor, rushed in with a female counsellor cradled in his arms.
“Becky fell,” he said and laid her down gently on the couch. “She banged up her arm.” Becky cradled her right arm close to her chest. She bit her lip as tears streamed down her cheeks, but managed to tell me what happened while I gently examined her.
“I was showing the kids tricks on Wheels’s BMX and did a 360 into the bushes and landed on my hands. My arm broke my fall.” She gasped with the pain.
Wheels appeared on the scene. I had to give him credit, he was always reliable in an emergency.
“Here’s your second reason to go to town,” I told him. “Becky has to be taken to the hospital for an x-ray and probably a cast.” I turned to her. “What’s your job at camp?”
“I’m a swim instructor.”
Swim instruction? As far as I could tell, swimming consisted of a counsellor standing on the beach, bellowing into a megaphone: “Everyone into the lake!” I still hadn’t even seen an alert lifeguard at the swim docks.
Becky was shivering with the pain. She was going into shock. I wrapped a blanket around her. She was about to vomit and I handed her a basin and held her hair back. “I think you’ve broken your arm,” I told her as I created a splint out of a rolled-up newspaper. I ripped up a bed sheet and fashioned a sling to support the weight of her arm.
We loaded Becky into the van. Owen, her boyfriend, hovered over her, looking worried. He hugged and kissed her. “You’re going to be all right, Becks.”
“They couldn’t run this place without me,” Wheels said cheerfully to me, revving up the motor and turning on the car radio.
“I’m quite sure,” I muttered.
“Hey, look at that!” Wheels admired my handiwork on Becky’s arm. “You’re more of a DIYER than I thought. You rock, Nurse Tilda! Maybe you don’t need all that stuff from the drugstore after all.”
“Get everything I asked for!” I practically shouted at him. “And drive carefully,” I added. I wondered if I should go with them, but Becky’s condition was stable and I was reluctant to leave the camp on its own if I didn’t have to. I hoped my makeshift arm splint would keep Becky’s bones sufficiently immobilized on the bumpy drive to the hospital.
Something else was on my mind. “Wheels, is there a coffee shop in town? Could you bring me a cappuccino?” I handed him a few bills and as I watched him drive away, I hummed the first few bars of that corny song, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, here I am at Camp Grenada …” I started counting down the minutes to their return. I desperately needed a jolt of real java.
3
DANGEROUS FUN
Things got worse. Every day, the waiting room filled up and the line of kids wanting to see me snaked out the door. There were noisy coughs, stuffy noses, assorted stomach aches, and a fever that went away after a day. Two CITS were made to stay overnight in the infirmary because the camp council decided this would be a suitable punishment for their streaking through camp. However, their stay in the infirmary ended up punishing me more. Their raunchy jokes and raucous laughter kept me awake all night.
When I wasn’t busy treating children in the infirmary, I was running around camp, doling out pills, bandaging wounds, or taping up sprained joints “in the field.” I was either offering Band-Aids, or band-aid type solutions. I was constantly putting out fires, both figurative and literal ones. Yes, a real fire broke out. It happened in the kitchen. Sarge couldn’t find the fire extinguisher, though he swore he had one … somewhere. I heard the commotion from the infirmary and rushed over, grabbed a box of baking soda, and poured it on the greasy flames that had been ignited by a splattering, overfilled deep-fryer.
So far, nothing had come up that I couldn’t handle, but the sheer volume and insistence of both the campers and the counsellors’ round-the-clock demands kept me hopping. The infirmary had also become a social gathering place. At first I assumed it was because of the cans of Coke I kept in the refrigerator, but the kids kept hanging out in the waiting room, long after those had been guzzled. At times, I took a breather and sat in my office with the door closed, eavesdropping on the conversations going on in the next room.
“My dad makes toilets,” one girl was saying. “He taught me everything. I can work my way around a toilet like that.” She snapped her fingers.
I might need her skills. Anderson still hadn’t unclogged my toilet that got blocked after some kids snuck in to use it. I had caught one boy who’d forgotten to flush the evidence, just as he was making his getaway.
“Use your own!” I shouted at him.
“Yours is cleaner!” he shot back.
One day the waiting room was quiet. Too quiet. I went out and found a bunch of kids painting their finger-and toenails with yellow and turquoise polish, the girls doing their own nails and then polishing the boys’ and talking quietly among themselves.
“Isn’t camp
awesome this summer?” I heard one say.
“Yeah, at home we’d never get away with half the stuff we do here,” another said. I was glad I didn’t know what “stuff” he was talking about. I went back to my room and spun my first-aid wheel and chuckled to myself.
Gunshot Wounds: Call doctor immediately. Such wounds may cause lockjaw.
At least I didn’t have to deal with that kind of injury, but there were some serious cases, and I made sure to keep detailed notes on them. Becky’s arm had a serious fracture and she needed surgery. She came back from the hospital with a cast up to her elbow and left the next day to recuperate at home. Owen, her boyfriend, trailed off after her. He was the camp’s tripper so that effectively put an end to all canoe trips. A roar of “hurray” rose up because no one wanted to go anyway.
One fourteen-year-old boy suffered a mild concussion.
“My teeth got shoved into a guy’s shoulder,” he told me. “We were playing tackle football and I was wide receiver. The other guys forgot about the ball and one went for my stomach and the other went for my head. I’m feeling dizzy and I just threw up.” He did seem a bit spaced out. That night, I set my alarm clock for every two hours to perform neurological checks on him. At first, I was tempted to ask the counsellor to help me out, but he was so dopey, I wondered if I should be doing neurological checks on him, too. It wasn’t easy differentiating between a coma and a teenage stupor, but the kid at least was fine in the morning.
Then a situation came up that I’d never encountered before, and it stumped me. A twelve-year-old from Michigan needed an x-ray. (Mike had mentioned we had a few American campers, attracted by our forests and clean lakes.) The problem was, the boy was unhappy about going to the doctor and the possibility of having an x-ray.
“My mother can’t afford the medical bills,” he explained.
The same thing happened with a camper who had a severe stomach ache. After twelve hours the pain still hadn’t abated, so I sent him to the hospital to rule out appendicitis. He was seen, blood work was drawn, an x-ray and ultrasound were done, but then he threw up and felt better. His mother was angry because she had had to pay for a hospital visit that turned out to be unnecessary.
I was uneasy when health care and business mixed. Growing up and working in Canada, I hadn’t worried about the cost of health care. As a nurse I’d always been guided by what was best for patients, not by their ability to pay. Call me naive – or just call me Canadian – but that situation left me flummoxed. In over twenty years of practice, I had never had a patient who couldn’t receive medical attention because of lack of funds. I’d never even seen a hospital bill.
Unfortunately, I had no one to talk to about such issues, or about anything for that matter. I was getting lonely. Overhearing the constant counsellor chatter on the walkie-talkies made me feel even more alienated because I couldn’t follow the fast volley of conversation filled with private jokes, secret references, abbreviations, and codes. What I missed most of all was adult conversation and companionship, my husband’s, Ivan’s, especially. I called him one night to complain that I was homesick. He listened and encouraged me to tough it out. I knew I had to stay till the end. I had only been there a little over a week and there were still two weeks to go, but already I was thoroughly exhausted and frustrated. In some ways the work here was more demanding than in the ICU. There, at least, emergencies only took you by surprise if you hadn’t prepared yourself ahead of time – something we nurses were trained to do. Almost everything that could happen to our patients was predictable. For example, if I noticed early signs of congestive heart failure, I would slow my patient’s iv fluids to minimize his fluid intake and thus reduce the load on his heart. At the same time, I’d have a vial of a diuretic ready to boost the urine output if he became “wet,” meaning if his lungs filled with fluid. If I was worried that pneumonia was brewing in my patient’s chest, I could step up the chest physiotherapy to mobilize secretions in the lungs and maximize lung expansion. But here, I was simultaneously bombarded with the serious and the significant, the preventable and the accidental. All I could do was react on the fly.
“Lots of stuff coming at ya, Nurse Tilda?” Wheels sympathized one morning.
“You got that right,” I said, sipping my coffee, back to instant after the one glorious cappuccino interlude.
He had to be tired, too. The revelry went on every night, way past midnight. Just the evening before, the counsellors were involved in some wild pagan ritual in the mess hall revolving around Wheels himself. I had peeked in to see him standing at the centre of a circle, holding up a flaming torch, surrounded by female counsellors in various states of undress and wearing crowns of dandelions and rainbow scarves wrapped around their necks and waists. They were swaying and offering up bowls of fruits and vegetables (from their rotting garden?) onto an altar. One of them was holding out a chalice of what I hoped was merely red juice.
“All hail King Wheels, God of Camp Na-Gee-La, Lord of the Lagoon!” they chanted. “Bow down to Wheels, God of camp!” they chanted.*
They said later it was a celebration of the summer solstice, but from what I could tell it was all part of their insatiable need to lose themselves in group fun. By day they looked after their campers, but the nights belonged to them.
After hours, whenever they could, they snuck off to the lagoon in the forest. Once, on an evening stroll further afield, I stumbled upon the hidden path. I followed it, led by the sounds of laughter and singing. Soon, I came to a mucky-looking pond around which male and female counsellors were whooping it up, dancing topless beside a campfire, smoking, and swigging from bottles of “hard lemonade.” I stood back, out of view, wondering again if I should put an end to their fun and do everything possible to have this dangerous place closed down. But I didn’t want to take on the role of morality police, and besides, the campers were safe in their cabins with counsellors who were on duty. I looked up at the sky and stars for answers. A shimmering sound, clear and bright, vibrating in the night, came from the lake, then it sounded again. Was it an echo or the call and answer
of two birds singing to each other? I turned back to the infirmary.
The late-night merriment was definitely taking its toll on the counsellors. They were rundown, getting colds, sore throats, and head aches. Whoever was in charge of the morning wake-up music was getting to it later and later and choosing more mellow selections, such as “Dream Weaver.” With its ethereal synthesized plea about closing your eyes, getting through the night, and making it to the morning light, it was not a tune to rouse anyone out of their slumber. It seemed that the frenetic energy of the first two weeks was now starting to peter out, just as we were heading into the final stretch – the third (and my final – ever!) week at Camp Na-Gee-La.
Most evenings, there was a campfire. I went but made sure to stay back and sit just outside the circle, so as not to intrude on the intimate gathering around the fire. It felt like the campers’ private space and I didn’t belong. However, one evening they gave a concert at the campfire. Counsellors performed folk songs on banjos, guitars, a harmonica, and a set of drums. They played old Pete Seeger songs, Arlo and Woody Guthrie numbers, and Bob Dylan. I loved it, but I heard grumbles among the kids.
“This music is so yesterday,” someone complained.
Soon the musicians switched to more modern songs about peace, many alternating between Hebrew and Arabic. There was one in particular they all loved that kept repeating the words “Peace,” “Shalom,” and “Salaam” over and over.
They are good kids, I thought. Their hearts are in the right place.
I was worried about Sarge. He didn’t look well, and late at night, in his cabin at the back of the kitchen, I heard him coughing uncontrollably. I made him come to the infirmary and the moment I placed my stethoscope on his chest, I could hear high-pitched wheezes as he breathed in and out. “Do you have asthma, Sarge?”
In between hacking fits, he glowered at my question.
&
nbsp; “Do you use an inhaler?” I asked.
In answer he pulled one out of his pocket and huffed into it a few times.
“Sarge, has anyone ever shown you how to use it properly?”
“I know how to use it.”
“You’re blowing out the medicine. Try it again.”
He did it again, the same old way. “The medicine is going out into the room, not your lungs,” I told him. He tried again but was getting frustrated. Then I had a hunch what might work.
“Pretend it’s a joint, Sarge. Toke on it. Just suck it in and hold it.”
He grinned. Now he got it.
I shook his inhaler. It was almost empty. “Do you have another?” He looked away. “This one’s almost finished, Sarge. You should never be without it.” He still didn’t respond. “I’m going to get you a new one.” He walked to the door and turned back, keeping his eyes on the ground. “Okay, but send the bill to my welfare case worker,” he said, “not my foster parents. They have no more money to spend on me.”
I tried to not look sympathetic because I knew Sarge wouldn’t want my pity. “Okay. Will do,” I said, as if what he’d just mentioned was a simple matter of account-keeping.
“Thanks, I owe you one, Nurse Dude.”
“Okay, then, why don’t you just tell me what’s for dinner.”
“Food,” he snapped, back to his usual irritable self. “Ood-fay,” he added in pig Latin. “Eye of newt. Mystery meat! Toxic tuna with arsenic thrown in. Are you happy, now? Didja ever wonder why the infirmary is next to the mess hall? That’s so when the kids get food poisoning, they can go straight to you.”