by Tilda Shalof
Two days later Mitchell returned to camp. He was well enough to re-join his cabin but wanted to stay in the Health Centre and we let him. Most of the day, he lay in bed, reluctant to walk around. He asked if we could bring in a television and kidded that he’d probably get bed sores from lying around so much. We served him noodle soups and chilled fruit juices. Seth and the cabin visited every day, bringing him treats and even Muffin, a rabbit from the nature area (and at nighttime, Mabel, the nocturnal hedgehog, who was awake and eager to play). Mitchell was enjoying our room service and being an invalid, but he was healthy now, and after a couple of days it was time to kick him out.
It’s like that in the hospital, too, I thought. We nurses always say that when our patients start playing with the buttons on the electric bed to put it into different positions or complaining about the mattress, the food, or the “service,” it’s time to discharge them. It may seem harsh, but the whole point is to get better and go home, isn’t it?
“Why don’t you take a walk to the nature area and put Muffin back in his cage?” I suggested. “You have to start moving,” I reminded him, but he complained that he was still in pain and too tired.
“Don’t you want to get back on the bike? Remember how it made you feel better last summer?” We talked again about Lance Armstrong but Mitchell wasn’t as inspired.
Try and help yourself, I wanted to tell him.
The next day Mitchell returned to his cabin but withdrew from his friends. He left swim class or sailing, even low-key arts and crafts, to visit us, each time coming up with some tiny or implausible ailment. He began to talk about going home.
“My parents say if I come home I’ll spend the summer vegging out on the couch and gain more weight.”
“Is that a possibility?”
He nodded and hung his head, guilty as charged. I put my arm around him as we walked back to his cabin.
“It’s weird ’cause each year I think I’m going to like camp, and I’m, like, excited – well, excited-slash-nervous – but as soon as I get here, I can’t handle it. I make the best of it on the outside, but on the inside I’m sad.” He brightened. “The best part was the hospital. Now, that was cool.”
A day or two later, Mitchell did go home. His parents came and thanked us for all we’d done. They were very loving toward their son but obviously disappointed. “We thought he’d at least make it through the first week,” the father said to Rudy.
“I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “Camp isn’t the right place for every child at all times. Let’s try again next year.”
Occasionally I put aside my resistance and went to prayer services. Alice was always there and the counsellors, too, sitting with their campers, setting a good example. I had to ask myself, what message was I sending by not attending? It’s good for you, but not for me. You need this but I don’t. Once I got there, I realized it was pleasant to be together with the rest of the camp, and the music was fabulous. Once, a visiting rabbi played the accordion. After a few guffaws at what everyone assumed would be a corny instrument, we all got into it, moving to the cool, old-world swing sound. Another day, the song-leaders sang prayers set to U2 melodies and one to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The children provided a lot of entertainment, too, reading aloud prayers and poems they’d written expressing gratitude for nature, friends, family, and camp itself. Some of their thoughts were touching and a few hilarious with the odd flub or blooper.
Alice always saved me a spot on the bench beside her but I preferred to stand at the side or the back of the outdoor chapel. There was a tree that had a deep cleft running down it right to the exposed roots and I liked to lean in there against the trunk. From that vantage point, I could look out at everyone and check out who had the sniffles or was coughing and who looked homesick. I watched Xiu-Ling and Frankie and tried to figure out if they were holding hands as best friends or scowling as mortal enemies. I double-checked that the brakes were locked on Steven’s wheelchair because Dave often parked it on a slope. Once, I noticed a little boy squirming in a certain way that was very familiar to me. The bathroom was a far distance, so I led him into the woods nearby and found him a private spot. “Do you enjoy services?” I asked as we made our way back.
“No, but it’s better than going to synagogue at home. How can I ever go back to that boring place?” he asked. “Even my dad falls asleep.”
No, these services were not boring. They were relaxing, thought-provoking, and joyful. Even talking about God didn’t seem as much of a stretch of the imagination, out in nature, in this beautiful setting.
“We each understand God in our separate ways,” Rabbi Emily said one day.
“I don’t know if I believe in God,” a young boy spoke up, “but at camp, I feel God.”
“Where’s God?” one kid joked. “Beats me! Let’s have a scavenger hunt for God.”
“If ever you’re looking for God,” said Rabbi Emily, “you can always touch your pulse and say, Oh, there you are.” She gave time for that idea to sink in. “Or, take a deep breath. That’s God moving through you.”
Sometimes Amy contributed to the discussion. One sunny day, she sat up and said flatly, “It’s not raining today.”
Rabbi Emily nodded. “Yes, Amy, go on.”
“The sky is the colour of God.”
One morning during services, as I stood off to the side, watching over everyone, my eye caught a movement in the trees surrounding the chapel. Then it stopped. It was big and black. A branch shifted. Leaves rustled. It was a bear, just a few steps away! I was the only one who saw it because of where I stood, facing the woods. I had to act fast to save the camp! I was panicking, but I tried to recall Layla’s advice. Was it “Make a racket! Jump up and scream!” or “Keep quiet and stare him down”? My mind raced madly for a few moments until my ICU training kicked in. I became calm and rational and knew exactly what to do. I got up, walked to the front, and whispered into Matti’s ear. “Cut short the silent meditation and go straight into the music.” I mentioned a particularly loud number. I bent down and cranked up the amplifier a few notches and cued Matti. Sure enough, as everyone burst into song, the bear startled, turned around, and lumbered off in the opposite direction. My scheme worked! Goldilocks had fended off the big, bad bear! I ran to tell Rudy but he wasn’t the least bit concerned.
“Hey, man, you scared off Yogi Bear! He visits us every year. He’s never been a problem. Well, once he broke into the kitchen and made off with a few loaves of bread.”
He’d been more upset when the kids messed with the mealtime blessing!
“So, you’re not worried about a bear at camp?”
“No, now that you’re on top of it.” He chuckled. “We can all rest easy.”
It was a swelteringly hot day – we had the air conditioner roaring full blast and kids were dropping by all day to “chill,” and, considering the temperature, we took that literally – when a counsellor came by with a special request. Could we have a “sex talk” with two of her fifteen-year-old girls? A rumour was going around that they’d been in a boys’ cabin and gone too far.
For this matter, I deferred to Alice and Louise. As a public health nurse and a physician, respectively, Alice and Louise were experienced in counselling patients about sexuality. (Needless to say, the topic didn’t often come up with my critically ill patients in the ICU.) However, Alice insisted I join the discussion. “We’re a team,” she reminded me.
That afternoon, during after-lunch rest period, we met in the Tent. Jasmine and Lee, two teenaged girls in halter tops, skimpy bikini bottoms, and flip-flops, showed up with sour scowls on their pretty faces. They’d been wrongly accused and misunderstood, they said. Now, they felt, everyone was against them and their reputations ruined, all because of vicious gossip.
“Why don’t you start by telling us what happened?” Alice suggested.
“It was during the Carnival and we were shaving whipped cream off a balloon without popping it,” Lee said.
&
nbsp; “Don’t forget the greased watermelon relay race,” Jasmine added.
“Yeah, right, we got all messy and so we went into the boys’ cabin – it was the closest one – to clean ourselves off, but we didn’t take showers there. See, that’s the rumour, that we took our clothes off. The whole thing has gotten completely out of hand and it’s soooo embarrassing! We swear, nothing happened!”
Jasmine nodded her head in vehement agreement. “They’re saying we took off our tops. There’s no way we did that! We’re just friends with those guys,” said Lee, “not friends with benefits. We’re not skanks! Everyone’s talking about us and spreading lies. One girl said we were stripping for the guys and doing lap dances. How would she know? She wasn’t even there. I thought we were friends! Well, forget that!” She flounced in her seat and looked away.
“Oh, you’re all against us, too, I can tell,” Jasmine chimed in. She was on the verge of tears. “This whole thing has been blown out of proportion. Are you going to call our parents?”
Louise spoke first. “You were asking for trouble. You put yourselves at risk by going into the boys’ cabin by yourselves, and besides, it’s against camp rules.” She launched into the results of a study published in a medical journal that stated that 62 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls said they wished they’d waited until they were older to have sex.
“But we didn’t do anything!” Lee wailed.
Louise switched gears and lightened up. “Did you ever stop and think maybe you were getting into more than you bargained for by going into the boys’ cabin?”
Or, maybe exactly what we bargained for, their smiles at one another seemed to say. On the one hand they’d enjoyed themselves, but now they weren’t so sure about this new bad-girl rep they were developing. How confusing it is to be a young woman today with so many mixed messages out there!
Next, Alice spoke. “You may be causing things to happen sooner than you are ready,” she cautioned in her gentle way. “You have to know if you’re ready for this.” She spoke about her own daughters and her wishes for them to respect themselves and to wait until they were ready for intimate relations with the right person at the right time.
It was my turn and I wanted to contribute something useful. Louise had been the authoritative professional and Alice, the protective, concerned parent. Then there was me, who remembered all too well what it was like to feel those desires. It didn’t seem so long ago that I’d done some pretty wild things myself, so it felt hypocritical to come down on them. Besides, I wanted to be the kind of grown-up who didn’t stand in judgment, and who could help them sort out these complicated matters, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. I’d read enough of those how-to-communicate-with-your-teenager books to know that offering advice was the worse thing. It only made them shut down, lose trust, and worse of all, it cut off the lines of communication. As a nurse, I’ve always been taught not to offer my personal opinion. We’re supposed to merely echo back, in a neutral way, our patients’ points of view and not influence them with our own values. However, here at camp, where I was both a parent figure and their nurse, that approach felt counter-intuitive. No, they didn’t need judgment or information – “411” as they called it – but I wasn’t sure what they did need.
“We’re here, if you need to talk,” was all I offered in the end.
After they left, we congratulated ourselves.
“They really listened to us,” Louise said.
“We kept the lines of communication open,” Alice murmured.
“I guess we did a pretty good job,” I said.
But later, as we walked to the dining hall for dinner, we happened to fall in behind Jasmine and Lee and overheard them talking to their friends.
“So, we had this major sex convo with the doctor and the nurses,” Lee was saying to her friends, “and it was soooo ridonkulous!”
“Soooo lame,” Jasmine squealed.
But how bad could it have been? The very next day they came back. I was working by myself when the two of them showed up. Jasmine was still pouting but Lee came at me in her assertive way. “We want to know what you really think. I mean, like, so what if we were making out with them? Is that so bad?”
If I said the wrong thing, they’d blow me off and I’d lose them altogether. What to say? What to say? I looked at their low-cut jeans and bare midriffs, their breasts spilling out of their skinny tank tops. Okay, here goes. “You both are very attractive –” I started.
“Are you saying we brought it on ourselves?” Lee snapped. “We have the right to dress however we like. It’s a free country. This isn’t Iraq, you know. We’re not sluts.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Jasmine said, looking tearful.
“I didn’t say you did,” I countered.
“So, I take it you’re saying, we should wait, before, ahh, doing anything more?”
“You’re not ready for more,” I said firmly. “Why not wait until you are?” I said the thing I’d want another parent to say to my own kids in this situation.
“I knew you’d say that,” Lee folded her arms across her chest. “Talking to you is like talking to my mother. She always freaks out, too. C’mon, Jaz, we’re done here.”
I’d said nothing, but already I could feel those precious lines of communication shutting down.
“I sound like a seal,” I heard a girl say.
I was in the midst of giving out the evening meds when I heard a strange sound. It was coming from Naomi, an always-smiling, very popular fourteen-year-old who’d never come to the Health Centre for anything before but was now sitting in the waiting room, surrounded by a group of friends while she had fits of coughing. In between bouts of a high-pitched, insistent, squeaky coughing spell, she joked around and giggled. If this had been the ICU and a patient suddenly started coughing like that, I would have placed an oximeter on her finger (an instrument we used to measure a patient’s oxygen concentration). Had she been a patient in the ICU, the sudden onset of a harsh cough like this would have garnered her a stat chest x-ray and maybe even a bronchoscopy, which involved a tube placed down into her trachea and lungs, but here, that wasn’t necessary – at least not yet. Even without an oximeter, just looking at Naomi’s rosy complexion and relaxed manner, I was fairly certain her oxygenation was normal.
I went out into the waiting room. Her friends were joking around with her, making her laugh. “This is not a party,” I said, ushering them out.
“I can’t breathe!” Naomi said, waving goodbye to her friends. I brought her into the examining room and listened to her chest and heard adequate and equal air entry on both sides, but she was breathing rapidly. “I can’t swallow and my chest hurts.” Her hands shook. “Is this a heart attack?” Off and on she gave that strange-sounding cough.
“No,” I reassured her. “Probably your chest is sore from coughing so much.”
Louise examined her thoroughly and then we went aside to speak privately. “I think it’s a panic attack,” she said. “You were right to throw out the friends. We want to make sure there’s no acting up for an audience’s attention. For now, let’s try giving her a small dose of sedation.”
I gave Naomi a tiny pill under her tongue and let that take effect. After about twenty minutes, we checked on her. She’d fallen asleep, and while she slept there was no cough, shakiness, or fast breathing. She must have sensed we were standing at the foot of her bed because she startled awake. As soon as she did, the cough and rapid breathing started up again. “I feel like I’m going to pass out,” she yelled. I stopped in my tracks. Someone about to pass out does not have the strength to yell. Someone about to lose consciousness is too weak to speak.
“My heart is racing,” she said, trembling. “It’s flip-flopping all around!” Her hands shook violently. She clutched at her chest and took big gulps of air. “I can’t breathe.”
Her strange cough seemed to be gone but her pulse was racing at 120 beats* per minute and her respiratory rate was also fast at for
ty-five breaths a minute. I gave her a paper bag to breathe into, to try to retain the carbon dioxide she was losing by hyperventilating.
“My chest hurts,” she cried. “I’m going to pass out.” Before we could deal with one problem, Naomi had moved on to the next. “The room is spinning. I’m going to faint!” she shouted. I took her blood pressure and it was a robust and normal 132 over 80.
Someone about to faint would have low blood pressure, I thought.
“I feel like I’m losing control of myself,” Naomi said. But her words sounded false like she was repeating lines she’d learned.
“I’m sure it must feel that way,” I said quietly. I felt sympathy for her because I could see she genuinely felt upset.
“My feet are numb! They’re tingling. I can’t feel my feet. They’re paralyzed.” She suddenly closed her eyes and lay there motionless.
“Naomi? Look at me! Open your eyes,” I told her, feeling slightly alarmed.
“I think I just blacked out there for a moment,” she said weakly.
But she hadn’t lost consciousness. She had been awake and, I was fairly confident, completely aware of everything she was doing. None of this was adding up. I found myself in the situation I’ve always hated: suspecting a patient was “faking it.” It was an especially uncomfortable feeling to doubt a child. I knew Louise was also looking for something deeper by her line of questioning.
“Is something bothering you, Naomi? Are you homesick?”
Naomi looked at her fiercely. “I love camp. I’ve never been homesick, not even for a minute.”