by Tilda Shalof
BOOKS BY TILDA SHALOF
A Nurse’s Story
The Making of a Nurse
Camp Nurse
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
1. The Treatment for Nature Deficit Disorder
2. Band-Aids, Calamine, and a Cappuccino to Go
3. Dangerous Fun
4. Escape from Utopia
5. The Business of Fun
6. Arts and Crafts Nurse
7. Hey, Nurse!
8. Lost and Found
9. Colour Wars Redux
10. Camp Goldilocks
11. Survival Skills
12. Sex Talk in the Tent
13. Sabbath Chaos
14. Gone Viral!
15. Campfire Nurse
16. The Cure for Homesickness
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to:
Elizabeth Kribs, Marilyn Biderman, and Terri Nimmo at McClelland & Stewart, and Lynn Schellenberg.
Vanessa Herman-Landau and Allison Landau for your help with this book; Dani Kagen for her camp memories; Omri Horwitz of The Harold Wartooth for his vast knowledge of music; Dan McCaughey for his vast knowledge of the outdoors.
Anna Gersman, nursing partner and dear friend, along with nurses Cathy Dain, Annie Levitan, Donna Robins, Gert Rossman, and Ella Shapiro; doctors Ian Kitai, Leo Levin, Gary Mann, David Saslove, Eddie Wasser, and Georgina Wilcock; URJ Camp George staff, faculty, and counsellors – Deborah Cooper, former camp nurse and Chair of the Camp Steering Committee; Ellyn Freedland, Rabbi Daniel Gottlieb, Anat Hoffman, Karen Kollins, Marilyn Lidor, Rosalyn Mosko, Ron Polster, and Jeff Rose; Paul Reichenbach with the Union for Reform Judaism and the leaders of its Canadian region, the CCRJ; Gavin and Shirley Herman and Sam Reisman and family for their vision of a caring, inclusive camp community that is URJ Camp George of Parry Sound, Ontario.
With gratitude to the late, great leader Dr. Sheela Basrur, who understood how the public’s health and hands-on nursing care go hand in hand.
To my campers and their families, especially Ariel and Liora Gersman, and Rachel Kreuter.
Most of all, thank you to Ivan, Harry, and Max Lewis, who remind me when I get homesick how fortunate I am to have such a loving home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For years, I dreamed about summer camp. Since I didn’t go to camp as a child, I always had a second-hand nostalgia for my friends’ camp memories: sitting round a roaring bonfire, arm in arm with friends, singing songs and enjoying gooey s’mores; the tough wilderness canoe trips, after which everyone came back bonded for life. I loved hearing about the late-night mayhem and antics of hormone-crazed counsellors. As an adult, I was a camper wannabe. So, when it came time for my own kids to go to camp, I saw a way into this happy world as a camp nurse.
This is the story of my summer odyssey, told from my dual perspectives as both a nurse and a parent. These stories are all true but in order to protect patient confidentiality and preserve the privacy and anonymity of the camps and their staff, I changed names and identifying details. In some cases, I made minor changes to the order of events for the sake of conciseness.
For the past six years, for a few weeks each summer, I’ve taken a break from the big-city medical centre where I care for critically ill adults, and travelled to beautiful, green Northern Ontario to tend to robustly healthy children dealing with ordinary, as well as a few extraordinary, ailments. Camp nursing has given me ways to combine my experience and intuition as a mother with my skills and knowledge as a nurse. And, just as my kids have grown up at camp, I too, have grown into being a camp nurse.
To parents, camp can feel like a secret world that we send our kids into with a mixture of trepidation and relief. In my unique position of fly (spy?) on the cabin wall, I’ve discovered that camp is about fun and play, learning new skills, and making friends. It is having adventures, being outdoors, and yes, making mischief. Camp is a place for children to take those first steps away from home, to connect deeply with one another, and ultimately, to create a community with their peers. Now, more than ever, kids need camp to help them connect to nature and one another.
The days are getting warmer. Soon it will be summer and time for … camp.
Tilda Shalof R.N.
Spring 2009
1
THE TREATMENT FOR NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER
“There’s been an accident – someone’s bleeding to death! Come quickly!”
Those were the first words I heard when I arrived at Camp Na-Gee-La. I had just turned in the driveway when I was greeted by this call to action from a frantic young man wearing only swimming trunks. I parked my car, grabbed my first-aid kit, and with my two sons on my heels, followed him through a thicket of trees to where his injured friend lay, also in bathing trunks, bleeding from a large, nasty gash on his knee. A pool of dark blood was spreading on the ground beside him. I was unfazed by the sight, and even my kids were calm. They were used to Mom handling emergencies. It’s what I do for a living.
While I assessed the wound I asked him his name.
“It’s Zack, and I’m gushing blood!”
Dripping, yes, oozing, maybe, but definitely not gushing. I knew exactly what to do. I took the blue-and-white beach towel still draped around Zack’s neck and pressed down on the wound to staunch the bleeding.
“Ahh, not my Toronto Maple Leafs towel!” Zack looked at his knee, winced, and looked away. “Am I hemorrhaging?”
“Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty more blood,” I reassured him. In the intensive care unit (ICU) where I’ve worked for the past twenty-two years, I’d seen mattresses filled with blood. I’d cared for patients whose blood poured onto the floor at my feet, blood that I sloshed around in as we worked to save their lives. This was nothing.
“How did this happen?” I asked. Zack said he’d tripped while running through the forest on the way back from the lagoon. I glanced at the flip-flops he was wearing. Not the best choice of footwear. After a few minutes, the bleeding stopped. I cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide from my first-aid kit and bandaged it.
“You’ll have to go to the hospital for stitches,” I told him once I’d helped him to his feet. A deep, jagged gash like this would need stitches in order for it to heal. “When was your last tetanus shot?” I asked. Zack hadn’t a clue.
“Is it really bad?” he whimpered.
“You’re going to be just fine. Are you a counsellor at the camp?”
He nodded. His friend, who’d been watching anxiously from the sidelines, now stepped forward to introduce himself.
“Hi, I’m Mike, the camp director. You must be Tilda, our nurse.”
Camp director? He looked more like my kids’ teenaged baby-sitter. When we’d spoken on the phone, he’d seemed older than this gawky kid, still with traces of acne and a boyish grin. Mike had told me he was doing a graduate degree in political science at the University of Toronto, so I knew he had to be in his early twenties, but he looked about sixteen.
“Welcome to Camp Na-Gee-La!” Mike said. I reached out to shake his hand, but he pulled me into a hug instead. “Good thing you arrived when you did. Man, I was freaking out.”
I looked around. We were deep in the wilderness of beautiful, green Northern Ontario at a “Youth-Leading-Youth Summer Camp Dedicated to Creating a Better Society with Equality and Justice for All!” That was its motto. I was pumped, eager for my new role as camp nurse in charge of the health and safety of about a hundred children, and their teenage counsellors, too. Apparently I was already on duty.
“Breathe deeply,” I had told my kids, opening up the car windows during the drive to camp. “This is fresh air.” We were well into our three-hour trip north from our home in Toronto to Camp Na-Gee-La on th
e far side of Georgian Bay, long past the suburbs with their outlet malls and bedroom communities. I glanced in the rearview mirror at Harry, age eight, and Max, age six, but could see only the crowns of their heads as they hunched over their electronic games, their thumbs a-flying. “Take a look out the window. See the countryside.”
“Are we there yet, Mom?” Harry asked, not even looking up.
They were oblivious to the glorious view, but that would soon change. Before long, they would be living outdoors in harmony with nature, singing songs around the campfire, paddling canoes, and hiking in the woods, arm in arm with their new friends. They would be campers for the first time and I, a firsttime Camp Nurse. We whizzed by farmhouses, fields of crops, and cow pastures. Then, we turned off the freeway onto a single-lane highway. On both sides of the road were the massive, craggy, pink-and-grey slabs of granite rock that I’d learned about years ago in geography class: the majestic Canadian Shield.
Camp was definitely going to be an adventure – for all of us. The outdoors was a foreign world to me. I was a city girl, at home in downtown throngs, used to breathing polluted air, idling in traffic jams, and navigating the underground subway system. The natural landscape was as familiar to me as the moon’s terrain, known only from pictures I’d seen in books. I had a bad case of “nature deficit disorder.”
My parents considered the outdoors a wild and dangerous place, best avoided at all costs. My mother understood Nature only in an artistic way. If the subject of “trees” ever came up, she launched into rhapsodic recitation: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree … A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.” To my father, in theory the outdoors embodied great scientific principles, but in practice, it was merely a system of passageways to get from one book-filled interior to another.
Consequently, I spent my entire childhood indoors. I spent all my time with my parents, caring for my sick, depressed mother and listening, an audience of one, to lectures from my erudite, self-educated father. My air-conditioned summers were wiled away reading in libraries, waiting in hospital lobbies, and sitting in the cool basement of our house, surrounded by piles of books and bowls of apples for sustenance. My only activities were turning pages, staring out of windows, and daydreaming. I barely moved a muscle. And summer camp was not an option. I once suggested it to my parents, but they shot that idea down right away.
“You’ll get dirty,” my mother fretted.
“No, my dear,” my father said. “Jews and canoes simply don’t mix.”
When I got married and became a mother myself, I vowed that my kids would have a different kind of childhood. I wanted them to have fun and friends their own age, to play outdoors, get dirty, and appreciate wildlife. Camp seemed like the place for all of that. My kids would learn how to make a fire, build a lean-to shelter in the woods, survive in the wilderness. They would know a toad from a frog, the bow from the stern, and the Milky Way as a galaxy rather than a chocolate bar.
For most of the long drive up to camp, it was quiet in the car, apart from the cheery, tinkly muzak of the kids’ games. They were cramming in as much electronic playtime as they could. They knew that upon our arrival at Camp Na-Gee-La, I would stow their games away in the car’s glove compartment, not to be touched again until our drive home, three weeks later.
Suddenly, something caught my eye on the road ahead. “Hey, guys, look at that!” Directly in front of our car, slowly making its way to the opposite lane, was a turtle with a wizened dinosaur face. I slowed down and pulled over to take a closer look. My kids were fascinated, their thumbs suspended over the keys of their games, the action on pause, as they watched and waited (and waited) for the reptile – or was it an amphibian? – to make it safely to the shoulder.
I thought about my kids. My older son, Harry, was quiet, serious, and painfully shy. I hoped camp might bring him out of his shell and boost his social skills. Max, on the other hand, was high-spirited, fiercely independent, and irrepressible. I hoped camp would give him the self-discipline and structure he needed. One thing I knew for sure: my kids were not going to merely read about the world as I had – they would live it, first-hand. If there were dangers involved, then so be it. I’ve always encouraged them to try new things and take risks – within reason.
As an adult, hearing my friends reminisce about camp, I’d felt envious, nostalgic for something I’d never even experienced: the gruelling canoe trips, the zany bunk-hopping and cabin raids, and the cozy scenes of sitting round the campfire making s’mores. My friends recall their camp days with loving wistfulness, falling into a reverie whenever that touchstone comes up:
“It changed my life. My camp friends are my closest, to this day.”
“I had my first kiss at camp … my first slow dance. He’s my husband now, and our kids go to the same camp!”
“The best was being a counsellor. Everyone knows you go to camp to get laid!”
“I lived for camp. Those summers were the best times of my life, the happiest.”
I loved hearing their stories, but I had to agree with one friend who said, “If you’ve never been to camp, you just don’t get it.” Yes, I wanted my kids to be campers, and as a camp nurse, I could vicariously fulfill my wish to be one, too.
I was pulled from these thoughts by cheers coming from the back seat of the car. The turtle had made it – a good omen, I thought. But as I drove on, getting closer to our destination, I began to worry.
For so many years as an ICU nurse, I had taken care of patients who had serious conditions, such as multi-system organ failure, septic shock, and respiratory failure. The stakes couldn’t be higher. When I had first considered the switch from the fast-paced environment of the hospital to what I imagined would be a laid-back, easy job, I had no concerns. Surely it would be a nice break from the intensity of the ICU, leaving me lots of free time for swimming in the lake, canoeing, and hiking in the forest. How hard could it be? Taking care of healthy children who had booboos, sniffles, and bug bites was a far cry from treating sick patients who had life-threatening illnesses. I had developed the typical, hard-bitten humour of nurses who toss off remarks like “any day my patient isn’t in cardiac arrest is a good day.” I wasn’t concerned about camp nursing because, after all, these weren’t sick kids. However, I did wonder if I’d have sufficient sympathy to offer those with everyday ailments. I realized I might have to recalibrate my “compassion-o-meter.”
And there might be a few other challenges at camp that I hadn’t considered. First of all I had no experience with pediatrics; I’d never taken care of children, other than my own. Also, at camp I’d be isolated and working by myself, without my ICU team to back me up. I began to wonder whether my skill set was suitable for camp. I knew what to do in the event of a cardiac arrest, but I had never even seen a case of poison ivy. I could start an intravenous drip, measure central venous pressure, and analyze arterial blood gases, but I’d never removed a splinter or taped a sprained ankle. Surely I could learn these things on the job? As I turned off the highway and onto a quiet country lane, the road got quite bumpy. I felt as if the dark forest of trees edging the roadway was closing in on me. I gripped the steering wheel tightly and drove on. You can do this, I told myself.
Then I saw the sign for Camp Na-Gee-La. As we approached the entrance gate, I tried to ease my nervousness by imagining the great times awaiting us. I thought back to my conversation with Mike, the camp director, and was reassured by his words. A few weeks ago, Mike and I had had a long talk on the phone. He’d told me about the camp, focusing mostly on its socialist philosophy. He said that Camp Na-Gee-La’s name came from the Hebrew, meaning “let us rejoice.” Mike had been a camper there himself every summer since the age of eight. He explained how Camp Na-Gee-La was part of a youth movement, which meant it was governed by young adults. The parent council oversaw the finances and administration, but the day-to-day running of camp was done by the campers and counsellors. The parent council had
voted that Mike be the camp director, and this would be his first summer in charge. He seemed eager to do a good job. He explained that it was a low-budget, no-frills camp modelled after the Israeli kibbutzim, or communes, of the ’60s, where everything was shared, including chores, decisions, and responsibilities. It was both Zionist and pro-Palestinian, left-wing politically, and completely secular, as in no religious affiliation. “Don’t worry,” Mike reassured me, “there’s no prayer hocus-pocus or anything like that.”
It seemed like an important point to him, but I didn’t feel one way or another about it. We were Jewish but not observant, so it seemed like Camp Na-Gee-La would suit me and my family just fine.
Mike told me more about their belief in the value of physical labour, living off the land, minimizing their ecological footprint, and “co-existing in a way that is respectful of the Planet.” It all sounded good to me. Camp Na-Gee-La attracted the children of some of the country’s finest artists, academics, and intellectuals, Mike said, “because of the way it inculcates humanistic values and promulgates a vision of equality and social justice.”
“So, Nurse Tilda,” he’d said playfully at the end of our conversation. “How about it? Are you in?”
I had taken only a moment to think it over. It certainly was flattering to be called Nurse Tilda. In the hospital, I was always called by my first name without any title. And I did admire Mike’s passion for his camp. Admittedly, my kids were still young for any inculcation or promulgation, but it didn’t seem that long ago that I had been young and idealistic, too. At forty-four years of age, I still felt young. Well, at least I was still idealistic. Though it scared me to think I’d be on my own without a doctor on hand and with the closest hospital a half-hour drive away, I reminded myself that I was an experienced nurse. I had handled many emergencies over my long career. C’mon, you can do this, I told myself. “Okay, I’m in,” I said. Bring it on!
