I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma when I was nine and a half. Cancer. I went from being a normal child to a prisoner, locked in a hospital bed, tied to my IV ball-and-chain. I was my own jailor. Already shy before my diagnosis, I used it as an excuse for self-imposed exile. It wasn't that I was scared; I was too young to be scared. And I suppose I was lucky, compared with some of the other kids I met at the hospital. I was in and out in only a few months, but I left completely shattered.
While I was at the hospital I met someone named Dan. I often saw him in the playroom, while playing Mario Karts against my nurse Sandy or Kristina the child life specialist. He told my mom about a summer camp for children with a history of cancer and their siblings. A camp where a kid like me could feel normal again.
When Dan and my mom showed me the camp video from the hospital archives, I scoffed at it. I thought the processions of singing, smiling faces childish and stupid. I mocked the name, Camp Goodtimes. I was angry and obstinate - suffering from early onset teenage angst brought on by too much time spent in a hospital environment. However, my dad was dead-set-against sending his still-sickly daughter away for a week, which meant I was determined to go.
On the first day of camp I was driven to the Canadian Cancer Society office by my mom. I grumbled like an old woman the entire way there. When I arrived, I met my counsellors, Kirsten and Cookie, and I made a name tag, which I dismissed as beneath me. We went outside to the parking lot and I said goodbye to my mom. While we were waiting, some of the skips formed us into a circle and starting singing "Tarzan". I was already bored with camp, but the song was easy enough to follow, so I begrudgingly began to sing along.
Being a camp song, "Tarzan" was extremely silly. I tried to remain aloof and bored, but every so often I would smirk at one of the lines. I quickly hid these mistakes by frowning extra-hard for the next line. When the song ended, I thought I was safe. Instead, they started on "Telephone". Kirsten called out my name, and I was forced to sing two lines by myself in front of all the campers. Betrayal.
On the bus, the offensive singing continued. I watched the campers much older than me and labelled them fools for joining in. I tried blotting out the noise. I tried staring out the window. I tried glowering at the faces across the aisle from me. Instead of listening to my pleas for quiet, they started singing new songs. "I'm a Little Stinky Skunk". "There Ain't No Flies on Us". The most ridiculous camp song ever invented, "Chicken Train". I had to sing that one. From that point on, I sang with the rest of the camp for the remainder of the bus and ferry ride. And as much as I hated to admit it, I started to have fun.
The rest of the week was filled with insanity. I woke up to laughter instead of to the whirring of hospital machines. After the first day I gave up on wearing my bandana, something I normally held on to like a security blanket. More importantly, I swam off my island of Elba and started interacting with people again. The seemingly solid walls I had built crumbled like Jericho. I made friends. People I normally would have judged I accepted, because they accepted me. I had stopped behaving like an ice queen the moment I started singing.
That year, I went kayaking for the first time. I danced under a fire hose at the mashed potato fight. I made and received my first friendship bracelets. And that was only one year out of eight. Things I had previously thought childish I embraced, because I had finally remembered that I was a child. I shook off the jaded personality I had assumed since my diagnosis. I was watered and sprinkled with dirt, and like a bean I grew.
I left camp that year able to interact with others again. When I went home, my family was introduced to a completely different girl. I could go to school again without fear: not that I wouldn't be teased because I had no hair, but that I wouldn't care. I had found a place where things like cancer didn't matter. A place like that is a gift, and despite what I had to go through to find it, I consider myself lucky to have something like camp in my life.
At Pass the Stick, people often mention the difference between the "camp world" and the "real world". The real world can hurt you, and the camp world heals you. In the camp world, there is acceptance and love everywhere. It is where I met some of my truest friends and where, over many years, I learned some of the most important things I now know about myself. It is where I learned the true meaning of the phrase "for the kids". And it is where my own personal world began.
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