Where Normal Is Special : At This Camp, Kids With Cancer Can Just Be Kids

ORANGE —  They clutched teddy bears, strummed on guitars and chased each other through the parking lot with squirt guns. By all appearances they were a regular group of kids with duffel bags getting ready for summer camp.

And that’s exactly what organizers had in mind.

Fifteen years ago, parents from the Orange County Foundation for Oncology Children and Families (OCFOCF) got together to create something for their kids that would seem, above all else, normal.

They came up with a camp on the shores of Bluff Lake. Located outside Big Bear City, the World’s Greatest Camp is a place where children sing songs around the fire, ride horses and go canoeing.

But it is also a place where baldness from chemotherapy and artificial legs that must be removed at swim time are annoyances, not embarrassments. A place where seriously ill children, and their often neglected siblings, are freed from the stigma of cancer.

“Everybody is my friend here,” said 10-year-old April Thomas, sporting a Winnie the Pooh hat and cuddling a stuffed Pooh bear.

April, who has cancer of the adrenal gland, has attended the three-day summer camp since she was about 5 years old and likes swimming the best. Most of all, she likes being around “kids who understand.”

“Kids at school are not my friends. They make fun of my eye,” said April, whose illness has affected her vision. “I wish camp was for a year.”

More than 100 children from around Southern California packed their bags and piled into buses at Children’s Hospital of Orange County on Friday to make the trek to camp, operated by the YMCA of Pasadena.

Some are cancer patients still in treatment. Others are survivors who have pulled through the danger zone, and others are brothers and sisters who are often overwhelmed by the attention granted to their sick siblings.

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“Sometimes it’s really rough because I don’t like seeing her cry when she gets her shots,” Michael Sullivan, 13, said of his 8-year-old sister, Mary, who has chronic myeloid leukemia. “At camp, I just love seeing her running around smiling.”

The camp is open to children of all ages. It is underwritten by private donations and is offered free to all participants, said Karen Sullivan, Michael and Mary’s mom and a president of OCFOCF.

For children battling disease, it offers a chance to feel like other kids, practice a little archery and try their hand at arts and crafts and other activities.

“I like the rifles, and I want to face my fear by going on the high wire,” said Tommy Larsen, 8, of Carpinteria, dressed in a military-green T-shirt and camouflage hat.

Tommy, diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 5, will stay in a cabin with a baseball theme. Two years ago, he said, “we were the musclemans.”

For the parents, who accompany their children, the camp offers them the chance to share their experience with others.

“It’s a very elite group,” Tammy Duncan of Yorba Linda said of having a child with cancer. “It’s just good to be around people who understand what you’ve been through.” Duncan and her 8-year-old daughter, Alexis, attended for the first time.

“I just really want to do everything,” said a bubbly Alexis, diagnosed with neuroblastoma at age 6. Alexis has talked to her class about her disease, but she said students don’t get it and “most of the time they get scared.”

Clustered around her cabinmates-to-be, Alexis was already making friends. When Heather Stevens, 10, of Huntington Beach, said she had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma seven years earlier, Alexis piped in, “Me too! That’s what I had!”

OCFOCF has a mailing list of 350 families. The group’s board of directors meets at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, but the group also serves many families whose children are treated at other facilities.

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The volunteer camp staff includes oncology nurses from Children’s Hospital, paramedics and emergency medical technicians from the Orange County Fire Authority, and counselors.

Reina McGraw, 19, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at age 5 and attended the camp for years as a patient. There, she could take her wig off without worrying about stares, and she received so much love she vowed to return it. Now she is a counselor for Cabin 7. Their theme: Charlie’s Angels.

“I talk to the kids and they can see, ‘She’s all better,’ and maybe it gives them a little bit of hope,” said McGraw.

Camp, which runs through Sunday, includes volleyball, horseshoes and all the staples. It also includes the “Pine Cone Dedication Ceremony” around the campfire tonight. That ritual involves tossing a pine cone into the flames in honor of someone.

“It starts out pretty tame, with kids dedicating them to ‘my new friend,’ ” Sullivan said. “But as it gets more intense, kids dedicate them to friends who are no longer there.” They give thanks to the doctors who are trying to save them, and whenever they pause to remember a child who didn’t make it, Sullivan said, they look skyward for a shooting star.