Girl’s cabin

My daughter, Annie, is in her ninth month of a 14-month intensive Emergency Room training for Physician Assistants at the Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, CA. It’s a huge state-of-the-art general hospital smack in the middle of one of the poorest, gang-infested areas of Southern California. The training is on-the-job, and the job is in one of the most demanding E.R. centers in the country. Annie comes home every weekend with stories from a third world country an hour and a half away.

But this story comes not from the hospital, but from a special camp in the San Bernardino Mountains for junior high and high school kids with type 1 diabetes. Type 1 means their bodies do not create insulin and they have to monitor their blood every two hours (yes, at 3 and 5 in the morning, too) by taking a pin prick of blood and stabilizing their levels of insulin and sugar with either an injection or a snack. These are healthy, active, normal kids who can drop unconscious any minute if their proper levels are not maintained. They have also learned to live with this constant pricking and poking, and will have to for the rest of their lives. Annie’s job was to be medically responsible for two cabins of kids, monitoring everything they ate and drank and figuring their treatments and administering them every two hours.

Annie entertained us for a whole afternoon and evening with stories from the week. How she came up with tying up her hair and filling it with syringes so she could quickly inject a cabin-full of kids. (Her demonstration of this resembled a swashbuckling Three Musketeer in a sword fight.) How she took part in everything they did. How she would drag them out of the pool, prick them, shoot them and throw them back in.  How she once had them push her into the pool fully clothed so she could hang with them a little longer. How she got them to drink their water when no one else could. (“You’re teaching them a beer drinking game?” one of the doctors said with an appalled look quickly followed by one of acknowledged admiration. “Who said anything about beer?” said Annie. “This is water pong.”) How in a downhill mountain bike race, Annie’s competitiveness took over and instead of stopping to help a kid who got a flat tire, she called out “That sucks!” and blew past him into second place.

But nothing equaled the story that happened one night when someone gave the wrong reading on the root beer floats they had before bed, and the entire camp was unconscious at the first watch. How Annie and another P.A. stared at each other when one of them asked, “How could the counselors let this happen?” and with a look of shock they realized the counselors, kitchen staff, and some of the doctors were all type 1 diabetics, too. And how they sprang into action, Annie running full tilt from cabin to clinic to cabin to clinic. And for the next half hour as counselors and staff came to, the comment most heard was “Annie was there,” or “Annie got that.”

“What about cabin 12?”

Boy’s cabin

“Annie got that.”

“Cabin 13”

“…Annie.”

“What is she, Wonder Doctor?”

Well according to the kids on the last day as the bus pulled away and Annie wiped her eyes after closing the door of her truck, they all screamed out: “Best doctor ever!”

And why do I tell you this story except as an excuse to brag about my daughter? I tell it because of what these kids have to deal with every day and every night, and what Annie told me: That she never heard one complaint from even one of them all week.

Suddenly I don’t have anything to complain about either.

Annie and Maggie: Annie’s match already for Chandler