CHAMP Camp Helps Kids Soar to New Heights

The forty-foot climbing tower looked as high as the Empire State Building to nine-year-old Derrick. How could he ever climb that high? But the other campers were making the dizzying ascent, foot by scary foot, and the counselors were cheering him on. Derrick was determined to reach the top. "I did it!" he hollered at last. "You can see everything from up here!"

Climbing a forty-foot tower would be exciting for any nine-year-old, but for Derrick Wolf, it was nothing short of a miracle. Derrick was born with Miller's Syndrome, a rare condition. Derrick is a double amputee (he gets around well on his prosthetic legs) and has a tracheotomy. But at a remarkable place called CHAMP Camp, held for one week every summer in Ashley, Ohio (just north of Columbus), Derrick's just one of 30 or so exuberant kids swimming, boating, and telling stories by the campfire.

If you want to get technical about it, Derrick didn't climb the tower hand over hand all by himself. He had some help from PM&R physician and CHAMP Camp medical director Chuck Dietzen, MD - "Dr. Chuck" to his kids. With belaying systems and baskets, Dr. Chuck and the other camp counselors make sure every camper who wants to makes it all the way to the top of the tower - despite tracheotomies, quadriplegia, and a host of other medical conditions. At CHAMP Camp, they say, "No one sits on the sidelines and no one is different."

CHAMP Camp was founded in 1991 by David Carter, vice president of clinical services at St. Vincent Children's Specialty Hospital in Indianapolis, and Nancy McCurdy, a childlife specialist there. They dreamed of providing an accessible camping experience for children who had tracheotomies or depended on ventilators to help them breathe. Right after CHAMP Camp's pilot summer, Dr. Chuck Dietzen returned from his PM&R residency at the University of Alabama-Birmingham to practice at St. Vincent's, and spoke at a hospital conference on recreation. "We want these kids to have the most normal day-to-day experiences possible," he told the conference. "That means they need to have supernormal experiences."

Carter and McCurdy knew they'd found CHAMP Camp's new medical director.

CHAMP Camp and Chuck Dietzen share the same mission in life - bringing out the potential of children some people might call "disabled." "I don't want these kids just surviving, I want them to live," he declares. And at CHAMP Camp, live they do. They fish, using special sip-and-puff fishing poles if needed. They ride horseback, with oxygen tanks strung on the horses like saddlebags. They take balloon rides. They careen around on wheelchair obstacle courses and, like all kids at camp, they hatch elaborate practical jokes, leaving Silly String and spiders in each others' beds. "Shout and shoot" squirt guns let even kids with the most limited mobility compete in spirited water fights.

Eleven-year-old Betsy Holtmeyer has been coming to CHAMP Camp since she was six (campers range in age from six to 18). Recalling Betsy's first year at CHAMP Camp, mom Sharon says, "I was so afraid. I didn't think anybody could take care of her the way I could. And then she came home and she'd had the best time. It let her do things she'd never been able to do before." Thanks to CHAMP Camp and a favorite counselor, Vanessa, the usually-shy Betsy has a new favorite saying: "You go, girl!"

Dr. Dietzen keeps track of his CHAMP Camp kids throughout the year, trading e-mails and visiting them. For one "movie night" he arrived to pick up Derrick and several other children in style - with a limousine. He treasures a letter from one of the camp's most inventive teenage pranksters, a seventeen-year-old named George whom Chuck has dubbed a "budding Stephen King." The letter begins "Dear Snot Buddy, how're you doing?"

"Dr. Snot Buddy" may clown around with his kids, but Dietzen, McCurdy, and Carter are totally serious about the CHAMP Camp experience. The counselors -mostly nurses and respiratory therapists or students in these fields - usually outnumber campers by a ratio of more than two to one, providing a lot of individual attention. Dr. Dietzen's medical services are sometimes supplemented by the assistance of one or two other physicians. The office is fully prepared to arrange fast and easy transport if a child needs medical attention that can't be provided at the campsite.

Despite the devotion of parents, kids, and volunteers alike, CHAMP camp always struggles for funding. "This is a grassroots effort, and it's year-to-year thing. It's expensive to lease a camp like this," says Dr. Dietzen. Fees for each child are only $150, and no camper is turned away for lack of funds. Almost all of the several dozen counselors are volunteers.

Since the program began, four CHAMP campers did succumb to their illnesses. At the funeral of a nine-year-old named Holly, who had a high spinal cord injury, family and friends read the autobiography she'd written using a mouth stick. Of the book's ten illustrated pages, seven were about camp. Erin, a teenager with a progressive genetic disorder called Hurler's Syndrome, arrived at camp last summer bearing her Do Not Rescuscitate orders. While she made it through the summer, Erin didn't live to return to camp this year. In her short life, she taught him a lot about how to live, says Dr. Dietzen. "One year I asked the kids what we could do to make camp better," he recalls. "I thought they'd say things like S'mores." Erin's answer: hot-air balloons and racing cars.

"People don't understand that these kids know better than anyone else that they've got a disability," Dr. Dietzen says. "It's our job to help them be as independent as possible. They figure out what they can do and they do it. If they can't do it, they tell us what they want done and we make it happen."