By Joey Hoffman, OSRUI Parent

Early in 2014, we received an application for a first-time camper who wanted to attend one of our 2-week sessions.  Our application asks some basic medical questions, and Daisy’s revealed that she had had a three-organ transplant at the age of 3.  Daisy’s application was immediately referred to our Special Needs Committee, composed of OSRUI staff and volunteer nurses, doctors, LD teachers, social workers, and psychologists, who help us gather information on campers with special needs.  OSRUI Head Nurse Paula Kaye took on Daisy’s case, and ended up speaking with her mom, her pediatrician and members of the transplant team and oncology team, all of whom were in favor of her spending two weeks at overnight camp.

Daisy had a wonderfully successful experience at OSRUI  and, as her mom explains in this article from The New York Times, she thought OSRUI was “amazing.”  She returns this summer for four weeks.  A budding actress, we look forward to welcoming Daisy to our Tiferet arts program on Monday.

Yet again, I debriefed Paula, the head nurse who stood before me with a ream of medical records.

“Please, give her Prograf at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. every day to help prevent rejection,” I said.

My heart raced; I was worried about my 12-year-old daughter Daisy. She was born with gastroschisis, a birth defect of the abdominal wall in which her intestines were outside her body. Nine years had passed since we moved from New York to Omaha, where a small bowel, liver and pancreas transplant when she was 3 saved her life.

I have been a single mother since four months after the transplant, which propelled me further into being not a helicopter parent, but a fighter pilot; squirting her little hands with sanitizer every time she touched a foreign object, like a human or an elevator button (“Yes, sweetie, you can push it, but remember, only with your elbow”).

Though I no longer hoard stockpiles of Purell, my eyes still dart, owl-like, for predators.

“We’re on it,” Paula said. “She’ll have a blast; I’m more worried about you!”

Out the window, I saw chatty parents, and heard the unmistakable shrills of excited girls.

“Mom, pleease let me go. I beg of you. They have Fruit Loops!” said Daisy, who campaigned for OSRUI, a sleepaway camp in rural Wisconsin –– eight hours from home –– for a year. The longest we had ever been apart was one week, when she vacationed with her dad in the mountains. Instead of sitting at home, obsessing over whether she took her medications, I camped out at a friend’s Kansas City condo and obsessed over her falling off a cliff. She wasn’t homesick. I was.

Read the rest of Joey’s article in The New York Times.