“She was very dedicated. That impacted me, certainly.”
“You have to survive the rain to get the rainbow.”In 2007
Mathews and his wife Heather welcomed the birth of their
daughter Hannah.
Hannah, now 14-years-old, lives with Dan and his wife, who
teaches at Eastside High School in Covington, at the family’s
residence in downtown Rutledge. She is, Dan says, a precocious
teenager who is well known in that small but special city.
She was also born with a brain malformation called holoprosencephaly.
The malformation has affected her speech ability and
created developmental delays. But she’s sociable, Dan says, and
when she can be around people, happy.
She has made him better, he says.
“I had been doing this job a long time before she came along
and it changed the way I do things.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know sometimes.”Dan says
Hannah underwent five different surgeries as part of the holoprosencephaly
diagnosis. And while the doctors and nurses were
efficient and the surgeries were effective, communication and a
level of humanity was sorely missing in the experience. Dan says
he remembered prior to Hannah’s birth and his epiphany when
families would bring their children to camp for the first time
and he, and his staff, would try and shoo parents away so the
kids could get settled. “We were impatient,” he says. The parents
would give him a stare, or a glare of concern for their fragile
child.
Since Hannah, he says, “we get that look.”
“If we had not had that experience we would not have known
what that family needs,” he says.
“What Hannah has taught us is what so many families are dealing
with.”
“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”Of the roughly 35 young
people Camp Twin Lakes employs each summer over the years,
more than 20 have become physicians. A host, Dan says, have become
nurses. Others work in other fields where helping people is
paramount. “We attract people who are into helping professions,”
he says. “Our goal is to give those clinicians humanity.”
In June, Camp Twin Lakes is expected to announce another
expansion, This time a $22 million improvement and growth for
a facility that, annually, allows children to “be like any other kid.”
“Nobody sticks out because they’re bald or taking injections or
are weak from chemotherapy,” he says. “They grow significantly
in a week.”
So do their parents. Campers are given a week to learn joy, for
sure, but also to learn “illness management skills that add to their
independence,” he says. “It’s a real win, sometimes, for a kid to
spend the night at grandmother’s house.”
With that win, when it happens, when there is that burst of joy
and laughter and sense of belonging that erupts from a child’s
face who has conquered a challenge before thought impossible,
even for these brave souls, Dan says he never gets tired of the
goosebumps. He never, he says, gets tired of the look on a staffer’s
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face when they realize they matter.
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