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Camp Bluebird: an ‘unforgettable’ time by Bill Davis Special to The Catalyst Marilyn Schaffner, the clinical director for MUSC’s Digestive Disease Center and Oncology, hasn’t been seen much without her hat since going through chemotherapy. But almost as soon as she took off her floppy blue hat, six-year “terminal” liver cancer survivor Linda John pounced and painted an ornately colored butterfly where the hair used to be. Schaffner and John were two of more than 40 cancer-survivors  attending the make-up session of Camp Bluebird, held Sunday, Nov. 7, along the banks of Lake Moultrie at a naval recreation area a few miles outside of Goose Creek. The camp was bumped from its original length, date and setting by a bunch of hot wind - Hurricane Floyd, to be exact. (It had been held at Camp St. Christopher’s on Seabrook Island since 1992.) This was the first Camp Bluebird for Carol Dolida, who started chemotherapy Wednesday for breast cancer. Diagnosed July 6, she has finished six weeks of radiation, had 19 lymph nodes removed and completed six weeks of radiation treatments. Now she is looking down the barrel of eight weeks of what she terms “chemo lite.” Armed with everything the Internet has to offer - from the latest protocol to an online support group, Dolida came face to face with the human element over a folding table. Joyce Eckhardt, a breast cancer survivor from Pimplico, came with Dolida. The two had met when Dolida taught Eckhardt in a computer skills course. Eckhardt had shared with her former teacher that she had had breast cancer and Dolida turned to her after being diagnosed. Since being brought together through breast cancer, they took the next logical step. They played matchmaker and introduced two of their adult children, who are now dating. Dolida also sat and talked with Phyllis Martin for 15 minutes, listening as the former McClellanville mayoral candidate bragged about her new, $37,000 chest. (It had been created from her stomach after a double mastectomy—and was bigger than the originals, by the way.) Martin, who lost the McClellanville election by  only 25 votes to a 22-year incumbent, told Dolida about how she handled her hair loss. “I shaved my head because there is only one beautician in McClellanville, and she only works on the weekends,” Martin said. She didn’t want the hassle of trying to arrange her schedule to meet with her falling follicles, so she went Kojak as a preemptive strike. “Now, when I put on glasses, I look like Ben Kingsley,” she chortled, while wearing Bert and Ernie shoelace clips. Humor was an integral part of the life-affirming daylong retreat, especially after the lakeside memorial service lead by camp director the Rev. Ben Breitkreuz. Breitkreuz, who also doubles as the community outreach liaison and chaplain at the Hollings Cancer Center, read out a short list of campers and friends who weren’t coming this year because they had passed away. Teresa. Marie. Fusako, and so on. Every time Breitkruez called out for remembrances of those that had passed, the campers recalled the human touches they had brought to past camps. Like the gentle man who carved wooden birds for everyone. “One thing that defines us as human beings, is that we don’t forget,” Breitkreuz told the campers during the memorial service. This was far from the first camp for Allan Cabading, a Hodgkin’s disease survivor. Cabading received an autologous bone marrow transplant in 1987, back when every procedure was still experimental. Since there was no match within his family, marrow was removed from his own body, cleansed of cancerous cells, frozen and reintroduced into his then-20-year-old body at a San Antonio hospital. Cabading will never forget May 17, 1987, the day he walked out of the hospital. He also will never forget the day he allowed his parents to visit him during his treatments, thinking wrongly it would be a good day. “I ended up convulsing. I remember watching the look on their faces and me trying to control the convulsions so as not to scare them because I had already put them through so much.” In that moment, Cabading has a memory and a subsequent survival story that he can tell to the next son, daughter, mother,  father or friend diagnosed with cancer. Coming to Camp Bluebird gives him a chance to give away that gift, he said. Based on his past, Cabading has been a member of a cancer survivor camp for children, Camp Happy Days, since 1984. He has also bet on the future, building a new home on the water in Mount Pleasant, overlooking the harbor. The motif of the future was rife in just about every activity the campers took part in, which served largely as an excuse to be together. Painting butterflies for a mobile to hang in the entrance at Hollings implied that everyone will be around for the next two seasons. The same for the pots that were decorated and the birdhouses that were built. Frank Brewer’s daughter had encouraged him to come. He admitted that he has struggled ever since two-thirds of his right lung had been removed last year after a fast-moving facial melanoma metastasized to it. “I could be with someone physically and not really be there,” Brewer allowed. But his daughter should feel better—by the midpoint, Brewer had given up his solitude to build a birdhouse with the group. “No matter what they are diagnosed with,” began Breitkreuz, a 25-year veteran of ministering to those with cancer, “cancer always throws them up against the wall. They feel their mortality, and, at first, it is always terminal.” One volunteer said that some of those in attendance were presently very, very sick and that some had dragged themselves out of beds, determined to be here and to reconnect with their common bond. And there was no promise that some of those would live to see next week. Even if none of the campers were cured by the time spent at Camp Bluebird, they were all better for it.