The Following Things May Be Hazardous to Your Health

These are the top seven most dangerous things we came across this week:

The Refrigerator
Yes, the fridge. Here's the story: It was Monday afternoon; Kelley, Phil and I were prepping for our stir fry dinner. I was in the back room of the kitchen that is our pantry, dish washing place, and has a fridge and a freezer. Our fridge is a bit old-school, one of the ones with the cooling elements exposed on the inside top of the fridge compartment. I had just washed off some dishes and my hands were wet as I reached into the fridge. I was stretching past a pile of leftover grilled cheese sandwiches and got stuck to the cooling element! Yes, my left index, middle, and ring fingers all were stuck to the inside of the fridge. All I could think of (past the mounds of pain I was experiencing) was the scene from A Christmas Story when the kid was sticking his tongue to the frozen telephone pole...I yelled to Kelley and Phil, Phil thought I was joking so he didn't do anything. Kelley came in, took a look, grabbed the spray bottle with bleach water in it, and sprayed me free! My index finger is almost completely free of any burn, but my middle and ring fingers look like I grilled them. I'll take a picture and post it later. I got a blood blister and anther normal blister and some nasty scabs/soon to be scars. The moral of the story is: look out for your cooling elements next time you reach into the fridge.

Small Town 4th of July Celebrations
In all of the McDermitt, NV, 4th of July weekend festivities, there is a rodeo on Saturday followed by a round of carnival games for the kiddies and later by a dance/block party for the adults. We walked the fifth of a mile to the Say When Casino to get dinner and were stopped by some of the locals who were sitting on the outside deck of the bar in town. They promptly informed us that it didn't really matter what age we were and that we were all welcome to join the jello shot competition when it came time. We are pretty sure that all but one or two of the people out there were quite snookered, as they made some inappropriate comments towards us ladies. We politely excuse ourselves to dinner, and enjoy a meal. We decide to walk back to our school afterwards, hang out for an hour, then go to the dance. Cowboys, country music, broken bottles, and booze. They had it all! The same drunk local kept hitting on us, and unfortunately he had been one of the ones at the bar earlier. He was asking all the girls in the group for their "dance cards," especially "the one with the glasses." Unfortunately, I am the only one who wears the glasses. Quickly I sat down on the curb with Mallory and mumbled some lame excuse. After about the twelfth time getting rejected, he finally left me alone. Moral of the story: Stay with friends and come up with a lame excuse when drunk men hit on you.

The Water in McDermitt, NV
Oh, the water. We got a notice from the school secretary Wednesday night at 7.30 that the water in the McDermitt watershed had been tested and found with traces of ecoli bacteria. SAY WHAT?!? It was a "suggested boil order," saying that all water that was to be used for cooking, drinking, and washing dishes needed to be boiled for a minute before use. What a stress! We took all the camper's cups and shoved them in our dish sanitizer as fast as we could without them seeing it. We told their leaders as soon as we got into the staff/counselor meeting at nine, plan in hand. We told them everything we knew, but refrained telling the campers that it was specifically ecoli. We had a somewhat melodramatic and hypochondriac group this week, so we felt that just telling them that it was a bacteria would be enough information. Their counselors were sent home with notices to inform the parents exactly what it was, what we did, etc., so I guess they will find out sooner or later! This is what we did: our tribal contact had given us the key to the senior center on the reservation, and they are for one reason or another in a different watershed than we are. We took one of the trucks and filled it with all our water jugs to be filled up there. We were boiling water for people to brush their teeth with, as well as running all the dishes a second time through our sanitizer. Kelley and I were going to go to Winnemucca the next day on our grocery run, so they gave us $100 to buy bottled water. 25 flats of water later, we still haven't found out any updates on the water situation other than the fact they sent in a second sample and results will be in by Monday. So far nobody has gotten sick, but we still have four days left in the gestation period. Moral of the story: Don't drink the water...but do because we don't want you to get heat stroke.

Second Helpings at Meals
This week the campers were ferocious when it comes to eating seconds. We run it so that every camper and counselor has to go through the line. Then the staff team (that is me and my new friends) gets to grab their plates of food, and two stay behind to serve seconds. As the staff who aren't serving again walk to the tables, we all yell "SECONDS!" at the top of our voices. Every day this week we had people (including adult counselors) who would run to get to the food! Once I had to get out of the way of someone who was booking it back to the table. At our water day, we had people hanging in a pack, ready to rush/fight their way to get to the small amount of leftover potato salad and burgers. We were slightly frightened and asked them to stand a little further away. Yes, they ran when we yelled. Moral of the story: Maybe Kelley and I should stop making such good food. Then nobody will want first servings, much less seconds.

Leeches
At water day we encountered a few leeches in our swimming hole. The girls screamed, the boys just laughed and slapped them off. It wasn't all that many, only four, but still dramatic enough for some people to not get back in. When we got back to camp, we checked Wikipedia to see what exactly happens when you are bitten by a leech, only to find that it is basically harmless. They just suck enough blood (a teaspoon at most) to satisfy them, then fall off. The only thing you should not do when coming in contact with a leech is to try to "burn" it off. When a leech comes into contact with abnormal heat, it vomits the blood back into its victim along with some other nasty stuff and can create a mean infection. Moral of the story: Just let the leech do it's thing. All will be fine.

Sleep Deprivation
This is quite a normal occurrence at SSP, especially for the chefs. A bedtime for staff any earlier than eleven thirty is a luck thing indeed. Three times a week we get to wake up at 5.30 to start cooking breakfast. The other days we get to sleep in until 6.45, but we still need naps. Sometimes even a two hour nap barely holds me over until the sun slips down behind the horizon. Yesterday we had pancakes, overslept half an hour (woke up at 6 on accident), didn't get done with breakfast and dishes until nine. Then Phil and I made roughly 90 enchiladas for dinner and finished around 12. Ate lunch, then went to each of the camper's work sites and handed out the traditional Friday Otter Pops. Got back around 3, cleaned up the mess we made trying to roll the enchiladas. 3.45 rolls around, and I asked Mallory if I could sleep until 4.15, fifteen minutes into free time when we were to be hanging out with campers. She said it would be fine. I laid down, and napped...until 5.30 when Kelley woke me up because dinner was supposed to be on the table in 15 minutes. Thankfully she got the memo that the enchiladas were just sitting in the ovens and were ready to be cooked-they still turned out great. Moral of the story: sleep whenever you can and for as long as you can. It will soon be a commodity.

Three Times the Normal Amount of Asthma Medication*
*Don't worry Mom, this wasn't me. It was one of our hypochondriac campers.
We had one of the biggest hypochondriacs this week. She had a whole host of things that were wrong. She had Type 1 Diabetes, high blood pressure, and moderate asthma. On top of these things, she came from a very loving-deprived home, and desperately sought attention for any reason possible. Dale, her youth leader, told the staff that she pretends to be sick for attention, and she herself told one of our supply coordinators, Jennifer, that she loves being in the center of attention. Overreacting + attention deprived = bad combination. Either way, she was having a small bought of asthma and took her medication. When it did not work immediately, she decided to take another dose of her inhaler. When this one did not work, she took another. Three times her daily amount needed in less than an hour and a half. Her blood pressure and heart rate both skyrocketed and she had a small panic attack. We called the EMTs, but they were an hour away in Winnemucca. So Dale decided that it would be best to meet them halfway, transfer her into the ambulance, and have her other leader Ashley follow in the car. Ashely told us later that the ambulance driver told her to keep up. "Keeping up" meant 95 MPH! Well, she made it to the ambulance, to the hospital, calmed her down, got her heart rate and blood pressure down, and sent her on her merry way. Moral of the story: Don't overdose on your medication.

Tomorrow we are welcoming our last week of campers for the summer! Hopefully this group won't have a need for our friendly neighborhood EMTs like the last two.