Take a Break: Camp Superstars

You remember summer camp, don't you?

A couple of weeks where you got the chance to just play and be a kid.

To enjoy the great outdoors.

An opportunity Lori Hauser of Gloversville almost missed out on when she was a kid 30 years ago.

"If you had asthma, you couldn't go to camp," she recalls.

Lori was ready to accept that her diagnosis would mean no camp ever.  Then the folks at Nathan Littauer hospital in Gloversville made her a superstar.

"It was a really great opportunity to be like everybody else."

Camp Superstars was started by hospital staffers in 1979 to give children, whose medical conditions typically kept them home for the summer, a camp of their own.

Today, all the children who attend Camp Superstars have a medical condition ranging from the mild to the severe. Doctors and nurses and therapists are always on hand making sure it's as safe as it is fun.

Jennifer Kincheloe of Gloversville sends both of her daughters to Camp Superstars.

"It's such a relief and such a comfort," she says, "knowing that there's a place for my children in this world."

Her daughters, Emily and Hannah, get to be just like everyone else for a week. The experience, however, stays with them much longer.

"At the end of last year," Jennifer remembers, "Emily began to cry and before I knew it tons of kids began to cry and the counselors were crying. It was really beneficial for them."

The woman running the show is Susan Mcneil.  She's been making Camp Superstars super all 30 years.

What keeps bringing her back every year?

"One thing, she says. "Them. All of them."

Campers keep coming back too.  Most of the counselors are former campers. Even our friend Lori, now an RN at Nathan Littauer, went back to camp to volunteer as a camp nurse.

Beause she knows what it means to be a superstar.