The Examiner - March 30, 1961

“Learning to Live Again….

Hard Work and Courage Needed to Overcome Physical Disaster”

Part II

At a small secluded convalescent hospital, seven miles from St. John’s, the miracle of learning is wrought daily in a very special sense. For the learning that takes place here is different and much more difficult than the learning of the ordinary child. It might be summed up as learning to do normal things in abnormal ways.

For the work of the Sunshine Camp for Crippled Children is no a work of ‘curing’ them of their infirmities. Most of them are literally incurable. It is a work not of ‘cures’ but of ‘improvements’ of teaching them to use whatever abilities they have to the vary maximum, of doing the tasks of daily living in spite of limbs that have been weakened by disease.

The Aims

Dr. Howard Rusk of the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation sums up the aims of the branch of medicine in which the Sunshine Camp workers are engaged in this way:

1.To eliminate the physical disability, if that is possible.
2.To reduce or alleviate the disability to the greatest extent possible.
3.To re-train the person with a residual disability, ‘to live and to work within the limits of the disability, but to the limit of his capabilities.

Teamwork

Mrs. Marilyn Marsh, the director of Nursing Services at the Sunshine Camp says that achieving this effect depends upon the skills of many professions, all exercised under the direction of a physician. The Medical Director of the Camp is Dr. C. McCann, and his assistant Dr. A. E. Shapter. Underneath these doctors the nurses, therapists and other personnel work as a team to teach the children the difficult arts of ordinary living: arts which seem so simple as to be almost instinctive to a person with full use of hands and feet and body muscles, but which represent an almost miraculous achievement for a person with a severe disability.

A day in the life of a child at the Sunshine Camp begins as seven a.m. when he is wakened and dressed and fed. At nine o’clock he goes to school, for the course of rehabilitation at the camp is often prolonged, and it is essential, while re-educating the body not to allow the child’s mental development to lapse. Every effort is made to keep the children of their age groups in learning so that when they go home they can return to school and continue their studies uninterrupted.

The School

The school is under the direction of Mrs. G. Parsons, who is a highly-qualified teacher, and who handles all the elementary grades giving special attending to the individual needs of each of small pupils. In this respect it is very unlike most schools on the ‘outside’ but the children use the same books and meet the same requirements of the curriculum as do children without their physical handicaps. Each child is required to spend a morning session of an hour and a half at his studies before going on to physiotherapy.

The physiotherapy department, directed by Miss Rose Dawson, engages in two distinct kinds of work: group therapy, aimed at building up the physique of the child, and individual therapy, aimed at training of special muscles and nerves, and the use of particular areas of the body, depending on the individual problems of each child.

Training Muscles

Group therapy is done on mats and with gym equipment, and includes series of exercises, push-ups and things of that sort. The children do whatever exercises they can manage, and omit the ones that may be beyond their individual powers.

In the individual work recourse is had to such devices as hot packs or tanks of warm water to make certain joints supple or to relax strained muscles. Special exercises are developed in order to train the child’s muscles to take over work which they are not used to: for example, a child with severe involvement of the lower limbs may receive special exercises for development of the arms and chest, so that the upper muscle can take over part of the work normally performed by the lower ones.

In physiotherapy children who can be helped by leg braces learn to walk with them. Merely fitting a child with braces is not enough. The child has to learn to use the muscles which will permit him to walk in the most nearly natural way; sometimes also, he has to learn to walk with crutches. It is not uncommon for young children with crippling diseases to take the first step they have ever taken in their lives between the parallel bars of the physiotherapy department at the Sunshine Camp. The doctors do a check up from time to time as the child progresses in the various physical skills which will permit him to lead as nearly normal a life as possible.

Baskets and Paints

After the various periods of physiotherapy prescribed for the individual cases, the children spent the next portion of their day at occupational therapy from one to three hours, or even more depending on their individual needs. Children with severely crippled hands, or who have had a hand amputated, may require long sessions of this particular work, which is under the direction of Margaret Parnwell. In this department children who have been fitted with artificial hands learn to use them: to operate light switches, use a fork and knife, button a coat. They do such things as basket weaving, which teach them the delicate finger motion which most of us do quite unconsciously. Games such as finger painting and building blocks teach them co-ordination between hand and eye, and there are also special games to develop special skills: treatment disguised as play.

There is a separate department in charge of Nurse Frances Jones, known as Activities of Daily Living. Here children who have not been able to care for themselves because of their handicaps, learn to do the dozens of tasks which are so simple for most children, but so difficult for a child with one or more crippled limbs: they learn to dress themselves, sometimes using special implements, if normal knives and forks and spoons are beyond their capabilities; they learn to wash and use the toilet, and to transfer themselves from place to place: in case of the severely crippled, to get from wheelchair to bed and back again without help, for example.

Typical of the problems faces by the staff of the camp is a16 year old girl now at the institution. She was a victim of the last polio epidemic and has lost the use of both hands. If you think about it for a minute you may realize the state of hideous helplessness which a person without the use of either hand experiences.

No Hands

In this case, the girl is bright, intelligent, and normal in every way except for complete paralysis of the hands. She is learning slowly to adapt herself to a life in which the functions of the fingers must be performed, somehow, by other and less nimble members of the body.

She has been fitted with special clothing using the new type of fastener in which the fabric strips adhere, and will peel apart, so that she is able to dress herself n spite of the absolute impossibility of being able to work a button or pull a zipper. She had adapted herself to a special sling holding an arm, with the help of which she is able to feed herself.

Doing school work without the help of fingers presents a special problem but even this has been overcome. With boards and sheets of paper clipped together and a splint on a hand with a large soft pencil strapped to the splint, she has learned to write and form figures in a large script which will doubtless become smaller and neater the longer she practises it. There is a every reason to believe that she will not only be able to carry on the tasks of daily living but may even be able to adapt herself to some special sort of work later in life. The severely handicapped, with such long and specialized training, often manage it.

Another important phase of the work of the Sunshine Camp is carried on by Miss Alfreda Berry and her assistant. Miss Berry is a social worker and it is her job to co-ordinate the work of the camp with what goes on outside, to help the children to fit more comfortably into home life, and to make suggestions as to how the home can be modified so as to adapt itself to the special needs of a handicapped child.

Social Work

The work of the Sunshine Camp, it can be seen, is complex and many sided. It is handicapped by severely limited space (only 31 beds at present) and also by its location. One of the largest spheres of the camp’s activity is in the treating of out-patients who come by the day from widely scattered parts of the St. John’s area. This creates a severe transportation problem, and sometimes causes the children to miss sessions of treatment and schooling because of weather conditions.

There is talk of a much larger institution, of moving, to a more suitable location, of attaching the rehabilitation centre to a regular children’s hospital. But all these plans, Mrs. Marsh points out, are still in the realm of hope.