Kaeden Rhoads, 19, owes a portion of the man he’s become to a 20-foot, wooden tower rising up from a clearing in a forest at a Lebanon County summer camp.
Every year since he was 13, Rhoads has scaled it, willed on by a cheering mob of children just like him. Then, clinging to a zip line, Rhoads flies back toward Earth, pulse pounding and happy.
The feat, one that millions of kids perform every summer throughout the country, becomes a miracle when viewed in scale. All the campers, aged 12 to 18, and a few of the counselors are waging private wars against heart ailments that might have killed them. Instead, their conditions have turned into challenges they’re learning to live up to every day.
Welcome to Camp Lionheart, Penn State Health Children’s Heart Group’s respite for kids fighting congenital heart defects. Here, for one week every year, more than a dozen learn about their conditions from experts, form bonds with fellow survivors and take a break from the bullying, the surgeries and the fear, for a taste of summertime normalcy. Penn State Health treated 10 of the 16 campers for their heart defects.
Rhoads, who underwent open heart surgery at the Children’s Hospital when he was four days old, has come to Camp Lionheart since its inception six years ago. This is his first year as a counselor.
“When I first came to this camp, I had no friends. I was bullied all the time because of my heart problem,” he said. “Everybody thinks you’re different. The world used to tell me you’re not allowed to be different. This camp taught me that it’s OK.”
The climb
Rhoads cranes his neck to look up one of the tower walls and watch veteran camper and resident jock Jaxin Bush, 13, race first-year camper H Byrd, 11, up the wall. (That’s his name, "H". Ask him why his parents named him for the eighth letter of the alphabet, and he shrugs.)
Bush was born with coarctation of the aorta and bicuspid aortic valve.