Limitless life for a week
Bianca Renteria’s life depends on getting to bed around 7 p.m. every day so her aunt can connect a dialysis machine to the 4-inch tube that protrudes from the 13-year-old’s stomach. As she has done for more than four years, Bianca spends 10 hours tethered to the machine, which does what her kidneys fail to do.
A similar condition killed her single mom 10 years ago. Now Bianca, who looks young for her age at 74 pounds and 4 feet 3, lives in a two-bedroom Santa Ana apartment with her grandmother, aunt, uncle, three (soon four) cousins and two siblings.
She has undergone two kidney transplants, but her body rejected both. “It’s not that common, it just happened to this poor little girl,” said Rose Gomsi, Bianca’s dialysis nurse at UCI Medical Center.
“She’s a little pistol, very energetic and optimistic,” said Gomsi, who signed her patient up for camp.
Though the ninth-grader’s life is highly restricted -- no dairy or junk foods, no swimming and for the most part, no travel, she was able to spend a week last month at Camp Whittle in Big Bear thanks to the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Fund.
“Camp gives these kids a chance to have a normal childhood experience,” said Maggie Holloway, a 17-year volunteer nurse with the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California, which annually sends 100 children with kidney ailments to camp. “We let them ride the horses, do almost everything. If something happens, then we’ll deal with that.”
Last year, Bianca fell ill two days before she was to go to camp. This summer, she had no transportation to the Santa Clarita drop-off point, so Gomsi drove her the 65 miles each way. “She was so happy to go to camp,” the nurse said. “When I picked her up at 5 a.m. to go, she had on her hat and her coat and she said, ‘I’m ready.’ ”
The bubbly teen’s only other experience outside of home, school and the hospital was a recent visit to Disneyland, five miles from her apartment. At camp, she loved the high ropes course -- scaling a tall pine tree on a rope ladder, inching her way across a horizontal tightrope and taking the only way down to the dirt below: jumping.
“She just loved camp. There was not a moment she did not enjoy,” said Holloway, who worked in Bianca’s unit. “I have been doing this for many years, and I can tell she is someone that this made a difference in her life.”
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About 11,000 children will go to camp this summer thanks to the $1.4 million raised last year.
The annual fund-raising campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $1 million in contributions at 50 cents on the dollar. Donations are tax-deductible. For more information, call (213) 237-5771 or visit www.latimes.com/summercamp.
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