# Scary Stories From the Summer-Camp Infirmary

**By:** Liz Krieger  
**Published:** 2026-07-27T07:00:02.647-04:00  
**Source:** [The Cut](https://www.thecut.com/article/summer-camp-health-center-infirmary-medication.html)

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Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Source Images Getty 
 The evening line for meds at Sarah’s camp in Massachusetts stretched around the exterior of the infirmary, a ramshackle building nearly identical to all the others save for a few extra whirring fans, a giant computer monitor, and a room of neat cots next to a bin of dogeared paperbacks. The kids and teens standing on it were eager to get back to their bunks for lights out, but first they had to wait — for allergy medication or an antidepressant or a melatonin chewable or prescription cream for impetigo. Some had to go all the way into the office (as opposed to just the screened-in porch) so that a nurse could watch them take their pill and confirm it goes down. A locked cabinet in the corner held enough drugs to open a small pharmacy. And yet, says Sarah, who just finished her last summer as a camper, nobody thought twice about any of this. “If you weren’t in the med line you’d almost feel like the odd one out,” she says. Today, the camp infirmary is far more than a pit stop for children in search of a Band-Aid or a popsicle; it’s a critical part of the camp’s daily infrastructure, more like a busy outpatient clinic than a first-aid tent.
 At most sleepaway camps, the health center is led by family-medicine physicians and nurse practitioners. They tend to be a specific type: ER veterans who are comfortable with uncertainty and mostly unbothered by the idea of practicing without the labs, scans, and specialists they would have ready access to in their regular jobs. (They are also, not surprisingly, die-hard fans of camp, lured by the traditions, the nostalgia, and in some cases, major discounts on their own kids’ camp tuitions.) And every day they face a complex and enormous caseload that camp doctors even 15 years ago would find unrecognizable today.
 “It’s actually kind of nonstop,” says Barry Diner, an emergency-medicine physician who has spent the better part of 12 summers as the camp doctor at Camp Moshava in the Poconos, and also runs Camp Medical Services, a telemedicine backup company covering 57 camps and roughly 90,000 campers this summer. “You used to go up to camp and work maybe an hour or two a day, and then you were done. Now I’m busy from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.,” he says.
 As the infirmary caseload has grown at camps across the country, the workforce to handle it hasn’t kept pace. Most camp doctors don’t stay for the whole summer, which means the health center is typically anchored by a handful of more permanent nurses or EMTs. They do everything from handling “sick call” ( designated times of day when kids show up with symptoms) to judging the lip-sync contest after dinner. “The vast majority of camps have a very tough time getting doctors,” Diner says. Robin Schafer, a pediatric and psychiatric nurse practitioner in her tenth summer at Raquette Lake Camp in the Adirondacks, sees the same crunch on the nursing side. “Some end up hiring nurses fresh out of school, or school nurses looking to fill their summer, who then discover camp nursing bears little resemblance to the stream of stomach aches and PE injuries they know well,” she says. “Especially because they can’t send the kid home so their parents can handle the fallout at the pediatrician’s office the next day.”
 The single biggest shift in camp medicine has been an increase in daily medications, which has occurred in lockstep with a rise in childhood mental-health diagnoses. The share of U.S. children with ADHD has nearly doubled since the late 1990s, from 6 percent to 11 percent today, and rates of depression and anxiety in kids have sharply risen too. “When I went to camp, in the ’80s, I don’t remember anyone from my bunk ever going to the health center for everyday medications,” says Diner. “Now, I’d say somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of kids are on some type of medication.” Increasingly, campers are also taking GLP-1s. “There were a handful of kids on them this summer. I bet next year there will be more,” he says.
 The medication room at the large camp where he works is massive — roughly 25 by 15 feet — and three of its four walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with drugs. There are also two refrigerators full of human-growth hormone for children trying to gain a few inches in height. The inventory is so valuable that losing it to a power outage would mean losing “a million dollars in growth hormone,” which is why Diner asked the camp’s insurance broker to add a specific rider for it. In addition, campers working on easing their food allergies through gradual food challenges tote in their own parent-packed bags of nuts and other allergens. Diner has to be present with epinephrine at the ready while they snack, as well as for 30 minutes afterward, since a reaction has to be caught and treated on the spot.
 Some camps now contract with specialized pharmacies, including CampMeds and PackMyRx, to help manage all of these logistics. These companies presort each camper’s medications into labeled blister packs. The goal is to prevent the inevitable errors that arise when you’re forced to open hundreds of pill bottles every day. “We’ve had to be much more stringent about using a company to pre-dose our camper medications,” says one longtime camp director from New Hampshire, who asked not to be named. “Without their help, we would be overwhelmed by the amount of meds and supplements needed for many campers each day.”
 Parents shared mostly positive experiences when I asked them how their kids’ summertime med management has gone over the years — with a few notable exceptions. One mother said her kid didn’t receive their medication on several occasions. Another recounted that her daughter was presented with her evening medication in the morning. (Thankfully, the preteen piped up and corrected the slip.) The same camper also admitted that on some days, when she didn’t feel like trekking to the infirmary, she didn’t line up for meds at all, and that no one seemed to notice. All of these issues were discovered, parents told me, at the end of the summer after their child got home or during the midsession phone call.
 A camp doctor in Maine told me about a camper who “jumped the line” and grabbed another child’s nighttime nasal spray off the medicine rack that the camp nurses wheel from bunk to bunk. That incident led her to rework the whole system. “Now we have one nurse guarding the meds while another goes from camper to camper, just to make sure something like this doesn’t happen,” she said. Schafer has created her own process to manage the med volume: a cup labeled with the camper’s name and the time for their dosage, which she fills and hands over at the same station each day. The biggest upside to the system is that “no one feels ashamed of whatever it is they have, because they all have it,” she says. Jordana Haber, a Westchester-based ER doctor, just finished her first stint as the camp doctor at a Catskills sleepaway camp that three of her kids attend. Haber told me she was shocked to see that taking melatonin at night is almost ubiquitous among campers today. Schafer, on the other hand, has reached acceptance. “Yes, there’s way more prescription medications, but there’s also what I call b.s. medications — where parents have their kids on four different vitamins and fish oil, or even bone-broth pills,” she told me. “So we just give the kids the vitamins that their parents send. If they forget a day or so we don’t stress.”
 In addition to the influx of medication changes, doctors say that the health challenges brought on by rustic living — with few or even zero air-conditioned spaces — have been amplified lately due to worsening global warming. This summer, poor air quality from the Canadian wildfires has been an unexpected problem, especially for kids with asthma. A camp near the Delaware Water Gap sent out a note to worried parents reassuring them that “strenuous activities” would be eliminated and that air purifiers and masks were on site in the infirmary for any campers needing respiratory support. “I’ve told camps that they should be reaching out to any kids who have asthma issues proactively, so that if they are having any issues they can be on top of it,” says Diner.
 Ticks, both those that carry Lyme disease and those that carry other illnesses (including the southern lone-star tick that causes alpha-gal syndrome), have steadily migrated along the East Coast and have recently been spotted as far north as Vermont. “My camp is located in a part of Pennsylvania that is literally an epicenter in America for ticks,” Diner says. His protocol for tick bites has grown more aggressive as the tick problem has worsened: Any camper with a tick attached more than 36 hours gets a single dose of prophylactic doxycycline, no debate. Haber, too, started a camper on antibiotics this summer for a suspected early case. “That’s something anyone working at a camp needs to have a high level of suspicion for, and treat,” she says.
 Intense heat is also a constant — and it’s one to which parents, even from hundreds of miles away, are highly attuned. Most have the camp’s forecast programmed into their phone’s weather app, and some also scrutinize the camp daily photo drops looking for signs of sunburn, heat stroke, and heat rashes on the faces of their flushed children. On very humid days, Schafer gets the camp kitchen involved: “I asked that the kitchen staff put Gatorade around campus instead of just water. But I’ve definitely had some kids with heat issues, overdoing it and having to really help them cool down,” she says.
 Haber says this same photo-fueled dynamic plays out with injuries: News of a scraped knee or a black eye tends to be absorbed calmly when the nurse calls home about it, but when it shows up unannounced in the camp’s photo feed, it can cause a panic. Her fix is to get ahead of it: When a camper is seen at the health center for any form of visible injury, she has them call home right away to explain what happened. Other medical events that merit a call to the parents: starting a camper on a prescription medication, like an antibiotic; spending an overnight in the infirmary due to illness; and leaving camp to go to urgent care or the emergency room.
 “I try to think as a parent here. What would I want to be informed about if this was my child? Each case is different,” says Haber. But, says Amanda Swain, a family-medicine physician who has been the camp doctor at Chestnut Lake in the Poconos for six years, “You have to recognize that you are not practicing medicine the same way that you would practice in your regular home setting.” In her first summer of camp medicine, before the rise of fish oil and pediatric weight-loss injections, a pediatrician friend gave her a piece of timeless advice: Most abdominal pain at camp is homesickness, not appendicitis. “It’s held up 9.9 times out of 10,” she says.